Is it time to cancel the Merchant of Venice?

Merchants come and go. But this one, directed by Abigail Graham, who is Jewish, arrives at a time when identity politics and the rise of antisemitism makes mounting a production of what many view  Shakespeare’s insoluble “problem” play (along with the misogynistic The Taming of the Shrew) especially charged. 

Recognising this, the Globe has posted trigger warnings about the play’s “antisemitism, colourism, and racism”.  The multicultural cast, over a third of whom are either Jewish or have Jewish antecedents, including Adrian Schiller, who plays Shylock, have been given “support” with “antisemitism training”, as have the creative team and the wider company.

Furthermore, this week, the theatre has published an essay online by the scholar Geraldine Heng, tracing the history of English antisemitism back to medieval times. And in March, the public can take part in a series of webinars hosted by the Globe’s co-director of education, Professor Farah Karim-Cooper. The series title,“Anti-Racist Shakespeare”,  might seem to suggest that the jury is out as to whether Merchant is antisemitic or not.  However, others cast their verdicts long ago. 

In a reposte to the play’s opening line, spoken by Antonio, “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.  It wearies me,”  in 1999 the JC’s then theatre critic David Nathan wrote: “In sooth, I know what saddens and wearies me: it is the sight of Shylock distributing his grief evenly between the loss of his daughter and his ducats; of the Jew turning into a mirror-image of his oppressors and sharpening his knife to take a pound of Christian flesh, having forgotten that a Christian bleeds if you cut him as much as a Jew bleeds if you prick him.”   

The critic particularly hated the “smug” slave-owning Christians, and was disdainful of Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, who is “as shallow as the company she seeks”.  Stevenson agrees.  “Jessica is always saying how much she wants to be a Christian and then runs off with one,” said the actress on the BBC’s Front Row. 

Yet in this production, it is Jessica, not Shylock, who is the key to unlocking the play’s seemingly baked-in Jew-bating.  Played by Eleanor Wyld, “Jessica is telling her father’s story,” explains an exhausted Graham when we meet at the Globe. The tiredness is not only because Graham is directing her first Shakespeare production in the stressful run-up to press night but because she is currently being deprived of sleep by her teething one-year-old son. 

“And because Jessica rejects her father and her faith,”  continues Graham, “she then realises how antisemitic are the people she has joined.  We’re very much looking at the play as being about Jewish pain.”  

But not only Jewish pain. Graham sets the production in modern-day London where Antonio (Michael Gould) and his friend Bassanio (Michael Marcus) are the embodiment of “white power” and “white supremacy”, responsible not only for “Jewish pain” but “global majority” suffering.  Take one of Portia’s suitors, the Prince of Morocco.  In Graham’s production, “he doesn’t want to be with Portia because he realises she is a racist. We are shifting the narrative so that it is being told from a Jewish and global majority perspective.”

Today, every production of Merchant has to adjust Shakespeare’s play to mitigate its antisemitism.  In the Globe’s previous 2016 version, with Jonathan Pryce as Shylock, there was an added forced conversion scene in which Shylock is baptised. 

But these efforts have never convinced Ryan Craig, a playwright whose work often centres on the Jewish experience. “I think the play is profoundly problematic,’ he says when we later speak on the phone.  “It is never placed in context by any production or theatre I can think of. They always try to fix it in the performance and that’s impossible. They never commission an accompanying work. And Shylock’s situation — being forced like all Jews to earn a living as a moneylender, forbidden to own land or trade — is purposefully never explained.”

On that last point, at least Graham has an answer.  “We have put in a line about [how] Shylock’s only employment option is being a money lender. That’s not something that’s in the general consciousness,” she says. But this is the only change to the text. 

Graham is one of the few Jews to have directed the play in this country.  Others include a young Jonathan Miller who persuaded his Shylock (Laurence Olivier) to forgo a fake nose. Israeli director Ilan Ronen brought his Habima production to the Globe (harried by pro-Palestinian protesters) in 2012, for an international season of Shakespeare’s canon. But coincidentally, Graham’s production will be performing at the same time as the latest Merchant in New York, directed by Arin Arbus, who is also Jewish and like the Globe’s production, sets the play in the 21st century. 

In Arbus’s version, Shylock is played by African American actor, John Douglas Thompson. Blackness and Jewishness — identities that are often seen as separate despite the fact that some Jews are Black — are combined. Thompson, one of America’s finest classical actors, is by no means the first black Shylock, but like Graham’s production, Arbus’s arrives in an era in which antisemitism is joining anti-black racism as a prejudice with a death toll in modern liberal democracies.   In that sense, “Jews” and “global majority” are represented by one man. 

Before the show opened off-Broadway, it was reported that Arbus “viewed the play as depicting bigotry, not endorsing it.” But this view sidesteps how, as Craig puts it, the play is “engineered to make Shylock the worst kind of villain”.  Particularly galling for Craig is how modern theatre culture appears to have a much higher threshold of tolerance for antisemitism than other racisms. 

“It amazes me that we live in a world where a theatre deletes the word ‘spooky’ to advertise its Halloween show, but another one thinks it’s OK to do The Merchant of Venice,” says Craig, referring to the National Theatre of Scotland’s discussion of whether to cancel the word from promotional material after it was pointed out that it has a history as a racial (anti-black) slur during the Second World War.  Craig is clear, however, that he would not want to censor the play. ( In fact, the ’National Theatre of Scotland have said that the appropriateness of the word spooky was discussed as part of anti-racism training but contrary to reports no decision has been made to ban it.)

Nor would director Sir Nicholas Hytner, even though he has no doubt that Shakespeare’s play is antisemitic. He accepts some theatres such as the Globe have a remit to examine all of Shakespeare’s plays.  However, “it’s doing the play a favour to say that Shakespeare challenges antisemitism,” he says, speaking on the phone during a break from directing Ralph Fiennes in David Hare’s latest. 

“Certainly, Shakespeare doesn’t even begin to challenge antisemitic ideology. What he does do is ask the audience to consider what it might be like to be this terrible person.”  

Throughout his career, including his 12 years running the National Theatre, Hytner has never been tempted to direct the play. Recently, a non-Jewish actor who he “admires greatly” asked if he might consider directing him as Shylock. Hytner thought about how it might be possible to “play Shylock as not Jewish and take the charge out if the word “Jew”, but in the end “couldn’t think of a way”.

It is, says Hytner, inescapable that the play takes the case against the Jew for granted but does not challenge the stereotype. Even Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech is less a plea to be seen as human than an argument to be as vengeful as everybody else. 

But as Hytner ponders this, and also the contrasts between the two Venetian residents Shylock and Othello (he directed the latter play to great acclaim in a production starring Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear), a possible link between Elizabethan and modern attitudes towards Jews occurs to him. It is rooted in a memory of how, when he was National Theatre artistic director, he commissioned Mike Leigh’s Jewish play Two Thousand Years (2006).  A request was sent to agents for Jewish actors. 

“The Jewish agents immediately reeled off who their Jewish clients were, and the gentile agents didn’t know.  I remember thinking at the time, how funny,” says Hytner, circling his main point before making it.

“I’m going to make a link between the great playwright [Shakespeare] who has no idea what Jews are – not least because he probably hadn’t met many, or even any – and the root of the current situation, that to a large extent a lot of [British] theatre still doesn’t.” Despite there being more Jews around today, both theatre and the country still have much in common with their Elizabethan counterparts, says Hytner cautiously. 

 “They just don’t know what Jews are,” he says. 

“They are just very confused by what Jews are.  In New York, where I have worked, the Jews and non-Jews know what Jews are. They have a greater understanding of who their Jewish colleagues are, of Jewish identity in all its complexity.  But British Jews? We are misunderstood. Our Judaism is misunderstood. There is a lack of curiosity about us.” 

Could this go some way to explaining the great Hershel Fink scandal at the Royal Court, when a grasping billionaire character just happened to end up with a very Jewish name?

“I mean, that was just jaw-dropping carelessness,” says Hytner, his voice still brimming with great incredulity.  

“How could they manage to claim the moral high ground by being sanctimonious and self-critical? I have no idea how they begin to think they pulled that off. It’s that lack of understanding.” 

Back at the Globe, Graham is expanding on how the play “is about white supremacy, antisemitism, capitalism, patriarchy and racism”.   It will reflect modern versions of all these things, says Graham. 

“There have been moments, both professionally and in my personal life, that I’ve experienced antisemitism,” she says.  “At what point do you become brave enough to call it out?  Because my granddad changed his surname from Goldstein to Graham, I have been able to sort of float through life quite anonymously. So this [play] is a little bit like coming out as Jewish.

“It’s very difficult to have a conversation about antisemitism right now. I’m not sure why. But this play is a chance to talk about it.”