This Merchant is an Easy Sell: Despite Shylock's Surprising Sex Change

the merchant of venice
shakespeare in the rough
the national post

As is well known, there were officially no Jews in England in Shakespeare's time; they had been expelled in the 14th century and were not readmitted until later in the 17th. It is therefore unlikely that Shylock in The Merchant of Venice could have been drawn from life, at least as far as his Jewishness is concerned. A new book, of which more later, argues that he is in fact based on a race of usurers closer to home, the Puritan moneylenders of Elizabethan London. That's quite persuasive; Shakespeare, like anybody working in the theatre, would have had every reason to attack the Protestant extremists who wanted to close him down, and Shylock's rabid dislike of music (hardly a Jewish characteristic) certainly marks him down as one of the killjoys.

Whatever. The play still calls him a Jew, and that is something with which we are stuck. Even the new production by Shakespeare in the Rough doesn't try to change that, though it has given the role to an actor who is not only gentile -- Native Canadian, in fact -- but a woman. I'm not sure if this counts as gender-blind casting; I would expect that to mean giving a woman a crack at playing a man (or vice versa), but here Shylock is turned female.

It's hard to judge the validity of this idea because in this performance it hardly gets to first base. Jani Lauzon has little of the fire, the wit and the depth of both hatred and suffering that make the character interesting.

All the same, if this is gender-blind casting, then the concept seems necessarily to entail tone-deaf casting. Men and women talk and behave differently in one another's company than they do when left to themselves, and Shakespeare was quite smart enough to know this and to write accordingly. If you're going to perform a sex change on a major character, then you also need to do something far more radical to the text than just altering the pronouns.

(There are a few more ambitious rewrites. I was wondering how they'd cope with "I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor." It's become "I had it of Nathan when I was a young woman." Call me reactionary, but I think the old line is sharper.)

It is fun to see Shylock turned into a Jewish mother, but he has after all only one short scene with his daughter, though it's elongated here by having them sing a duet. This comes just after the speech about hating music.

Otherwise, Sanjay Talwar's production is lively and intelligent, with some sharp editing and an excellent use of Withrow Park's deep perspective to remind us of characters who are theoretically offstage. This troupe still has the inside track on open-air Shakespeare within the city, even if, compared to luxurious High Park, it's a dirt track. Michael Blake does an excellent double as the Prince of Morocco and Gratiano, though I still wonder why no actor ever plays up the latter character's melancholic streak. The shifting moods that Carly Street uncovers in Portia, especially in the casket scene, put her on a different plane from the rest of the show, and her disguise at the trial is amazing.

But that's another thing: This is a play in which the heroine has to dress up as a man in order to be taken seriously as a lawyer. It's a sexist society as well as a racist one (an eclectic design that takes in crinolines and cellphones does nothing to change that), so it's impossible to believe that this Shylock's enemies, so free with the anti-Semitism, wouldn't take hostile note of her womanhood as well.