Thoughts on Shakespeare: Merchant of Venice
The Globe and Mail, Spectator

A FEW years ago the Stratford Festival revived The Merchant of Venice , and set off a storm of protest. No, that's an exaggeration, but a comedy whose villain is a Jew -- a villain, apparently, because he's a Jew -- is bound to generate a certain amount of contemporary fallout. I wrote an article in this paper saying that the play was anti-Semitic, but only superficially; that its prejudices were less Shakespeare's own than those of his period; and that the character of Shylock was so complex, so compelling, and so attractive to actors that it would override anybody's attitudes.

The play is back at the festival this season, and last Sunday Professor Harold Bloom came to Stratford to lecture on it. Bloom is one of the finest critics alive, a teacher at Yale and Harvard, and author of the majestic book The Western Canon. He is currently writing a book on Shakespeare's characters, a magnificently unfashionable enterprise in an academic climate that distrusts character nearly as much as it distrusts Shakespeare. For the rest of us, of course, he's right in the mainstream. Most real people watch plays and read novels in order to meet other real people, who just happen to be fictitious.

Bloom's own favourite Shakespearean character is Falstaff, whom he has re-imagined as a kind of secular saint, and he looks and sounds Falstaffian himself: witty, grandiloquent, silver-haired and, well, weighty. He holds to the good old romantic notion that Shylock is a character who got away from his author (as he phrased it, "the wrong Jew in the right play"), but he also believes that the play is "profoundly anti-Semitic." He thinks Shylock is "a comic villain . . . a hallucinatory bogyman," conjured by an author who may never have met a Jew for an equally unknowing audience. He admits, though, that he is never played that way.

Certainly both the recent and the current Stratford stagings bear him out. The earlier one, by Michael Langham, worked hard and skillfully to present the play as a humane romantic comedy. Troubling moments were cut, most notably Shylock's forced conversion to Christianity as punishment for having plotted the death of the merchant Antonio. This year Marti Maraden has gone to the opposite but equally accommodating extreme, setting the play in immediately pre-Fascist Italy. Compelling and beautifully designed, her production is most notable for the quiet, contained Shylock of Douglas Rain. Looking like a walking photograph of the period, he presents a detailed portrait of a half-accepted moneyman, treading warily on the edges of his society. His patience is impeccable, his vengeance implacable. Cutting off a pound of your opponent's flesh in the hope he'll bleed to death is not a nice thing to do, any way you, so to speak, slice it. But the mocking, encroaching blackshirts make it clear that this Shylock is a victim of history, in the worst way.

Shylock, as Bloom trenchantly observed, has been the most influential Jewish character in world literature. His lines even sound Jewish: proof, I guess, of Shakespeare's controlling influence on the rhythms of English speech. His immediacy is astonishing; it may even have astonished Shakespeare. Did he realize what he had done when he wrote the tirade that begins "hath not a Jew eyes?" Bloom, ferociously on his guard against sentimentalizing Shylock, professed himself unmoved by this speech. Well, it isn't there to make us cry. But it should make us think, and feel.

Part of Shylock's greatness, as Bloom rightly claims, is the way he "celebrates compulsiveness for its own sake." He won't explain why he hates Antonio; he just does. But there are two kinds of Shakespearean villain. There are the solitaries, who acknowledge no human ties: Richard III ("I am myself alone"), Iago, Edmund in King Lear , the bastard Don John in Much Ado About Nothing. Then, far more vulnerable, there are those with affections: Macbeth, the King in Hamlet who murders partly for love, and -- pre-eminently -- Shylock. He has a daughter, whose desertion torments him. He had a wife, whom he mourns. He even suffers a pang when a servant gives notice. Shakespeare piles it on. Why?

Bloom has an all-encompassing theory of literary creation. He calls it the Anxiety of Influence. Roughly, a writer reacts against some great predecessor. (This might not account for Homer who can have had few influences to be anxious about.) So Shylock was Shakespeare's attempt to outdo and exorcise Barabas, the gleefully unscrupulous hero-villain of Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. He must have been played, as Barabas assuredly was, as a red-wigged, hook-nosed caricature.

Unfortunately for this theory, Shylock's extremely vocal opponents in the play make no disparaging references to his personal appearance. They do seem to regard him as a human being, however unlikable. Even the forced conversion might be seen as a benevolent attempt to save his soul. It hurts to say this, but in the play the conversion is not presented as any big deal. It is not the climax of Shylock's punishments, and he himself says nothing about it. (The most disturbing Shylock I have seen, though not the best, was Patrick Stewart; he went smilingly down on his knees at this point, and cringed.) We of course can hardly pass over it so easily. It is Portia with her legal tricks who has brought Shylock to this pass (and after all that stuff about the quality of mercy). At Stratford, Susan Coyne's rather opaque Portia goes in at this point for some silent "oh-God-what-I-have-done?" acting. At least, I think that's what she's getting at.

Fiend or martyr, Shylock by this point has gone way beyond Marlowe's Barabas in sheer humanity. Bloom would have it that Shakespeare's "pride in getting Marlowe out of his system increased his investment in Shylock." He can hardly have been unaware of Marlowe's Jew in creating his own, but I can't see that this kind of literary Oedipus complex accounts for the character's vitality. I can't wait to read Bloom's book, but I'll stick to the hoariest but most convincing explanation of Shakespeare's greatness: his ability -- rather, his compulsion -- to think and feel himself into another person's skin. If that person is a Jew, then the play in which he has a key role is not going to be "profoundly anti-Semitic." And Stratford can go on programming The Merchant of Venice without making too many excuses.