Note: I'm trying to get the second part of my Wooden O presentation put together. This is what I managed to write after about four hours of work. Also, ignore the footnote links. They don't work right.
"In early modern anti-Semitism…the Jews were denounced for their limitation, for sticking to their particular way of life...With late nineteenth-century chauvinist imperialism, the logic was inverted: the Jews were perceived as cosmopolitan, as the embodiment of an unlimited, 'deracinated' existence, which, like a cancerous intruder, threatens to dissolve the identity of every particular-limited ethnic community." --Slavoj Žižek[i] "Jews have never been grafted onto the stock of other people." --Andrew Willet, 1590[ii] "Just as it is often hard to tell a toadstool from an edible mushroom, so too it is often very hard to recognize the Jew as a swindler and criminal..." --Der Giftpilz (The Poisoned Mushroom)[iii] "Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnation." --Lancelot Gobbo It is fairly well established that modern audiences of any of Shakespeare's works see a different story than what the Elizabethan/Jacobean audiences experienced at the Globe Theatre. Nowhere is this more visible than with The Merchant of Venice. Reading this play in our post-Holocaust world means that we access the story through Shylock--an avenue that likely would have baffled the original audiences. In some ways, our extratextual sympathies for Shylock come as a type of cultural allergy to anything connected to Nazism. In my view, such an allergy is important, and in the case of The Merchant of Venice, it serves to urge a cautiousness on the readers. After all, Germany had, for many years before the rise of the Third Reich, called the Bard "unser Shakespear", or "our Shakespeare".[iv] Hitler is said to have declared that "Shylock was a 'timelessly valid characterization of the Jew'."[v] In some ways, audiences want to sympathize with Shylock simply as a way of, as it were, striking back against the horrors that Nazism unleashed on the Jewish people. Shakespeare makes it easy for us to sympathize with his villain. There is, after all, his stirring speech about the shared humanity of all: "Hath not a Jew eyes…?" (Harold Bloom argues that he is "not moved by [Shylock's]…litany, since what he is saying there is now of possible interest only to wavering skinheads and similar sociopaths"[vi], perhaps mistaking the specific for the general.) And, read in this excerpted sense, it's easy to see how sympathetic Shylock's plea is. Read in further context, however, we see that Shylock's words also spell out his justification for a legalized murder. The difficulty of critiquing this sort of behavior is that Shylock is himself a victim of oppressive systems--if not through Shakespeare's version of Venice, but through the centuries of anti-Semitism and racism that he and the Jewish people have suffered. Shylock, then, is a different villain than Iago. What would Othello look like if the Black character were Iago? The villain? That is what we get with Shylock, and yet he manages to gain the sympathies of the audience more fully than perhaps any other antagonist in Shakespeare's cannon. In order to try to transmit the feelings of the anti-Semitic Elizabethan past--a past in which, legally, no one could have known a Jew, as it was illegal to be one and live in England since the late thirteenth century--I once was the dramaturge for an ensemble piece performed here at the Utah Shakespeare Festival high school drama competition. In it, we aimed to invoke the anti-Nazi allergy of our modern audience and translate it into something that would have been familiar to the first audience of The Merchant of Venice. Using the language of Nazism in the form of uniforms, swastikas, and goose-stepping actors, we cast Shylock as the Fuhrer and had his claims for the "pound of flesh" to be coming from our concentration camp survivor, Antonio. By putting the inherent sympathies of a concentration camp survivor onto the "Christian", we created a dissonance between the text and our shared history. This sort of verbal/visual language transported the emotional reactions from the original audience to the modern one. (As an aside, the judges reacted very negatively to the piece, with the forcefulness of our deliberate inversion so powerful that they didn't have time to dwell on any of the nuances or potential purpose of such a choice.) But what of the language itself? When the words are on stage, what do they say? Almost all of the Christians in the play have a racial bias, if not against Jews (as Antonio, Bassanio, the Salads (Salarino and Solanio), Lancelot, and Gratiano all show), then against any who look different to the Venetian society (consider Portia's snort, "Let all of his complexion choose me so" (2.7.79)). To pursue but one example of many: Consider this conversation between the Salads and Shylock (3.1): SALANIO Let me say 'amen' betimes, lest the devil cross my prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew. Enter SHYLOCK SALANIO …And Shylock, for his own part, knew the bird was fledged; and then it is the complexion of them all to leave the dam. SHYLOCK She is damned for it. SALANIO That's certain, if the devil may be her judge. SHYLOCK My own flesh and blood to rebel! SALANIO Out upon it, old carrion! rebels it at these years? SHYLOCK I say, my daughter is my flesh and blood. SALARINO There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory; more between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish. The racial lines are clearly staked in color, flesh (with attendant connotations of sexuality), and animalistic metaphors, but there's an unambiguous intonation, too, one that we've seen time and again throughout the play: The equation of Jewishness and the devil. As demonstrated by the colors on the slide, you can see the interplay of assumptions, contradictions, puns, and insults mounting on top of Shylock and, in many ways, the Jewish nation in general. Shylock's explanation for such hatred and scorn is never denied by the Christians: They do hate him, it seems, because he is a Jew. The manifestations of the racial animus are heard throughout the play, then most clearly seen in the climactic trial scene (4.1). When Portia first arrives, she asks a question that can be read in many ways by inquiring "Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?" (169), a question that can be comedic if the merchant is in chains and the Jew is wearing his gaberdine and yarmulke, but points to the possibility of Portia's disinterest in the case. Yet Shylock's assertion when he completes the brief chiasmus ("Is your name Shylock? / Shylock is my name" (171)) points toward what David Suchet observed, as mentioned earlier: "He's only called by his name, Shylock, six times; Jew, twenty-two." In a world where the removal of a Jew's name carries with it dark undertones, it's difficult not to see the significance these words carry. Perhaps it is poetical rational, as it was with Othello: the Jew as opposed to Shylock (the one being an iamb, the other a trochee). Portia's line (177) "Then must the Jew be merciful" can't fit the meter with "Shylock" in place of his euphemism. Still, Shakespeare does not always fit in with his consistent blank verse, and a shift could have been orchestrated in some way. No, this subtle form of racism--of "deracinating" or, more largely, "dehumanizing"--is encoded in the words which are spoken and support the system which is designed to oppress and deny those deemed subhuman. Maybe we should say that Shylock's eventual--perhaps even inevitable--defeat is the largest indictment of a racially unjust society. His goal of murder is hardly laudable, and there is much to be said about the way in which the Venetian government got out of the curse he laid on them ("…fie upon your law" (100)), but the point still remains that, in a racist, anti-Semitic society such as the one we see on the stage, Shylock never had a chance. He tried to show the Christians their "villainy", only to be subsumed into Christianity. His rebellion turned into submission with the heart-breaking lie--his penultimate utterance of the play--"I am content" (389) and we see, yet again, how those exploited by the system which oppresses them is deliberate designed to maintain them in their so-called "proper place". [i] Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. The MIT Press. 2006. [ii] As quoted in James Shapiro's book, Shakespeare and the Jews. Columbia University Press. 1996. [iii] As quoted at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/der-giftpilz where the Nazi children's book The Poisoned Mushroom is discussed. [iv] As quoted in "Shylock and Nazi Propaganda" from The New York Times. 4 April 1993. [v] Dickson, Andrew. Worlds Elsewhere. Henry Holt and Co. 2015. [vi] Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead. 1998. Comments are closed.
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