thoughts on shakespeare: the merchant of venice
the Stratford Festival
the globe and mail

THAT OLD RACIST William Shakespeare is catching it again. The Stratford Festival has announced it will present what is, in Canada, his most notorious play this year, and the news is causing the customary concern.

Coming from Britain, where there seems to be a major production of The Merchant of Venice every other season, I was surprised (and a little envious) to learn that this Merchant will be only the fifth in Stratford's 37- year existence. Presumably the play's rarity is not due to its being a financial or artistic risk. But it has a history of causing trouble.

Shylock - customarily the star role and technically the villain - is a Jew. Whenever the play is revived, it provokes at the least unease and, at most, accusations of downright anti-Semitism followed by demands that it be removed from the repertoire.

This happens all over North America, but hardly ever in Britain. This is partly because the Jewish community there is less sensitive - or less vociferous - but it is also due to Shakespeare's being part of the national bloodstream. He is simply there, like the weather, and it would be both unsophisticated and unproductive to call for the abolition of either. All they can do is adapt - adapt themselves to the climate or, since he is rather more malleable, adapt Shakespeare to themselves.

That Shakespeare and Canada are also being acclimatized to one another is proved by the low-key, sensible character of this year's controversy. No, says the Canadian Jewish Congress, we wouldn't dream of asking for censorship; we merely ask that children be kept away from the play until they are old enough to appreciate its implications. That seems fair, though it is more a matter for the schools than for the theatre, which can hardly be expected to turn away customers, young or old, singly or in groups.

The CJC asks that teachers, when confronted by the play, put it in context, which for us, if not for Shakespeare, must include the history of anti-Semitism. Again unarguable: teachers of literature should always put works in context. It's their job.

As it happens, the Merchant was the first Shakespeare play I studied in school. I was 13 and the only Jew in the class, and I was not aware of any ill feeling toward Shylock spilling over on to me. (Come to think of it, I wasn't aware of any ill feeling toward Shylock at all; kids, even more than adults, love a good villain.) But I may have been lucky; I went to a big-city school.

The CJC seems more concerned about children growing up in rural areas: "Shylock represents their first encounter with a Jew . . . Then, every Jewish child they encounter is a Shylock." This is a bit puzzling; if they've never met any Jews prior to seeing the play, why are they going to start meeting them now? But the risk of Jewish children, or any children, being made to suffer is not worth taking; there are 36 other Shakespeare plays for young students to cut their teeth on.

For Stratford, literary adviser and assistant director Elliott Hayes has countered - as I imagine I would in his place - that, although the play contains anti-Semitic lines, Shylock is no stereotype and Shakespeare himself was no bigot. I wonder how he knows: about Shakespeare, I mean. There is a distinction to be drawn between the man and the playwright.

Shakespeare the playwright distributes his emotional sympathies with Sphinx-like impartiality; even Iago and Richard III, far more comprehensive rogues than Shylock, are allowed voices and feelings of their own. But in the end the forces of conventional society tell us exactly what we are meant to think of them. The moral standpoint is not very exciting or subversive, but it's probably Shakespeare's own.

On the evidence of the Merchant, Shakespeare was anti-Semitic. Not viciously and maybe not consciously: it was simply part of the air he breathed. Officially there were no Jews in Elizabethan England, so his Shylock was a fantasy figure drawing on the legend of the Jew as Christ- killer (which isn't much dwelt on in the play) and as usurer (which is dwelt on a great deal).

Shakespeare is capable, in this play and others, of using the word ''Jew'' as an automatic, casual insult. But the toughest thing for a modern Jew is not that Shylock is a comic miser who loses his daughter and his wealth, or that he is a would-be murderer itching for a pound of his arch-enemy's flesh. What hurts is that he is finally forced to convert to Christianity and that this is meant to constitute a happy ending.

The Elizabethans presumably took it, according to temperament, as a thundering good laugh on Shylock or as a charitable contribution toward the saving of his soul, a practical demonstration of the quality of mercy not being strained. Liberty of conscience was not one of that age's priorities.

But it is a moment that I blot out from my memory of the play until I encounter it in performance, when it hits me like a blow in the face. I don't think that this is what Shakespeare intended. But then I don't think that it's my job as a spectator to respond to his intentions; he has had his say as a playwright and I am entitled to my reaction. Besides, his intentions may be at variance with his execution.

There is one other famous Jew in Elizabethan drama, Barabas in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. He is far more of a monster than Shylock ("Sometimes," he remarks with engaging off-handedness, "I go about and poison wells"), and Marlowe has no sympathy for him. But then he has no sympathy for anybody; he creates a vicious cartoon world and, as a natural rebel, clearly enjoys using his villainous outsider to expose official (which is to say Christian) hypocrisy.

Paradoxically, Shylock is a more anti-Semitic creation than Barabas just because he is more human. You have to take him seriously. His opponents in the play are pretty colorless, so you can argue that Shakespeare, too, was making a point about hypocrisy. But it's just as likely that he meant his Christians to be positively likeable and didn't do a very good job of it.

Shylock has the vitality of villainy, which I perversely feel is a greater compliment to a Jew from a Christian writer than any amount of virtuous martyrdom. When he so famously inquires, "Hath not a Jew eyes?" he is not cringing or pleading or making a case for tolerance. He is leading up to the further question, "If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" with the attached threat, "the villainy you teach me I will execute and it will go hard but I shall better the instruction."

Morally this may not be admirable, and it does not have much to do with Judaic law. But it is dramatically exciting and for Jews, after centuries of subservience, it is an emotional release. We identify with Shylock as instinctively as we identify with the state of Israel; and the two causes torture our consciences in similar ways. Shakespeare may not have liked Shylock, but he must have ended up respecting him, and that is a lesson worth teaching to any age.

The theatrical appeal crosses racial and religious barriers. Actors, Jewish and Gentile, dream of playing Shylock, but few line up to play Antonio, his noble if intolerant prey. Jewish actors are actually less likely to compromise over Shylock than are Gentiles, who tend to arrive full of compassion and understanding.

In the British theatre there have been two great Shylocks in the past decade. One was a Jew, David Suchet, whose Shylock was a compulsive joker who had adopted a mask of self-mockery as camouflage in an alien society and found it had stuck to him. He was not noble but he was unpredictable, flesh-and-blood real. On the whole you felt he got what he deserved - until the final humiliation, which sent the house into a palpable state of shock.

At the other extreme there was the notably Christian Alec Guinness, whose Shylock was all subtlety and dignity, a walking dossier on the corroding effects of persecution. You sympathized with, and lamented for him - but, ironically, when he received the order of the font, the audience reverted to Elizabethan type and laughed.

Admittedly, he was playing at the Chichester Festival Theatre, which has an unusual clientele drawn from England's conservative stockbroker belt and probably more in need of consciousness-raising than any Canadian school children, however rural.

Probably the most famous of postwar Shylocks was Laurence Olivier in the 1970s, playing with quicksilver attack, protruding teeth and a Rothschild accent. It was his "I can be Jewish" performance, to match his "I can be black" Othello (a more substantial achievement) of the previous decade. Next month London will see Dustin Hoffman, who can presumably take the Jewishness for granted. Maybe he'll give an "I may be a movie star but I can speak Shakespeare" performance.

Stratford's Shylock is Brian Bedford, an actor whose natural habitat is the borderland between comedy and tragedy. This is precisely where Shylock lives, stretched between Elizabethan popular prejudice and Shakespeare's instinctive commitment to complicated humanity.