Making Sense of the Merchant

The Merchant of Venice
UK film council
The National Post

There are two Shakespeare plays that deal with race, and both of them are set, at least partly, in Venice. Othello begins there and then moves speedily to Cyprus; that island, though, was a Venetian colony and the city-state's politics are never left far behind. The Merchant of Venice switches throughout its length between Venice itself and a place, of uncertain geographical provenance, called Belmont.

Belmont is a fairy-tale spot, and you might say the same for most of the settings of Shakespeare's comedies, even the ones with recognizable names. They're nearly all in Italy, a place that for Elizabethan England combined the attractions of accessibility and exoticism. If you could afford it, you took a trip there. If you were among the majority who couldn't, you stayed home, read romances, watched plays or maybe wrote them. The towns Shakespeare fantasized about seem to have been interchangeable; he named them Padua, Verona, Milan or Messina, according to his whim or source material, but he hardly bothered to research their differences.

Venice was something else. (So was Rome, but the dramatists, beneficiaries of a firm classical education, reserved that location for tragedies.) Venice was a world power, political and economic, the first great mercantile state, maybe the first melting pot. If you wrote about it, and especially about its merchant class, you were dealing with contemporary reality. You were specific. You mentioned gondolas. You mentioned the Rialto, with some knowledge of both where and what it was. You showed awareness of the city's dependence on foreign trade and its consequent prickly relationship with its own resident aliens.

In his fine new film of The Merchant of Venice, Michael Radford has seized on this. He naturally shot his Venetian scenes in Venice, capitalizing on that place's timeless capacity for looking like itself. (Anyone who's been there will know what I mean. It's like being on the stage of a play set in Venice.) And, approaching the play's most notorious problem head-on, he starts with captions filling us in on the position of the Jews in Venice in 1596, which is as good a date as any for the play's composition. He tells us about ghettoes and curfews and about the Jews' being forced to make their living as usurers and to wear red hats as if they were, well, yellow stars.

Here he goes in some respects beyond Shakespeare, who mentions none of these things, though he may (unconsciously?) imply them. The play does, however, tell us just how good Christians were accustomed to behave toward Jews when they met them on the street (or on a bridge over a canal): They jeered and spat at them. Here we see Jeremy Irons's Antonio doing just that to Al Pacino's Shylock, which is slightly -- though only slightly -- more disturbing than hearing about it. A Shakespeare film, even more than a stage production, is necessarily a comment on the play. Radford makes his comment by providing a context, one in which people buy and sell and walk about and bring their lines to recognizable life. We see the characters' anti-Semitism, and maybe the play's, as a moment in history. That doesn't let anyone off the hook, but it does lend a clearer view. I'm a traditional humanist on this. I think the play makes perfect sense if Shylock is taken as pure villain, who deserves to be robbed of faith and daughter and ducats, but it isn't a sense I would want to sit through.

Meanwhile, I cling to the idea that in drawing him (again unconsciously?) from the inside, Shakespeare made Shylock comprehensible and, to a degree, sympathetic. Shylock's villainy is, in any case, on a far smaller scale than that of Barabas in Christopher Marlowe's cartoon tragedy The Jew of Malta, but that only makes him more disturbing and, in the history of anti- Semitism, more dangerous. You don't believe in Barabas. You do believe in Shylock. I certainly agree with the Canadian Jewish Congress that The Merchant shouldn't be taught in schools until the students, too, are able to contextualize.

Pacino's Shylock, ethnically unassailable ("The thing about Italian families," according to Kaye Ballard, who came from one, "is they're so Jewish"), is a masterly portrait of suffering and "ancient grudge" (a line the movie cuts) hardening into implacability. The most eloquent case this Shylock makes is not "hath not a Jew eyes?" but his speech at the trial, vitriolic and exquisitely reasoned, calling Venetian society on its ownership of slaves.

This, too, is the kind of specific historical matter you don't find in the other comedies. (And Radford has a black halberdier standing by to underline the point.) In some ways, though, the most interesting performance is Irons's Antonio, whose melancholy is all down to his love for the lightweight Bassanio (Joseph Fiennes is very lightweight); borrowing from Shylock to finance his friend's wooing of Portia, Irons seems almost to be courting martyrdom. There is nothing new in this interpretation, but I have never seen it given so much presence, maybe because I've never before seen Antonio played by a star.

Nor have I ever seen his incipient immolation so powerfully staged, the victim bound to a chair to surrender his pound of flesh. The tension of the trial is screwed to the uttermost. One is left with a feeling of unacknowledged kinship between Shylock and Antonio (either of whom might theoretically be the title character); both doomed outsiders, they are the biggest men in Venice. In a more rational world they might be friends.

The theme is pursued into the last scene at Belmont, which is not the anticlimax it has generally been reckoned. (Belmont is played by Luxembourg, which doesn't look like itself.)

The lovers have had their spat over the rings that were meant to be pledges of everlasting love. Lynn Collins's Portia, hitherto more powerful in Venice than at home, says she will give Bassanio a new ring, and asks Antonio to hand it to him, making him the agent of his own emotional undoing. She had always seemed a touch jealous of her husband's friend, even while saving his life; now she has both men where she wants them.

Most productions in my experience have ended with one character left alone on stage: either Antonio or Shylock's daughter, Jessica, now married and Christian. She, too, is fondling a ring, the very turquoise that Shylock's friend Tubal (the admirable Allan Cordunner) had said she exchanged for a monkey. Was he lying? Misinformed? One would like to know.

Either way, Jessica has been snubbed by the other Gentiles, even though she is now theoretically one of the goodies. Even Shylock's enforced baptism may well have been viewed by the Elizabethans as a happy ending for him, though the film certainly doesn't see it that way. I lied when I said The Merchant is about race: Its conflicts and prejudices are all religious. But of course one easily blurs into the other. The Nazis burned scrolls and synagogues; they burned converted Jews as well.

You don't need modern dress to make the point. Radford makes it, very powerfully, by going precisely in the opposite direction.