Sometime over Christmas break, my family was making chitter-chatter over sausage rolls and Al Pacino's version of The Merchant of Venice came up.
"Well, Sarah?" asked my cousin. "What should we think about it?"
I spent a glorious moment staring pensively, masticating a piece of shortbread and reveling in the fact that somebody actually thought me qualified to offer a "professional opinion" on something. When your days are spent making photocopies of other people's work, other people who managed to say it first and oh-so-much-better than you ever could, that is, when you're not wading through drippish swamps of footnotes and thanklessly slogging through tome after tome of masturbatory literary theory, you begin to feel fairly insignificant, as if your future has taken on the sheen of your carrel window and you're destined to never publish anything outside of your department's grad journal.
After my last marriage proposal to that fiendishly fickle Grant was rejected after the bastard seductively led me on for months, my supervisor pulled me aside. "You're going to feel like you're a big idiot," he said. "You will question why you're even bothering, and feel like the stupidest person alive."
"This is your way of comforting me?!?"
"Listen to me. Everybody feels this way when they're doing a PhD. Everybody swings from glee to despair. For every two steps forward, you take one step back. It happens. But you keep going."
So I tongued that shortbread into a thick paste and stared my cousin down, knowing full well that it was highly likely I was about to say something idiotic.
"Well?"
"Al Pacino's not Jewish."
"So?"
"Well, he's obviously trying to make some kind of point, because modern versions of Merchant are always trying to prove something-or-other. Non-Jews can't deal with the play without offering all kinds of caveats to explain or excuse its anti-Semitism, desperately trying to redeem either Shylock or Shakespeare."
At least, that's what I remember saying. I think my cousin would argue that I just mumbled and sprayed crumbs into his wine. It was almost eight months ago, and I've had a lot of wine of my own since then.
My memory of that conversation may be pretty fuzzy, but I do know that the following is true:
1) In any discussion of Shakespeare, everybody claims to be an expert, and
2) If the Shakespeare in question is The Merchant of Venice, this omnipresent "expert" Shakespearean knowledge that everybody who's ever taken a university-level English course claims to have is immediately fused with our equally omnipresent post-colonial political correctness.
Witness what's going on in the comments thread at Pendragon. Amanda responded to a post at Lance Mannion's blog where he was trying to make the case that Merchant can no longer "be played" as an anti-Semitic play because
what has changed is that we do not automatically associate
Jewishness with villainy of any sort, including usury---in fact, we are
inclined to treat a character's Jewishness as a sign of special
sympathy. But also we don't automatically identify with "Christian"
characters. Just the opposite. We're more inclined to see a
character's flaunted Christianity as a sign of his untrustworthiness if
not his out and out villainy.
Lance's basic take - and I don't agree - is that because Shylock is sympathetic to the audience and somebody like Antonio is, by today's standards, a racist, the play can't be anti-Semitic to its modern viewers.
Of course by we here I mean educated theater-going audiences in the United States. There are plenty of audiences in the world, plenty here,
whose views aren't much more progressive than those of the groundlings*
in Shakespeare's day and for whom the play will always be anti-Semitic.
Well, unsurprisingly, Amanda - and a lot of other people - didn't like this.
Ah, this entire argument pains me because I am sympathetic to people
who want so badly for such a beautiful play not to be anti-Semitic. But
I have to go forth and say that there's no doubt about it. The
character is a wretched stereotype and I think on a certain level the
audience just has to accept that. I think you can play him
sympathetically, sure, but ultimately he's still a stereotypical bad
guy.
And Amanda's right: Shylock is the bad guy, inasmuch as the play is structured to have one. (You can make a pretty strong argument how capitalism itself is the "bad guy" of the play, because the Duke of Venice refuses to break the contract between Antonio and Shylock since it'd harm Venice's status as an economic centre.) But the discussion of whether Merchant is racist or not isn't particularly interesting to me in and of itself - what is worth noting in the whole discussion is Amanda's comments thread, which immediately became polarized.
There's a neat trick characters in Renaissance history plays like to do where they get their enemies to forswear themselves and inadvertently order their own deaths. This is how Richard III manages to kill Hastings, and how Henry V traps a handful of traitorous earls and dukes who are about to sell England out to the frogs.
"What do you think of people who do X?" asks the man with the executioner on retainer.
"Oh, they should be beheaded," says the soon-to-be-convertible Lord Something-or-Other.
"Aha! Well, I know that you do X!" shrieks the King. "Off with his head!"
It's the classic version of "do you still beat your wife?" - no matter how you respond, you're still fucked.
And so it is with any discussion of Merchant, where if you point out that calling the play "racist" is anachronistic, you get some kind of "how DARE YOU try to excuse it" business before you can even say "hermeneutics".
"Nortcliff" asks, "Shakespeare's Racism"????? How can you apply a 20th century term to somebody born 400 years earlier? and within three posts there's the following indignant response from "R Mildred":
Yes, something only exists once it's been given terminology.
That's like saying trees didn't exist before people invented the word "tree".
And anti-Semites sprung fully formed from hitler's brow.
Others responding to these sorts of comments immediately swing in the other direction, using the tried-and-true method of Bardolotry always employed by somebody within thirty seconds of all discussion of Willy: "Yes, he was the product of his time, but he is FOR ALL TIME...he is the GREATEST writer ever...me and Shakey hotluv4Evah!"
I think that we can't apply 20th Century Definition on Shakespeare.
Yes, it was sexist, and yes it was racist: on how we know them to be.
But, I would argue that Shakespeare was progressive FOR HIS TIME.
Females were given strong roles and minorities were actually shown as
sympathetic and allowed on stage.
That's better than what else was being shown at the time.
"Ahem" pipes in in a similar vein, claiming that the brilliantly Machiavellian and equally sympathetic "bad guy" Jew Barabas is inferior to Shylock, presumably because he had the misfortune of being written by Kit "Homo" Marlowe instead of William "Best. Writer. Ever." Shakespeare.
And so on. At this point whether Merchant is racist or not is irrelevant, the conversation deteriorating to just a pissing contest where people can spout off odd tidbits they recall from ENG 152, "Shakespeare for our Time" or that PBS special by Michael Wood, all the while claiming how much they LOVE him.
And what it really comes down to is that it just doesn't matter. Shakespeare is just another thing to like or dislike, condemn or praise at whim, like MacDonald's or the ballet or the Gap or vegetarianism. Liking, disliking, praising and condemning these things all come with a socio-cultural cache of meanings that give us each a way to signify our selves to others. "I don't eat at MacDonald's" often means something else, something like "I think about the environment more than YOU," or "I have a crush on Morgan Spurlock and I obey him in everything in the hopes that one day he will love me back."
Likewise, since Shakespeare is the major signifier of "culture" to the Western world, admitting a familiarity with his works is shorthand for "I am smart and read things that are difficult. You should pay attention to me." Citing - and identifying - a reference to Shakespeare's plays (we tend to forget about his nondramatic writings, unless they're sonnet 116) is a quick and easy way to demonstrate somebody's level of education - this is why the Star Trek franchise has repeatedly laboured to infuse Shakespeare in episode after episode. It's also why almost all cultures have attempted to "appropriate" Shakespeare for themselves. Even the most violent of Trek villains claim that "Shakespeare sounds better in the original Klingon".
Think about the way the word "Shakespeare" operates, as both an identifier of the writer and his writing - "I was reading some Shakespeare." We've commodified "the Bard" (note the definitive article) to the point where his visage sells t-shirts and mousepads and even an action figure. Shakespeare signifies a lot more as an icon than he ever could as a mere playwright, even "the best" one that "ever lived", so it's no surprise that people feel so invested in his condemnation or defense.
It just surprises me, though, that anybody would care what I have to say about all this. You know, now that I'm the big "expert".
* I know that I've just spent a post saying that I don't know anything, and I don't, but this popular fiction of the stupidity/racism/closemindedness of Shakespeare's groundlings is a myth. If you would like to debate this, please read Alfred Harbage or Andrew Gurr or Ann Jennalie Cook and get back to me. But be forewarned that you can't trust anything Ben Jonson said about Jacobean audiences because he was a big whiny baby, as were most of the other playwrights of the era, for whom fratching about their audiences was like the Canadian obsession with bitching about the windchill. It was a way to bond and not say anything.
