Merchant declined

Fuck those Venetian fuckers, anyway

I was so hungry for theater after the long lockdown that I broke my fast last weekend with The Merchant of Venice at DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company. It’s not that I don’t like the Company; I think they’re very good. (Anyway, this production’s pedigree is Brooklyn’s esteemed Theater for a New Audience.) It’s that I never liked the play nor ever wanted to see it.  

I love pretty much everything Shylock says; he has very few lines (Harold Bloom counts 360), but boy, are they choice. And Portia’s a pistol, whose intelligence is delightful when she bandies with her lady-in-waiting Nerissa and toys with the idiot men — especially the particularly idiotic Bassanio, who bankrupts Antonio to make a grand show at Portia’s and, even after her broad hints, has to laboriously puzzle through his choice of caskets before choosing correctly and winning the right to marry her; on top of this, he makes a fool of himself by giving away the ring she made him promise never to relinquish, to… Portia disguised as a male lawyer.

Bassanio’s not the only idiot/asshole —and here we start to get at what bugs me about Merchant: Everyone besides Shylock and Portia (and in some ways Launcelot the servant, one of WS’ better comic lowlifes) is a dullard. They’re stiff and don’t say very interesting things; Antonio, the Merchant who by his stupid bond gets himself into Shylock’s clutches, is about as dumb as his buddy Bassanio, and it’s only the intervention of Portia at trial (and, implicitly, the intervention of heaven when his supposedly lost ships finally come in) that hauls his pound of flesh and fortune out of the fire.

Plus they’re all anti-Semitic. Even Harold Bloom, who loved Shakespeare, acknowledged the play doesn’t work unless we accept the Jew-hate in the Elizabethan spirit: “To recover the comic splendor of The Merchant of Venice now,” he said, “you need to be either a scholar or an anti-Semite, or best of all an anti-Semitic scholar.” Bloom acknowledges the richness of Shylock as a character, as who could not, and goes so far as to admit the possibility that the boss simply fucked up, bailing on the integrity of his creation by allowing him at trial to be humiliated and Christianized (not something Shylock as we know him is likely to do) in order to get to the comedy resolution in Act V, where gentler rebukes between husbands and wives, and sweet love-and-music poesy by Shylock’s apostate daughter Jessica and her Christian husband Lorenzo, give the groundlings their warm fuzzies.

But everyone spits, sometimes literally, on Shylock (even his daughter: “Alack, what heinous sin is it in me/To be ashamed to be my father’s child!”), and the play portrays the conflict between Shylock’s usury-specific revenge and Portia’s Quality of Mercy shtick as a Christian parable meant to justify his annihilation. Bloom, fanboy that he is, offers the Bard an out: Shylock is one of his “displaced spirits” like Edgar and Caliban, he says, from whom “ambivalence emanates… and ambivalence is part of our response to them also.” But he still can’t go all the way with it: “I have never seen, will never see, and could not bear seeing a production of the play that is consonant with the play’s own values.” Hell, even an Unherd cancelculture crybaby has said that the play “deserves to be cancelled.” (The responses are a real I Rest My Case situation.)

In this modern-dress, simply-staged version, director Arin Arbus’s solution is a frankly alternative reading: The Venetians are overtly racist pigs and this is implicitly tied to their other faults, which get double-underlined. Bassiano is a shallow parvenu and Antonio is just plain in love with him — they get a big, passionate kiss at the trial (really punching up the disguised Portia’s “your wife would give you little thanks for that”). Their buddies are just bigoted jerks. Shylock’s humiliation at the hands of these awful people is protracted and repulsive, and I could feel the audience’s disgust at it.

I have not mentioned that all the Jews in the production are played by black people. (So are Nerissa and the Duke, which in context suggests a universe in which outcasts are sometimes allowed paths to relative privilege so long as they enforce the accepted order.)

Even Act V, with the couples decamped to rustic Belmont, is marred — actually, ruined. The Jessica and Lorenzo scene starts with love-play turned roleplay; Lorenzo gets rough, Jessica recoils. Their discourse on music becomes a quieter version of The Dozens; “many vows of faith/And ne’er a true one” and “little shrew” are no longer love pats. It is suggested that, having successfully despoiled Jessica’s faith, Lorenzo no longer respects her. (We’re also let to see that Launcelot is sympathetic to Jessica, and Lorenzo hates him for it.) Nessia and, especially, Portia are not so much playful with their new husbands as disappointed with and challenging of them. Portia’s dispatch of Antonio is cold, and when she says —

It is almost morning,
And yet I am sure you are not satisfied
Of these events at full. Let us go in;
And charge us there upon inter'gatories,
And we will answer all things faithfully.

— it’s not the usual kiss-and-make-up Exeunt.

Arbus rather overstresses the point by having Jessica and Shylock, wearing crucifixes, speak the Kol Nidre as a kind of epilogue, but we already get it: These Christians are vicious bastards, and none of them really got Portia’s “gentle rain from heaven” speech; in fact we’re not sure Portia completely gets it either; she’s sharp and fun and, as far as it goes, decent, but we get the sense that she is mainly moved by the disrespect she notices toward herself, rather than by the cruelty toward others of which, after all, she has been a part.  

This is the sort of forced reasoning with a classic text that normally bugs me, as it did when this same theater presented a Tartuffe back in 2015 that was so overdetermined I could barely enjoy it. But as regards The Merchant of Venice I say, Arbus and her cast are just saying what we’re all thinking. The several riches of the play — the two leads, some sweet poetry, good gags, and sharp dramaturgy — can withstand the treatment, and as for the inversion of the traditional ending, it is an earned inversion — it applies the putative morality of the play to destroy it. I mean, fuck these people, they don’t deserve a happy ending, and our time is entitled to talk back to theirs.

I guess this is a review, so I should add that while a few of the younger actors are a little green for my taste, they were all fine and some stand out. The casket scenes are played full-on for laughs and Varín Ayala as Aragon and Maurice Jones as Morocco can get them. (Jones also doubles as the platonic ideal of a Shakespearean Duke.) Nate Miller as Launcelot has the rare double gift of being able to make a Bard clown’s antics funny and his jokes comprehensible; the sad limning I mentioned earlier is just bittersweet icing.

Isabel Arraiza’s Portia, first seen doing Crossfit, suggests at first a sharp but not necessarily soulful princess, and her full performance both confirms and confounds the impression — that is, Arraiza plumbs her lack of depths. For example, she’s impressively clever about getting the husband she wants, but her silly swooniness over him, and its poor reward, suggests she’s been too clever by half. At the end Portia seems not only disappointed but astonished that someone as smart as her could end up with so much less than everything, and we may also see the dawning of realizations about the world she had taken for granted.

John Douglas Thompson’s Shylock is very professional in his opening encounter with the contemptuous Antonio and Bassanio, but when he suddenly turns to us and says, “I hate him for he is a Christian,” we’re not at all surprised. Stooped and fearful in a three-piece suit, but with glittering intelligence, Thompson gives the impression of a professional shit-eater who has about reached his limit. His explosion of grief over the loss of his daughter — which he half-disguises as grief over the loss of her dowry of jewels (and say, I wonder if the parallel with Othello’s “threw a pearl away/Richer than all his tribe” only now occurs to me because Thompson’s black) — is properly the cataclysm that leads to vengeance and ruin, and his behavior when he feels he’s won is simultaneously deliberate and insane. Now that I’ve braved it I’ll certainly see other Shylocks, but I doubt I’ll see one better.