What Ho! on the Rialto

THIS MERCHANT OF VENICE is prime evidence for the view that Shakespeare should be produced on stage as a necessary adjunct to classroom study. The text appears to be a mare's nest of incompatible themes and emotional effections, careening from Shylock's tragedy to Bassanio's comedy to Antonio's romance. But in a good production--and the Loeb mainstage production is a very good production indeed--these problems are reconciled in performance.

Shylock, of course, presents the most difficult problems for any production. Many people continue to view The Merchant of Venice as, for all intents and purposes, unperformable after the Holocaust. At worst this view leads to the total suppression of an early Shakespeare masterpiece, at best to a crushing overemphasis on Shylock's role, so that the play becomes a one-man tragedy. Ask most people the name of the merchant of Venice, and they will answer "Shylock" more frequently than "Antonio." Antonio has not passed into the language as a generic term; "Shylock" is one of the most durable neologisms we owe to Shakespeare. The way that Shylock engrosses the play, crowding out the rest of the characters, is not an exclusively modern event (it is probably part of the romantic desire to see heroes in villains and vice versa, that made Satan the hero of Paradise Lost), though it has gained great impetus from the horrors of anti-semitism in the twentieth century. The basic font and origin of the trouble with The Merchant of Venice is something nearly unique in Shakespeare--an unresolved tension between an Elizabethan stage convention (the evil Jew) and Shakespeare's own meaning.

Like most comedies, The Merchant of Venice is about the conflict between law and the powers above law. Throughout the first four acts we are shown, as we are shown in most tragedy, the conflict of two irreconcilable rights: Shylock's right to "justice" and Antonio's to humane treatment. Mercy and justice seem to be at odds. But the whole point of Shylock's Judaism is that only the old dispensation, the Mosaic law of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," is incompatible with mercy. The coming of Christ means that mercy becomes law. In the language of the plays central metaphor--which appears to Shylock as a cheap trick but to Christians as God's grace--mercy and justice are as inseparable as flesh and blood.

SHYLOCK remains unreconciled. How satisfied can we be about any "happy" ending that makes its sine qua non his humiliation? Director George Hamlin has taken a wise hint from Walter Kaiser and ended the play, not with the happy sight of lusty couples marching off to bed, but on a note of melancholy. Silhouetted against a night sky, Antonio wordlessly stares into a fountain, suggesting that the solutions on the play's surface are far from final.

This goes part of the way to solving the Shylock problem, though nothing can gloss over the fact that Shakespeare has given Shylock the motivations, actions and retribution that properly belong the stock stage Jew, but has written speeches that (at least to the modern ear) make him something better. And the production seriously stumbles at a critical point in the interpretation of Shylock's position in the play's scheme of redemption. When Portia confounds Shylock by allowing him his pound of flesh but condemning him to death if an iota of blood be spilled in its excision, the reaction of the Venetians is such that it seems a cheap trick rather than a masterly example of a literalist hoist on his own petard. At this point Graziano alone expresses the vulgar view of what is going on; his taunts are, significantly, not echoed by anyone else. Yet here their silence condemns the bystanders; and the final touch to the mishandling of the scene comes when the Duke pronounces his pardon, snarling out forgiveness in a voice somewhere between Don Rickles and a marine drill sergeant.

Jonathan Epstein's Shylock at the Loeb exhibited the inherentdifficulties of the role, many of which were overcome by the sheer force of his voice. At times he played a foolish old man, strangled in verbal tics, though always too terrible to be funny. More often he was the lofty, dignified representative of Judaism and its haughty law. In any case, his Shylock was more sinned against than sinning--the temptation that this production, not without provocation, succumbed to. One suspects that Esptein really wanted to play Lear or Coriolanus. Epstein was the only actor in the entire cast to successfully master the art of speaking verse on stage and achieving a Shakespearean voice. Although at all times he was eloquent, Epstein, in a proper attempt to make Shylock a genuine foreigner in the midst of the Venetian oligarchy, overdid his accent to the point where--combined with the wheezing and spluttering of old age--it obscured his lines. In a sense Epstein's commanding talent determined the production's orientation. As the only member of the cast who rose above the congenital American inability to speak Shakespeare, Epstein couldn't help but invest Shylock with a noble superiority of manner and a dominant position in the play.

The quality of the supporting cast was generally high. Portia made effective transitions from sharptongued young woman to romantic lover to merciful judge, though her voice sometimes took on too keen an edge to act as a genuine agent of reconciliation. Antonio (Peter Henderson) was properly grave and honorable; Bassanio (Jeffrey Rubin) was in higher spirits but equally good. Both played straight men, but the success of the play depended on them; unless we are made to feel that they are men of higher moral value than Shylock the play is a heap of incoherence. I would also single out the Prince of Morocco (Curt Anderson), Salerio (John Sedgwick), Nerissa (Meg Vaillancourt), and Jessica (Andrea LaSonde) for their well-executed performances. Launcelot Gobbo (Kevin Grumbach) did some unexpectedly successful things with some of Shakespeare's least inspired clown material, and his father (Peter Frisch) served him as an effective foil. Lorenzo (Danny Snow) managed to project a kind of cortesia Castiglione would have recognized. The only serious miscasting was the Duke of Venice himself (David Garcia) who lacked the eloquence to make his magnanimity seem better than a sham. Graziano (Dan Riviera) left his role in a shambles, just a little too rasping and sinister to fit in with the overarching Shakespearean theme.

The scenery, moving back and forth from the crowded, multi-colored streets of Venice to Portia's country house in Belmont, was well-conceived by Joe Mobilia. In many ways, the scenery deserves the lion's share of the credit for integrating Act Five with the rest of the play. On paper the change from the tragic confrontation of justice and mercy in the high pomp of the Doge's court to the light-headed romanticism and cheeky bawdry of the lover's idyll in Belmont is puzzling. It is difficult to get the bad taste of what has been done to Shylock out of one's mind. But in the theater Shylock can be truly forgotten when the eye is dazzled by the unearthly beauty of the scene--a graceful tracery of arching columns silhouetted against a deep blue sky spangled with constellations, with the sound of the waters of fountains playing gently in the background. Even the music, which all too often sounded like Masterpiece Theater fanfare, couldn't destroy the mood of timeless innocence.

TWO cavils should be mentioned, one minor and one major. It was annoying (atleast to those with a smattering of Italian) to be forced to stare through most of the play at two egregious errors. Two shopfronts are included in the scenery, the first labelled "Sarto" and the second "Gioeneria." Presumably "Sartoria" (tailor's shop) and "Gioielleria" (jeweller's shop) were intended. Much more important, was the inexplicable omission--from a production which admirably omits little else--of Portia's song "Tell me where is fancy bred..." This song is not an ornamental time-waster but an essential piece of narrative; it enables Bassanio to choose the right casket (the one made of lead) by listening to the rhyme-words--"bred," "head," "nourished." Perhaps Portia couldn't sing.

If there is any major fault with the Loeb production it is that it is eminently safe. No one could condemn it as being obviously deviant from Shakespeare's purpose or offensively anti-Semitic. Hamlin might have been more daring. He might have created, for example, a Merchant of Venice as envisioned by Leslie Fiedler, in whose view Shylock represents early Puritanism and the morality of accountability, and the rest of the Venetians are simply time-serving hedonists seeking the shortest route to pleasure no matter how unjust. Or Hamlin might have aimed for "historical accuracy" and had Shylock played, as George C. Scott played him a few years ago, as a contemptible buffoon. He chose for the middle way, and provided a viable, plausible interpretation that does not strain anything to the breaking point.