Well, hi there. It’s been a while.
First things first: despite a loooong hiatus (oh, adulting…), I will still attempt to meet my goal of reading (or watching or listening to) all of Shakespeare’s plays by the end of the year. This will require a few modifications to my original plans. I will be posting about two Shakespeare plays per week from now until the end of the year (fingers crossed!). I won’t be doing any bonus posts until after the new year – just the posts about each play as I read them – and format of the posts will look slightly different (to help speed things up for me). Other than that, I’m back and ready to take on the Bard!
Today’s topic: The Merchant of Venice.
Sadly, this was not the best play to dive back into this project, which was very disappointing. I decided to watch this one and found a version I was quite excited to see. I had sort of read this before and sort of watched it before, but as I was watching it for real this time around, I realized why it had only ever been “sort of.” It was really hard for me to get through.
Here’s the thing. I love Shakespeare. I adore Shakespeare. I mean, this entire blog is devoted to Shakespeare (obviously). But the story of Merchant does not work for me. I’m certain that people with more knowledge and probably better taste would be appalled and defend the greatness of this play. And that’s fair. But it just doesn’t make sense to me. I think the characters are among Shakespeare’s worst crafted. The anti-Semitism in the play feels intrinsic and internal rather than thematic or constructive. (I contrast it with Taming of the Shrew, for example, which manages to comment on stereotypes without truly relying on them.) The plot in some ways feels oddly scattered. It bothers me that this is supposed to be a “comedy.” There’s really nothing funny about it (and any humor you can find in it is quite mean-spirited in one way or another).
I just don’t like it.
It’s the first one so far that I just simply don’t like (although I did admit to feeling a little conflicted and slightly disappointed with King John).
To be fair to this play (which is a very famous one) and to my beloved Bard, I am not entirely sure how much of my dislike is because of the play itself and how much is due to the terrible film version that I watched. I don’t want to bash two much-loved artistic icons in the same post, so I will refrain from saying that *coughitwastheversionstarringLaurenceOliviercough*. Excuse my cough… 😉 (For the record, I really enjoy pretty much all of Olivier’s other Shakespeare films.) It’s only a two-hour film, but it was so bad that I kept looking at the time stamp, every 15 minutes, legitimately thinking it had to have been at least an hour since I had last checked. Guys. It was that bad. But I don’t think it’s entirely the movie’s fault that I don’t like the play, because I saw a close retelling of The Merchant of Venice called District Merchant on stage early in the summer and, while there were some things I liked, I didn’t particularly enjoy it.
So. There we are.
Please, please tell me why I am wrong about this play! I want to like it. There are some beautiful lines, and you know…other great qualities I’m sure. But please: if you like this play, let me know, and tell me why! Who knows?
I could very well end up eating my words.
It’s perfectly okay to dislike a play! So I won’t say you’re wrong.
But whatever version you watch is almost certainly going to affect your perception of the play, which is why I never watch a film version before reading a play… In fact, even though there are some pretty good versions of many of the plays, I tend to shy away from film versions of Shakespeare altogether.
Having said that, you may wish to give the 2004 Al Pacino one a try if you’re still willing to experiment.
As for comedy… Comedy as a genre only really describes the format of the play rather than the content. It doesn’t have to be funny to be a comedy, and this play is certainly one that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But then again, Shakespeare does deliberately uncomfortable very well, both in comedies (Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, Alls Well that Ends Well), and in tragedies (King Lear, and even Hamlet, which is not a straightforward revenge tragedy). I always feel that a complicated play that gives you a feeling of repulsion is probably doing its job of making you think. There’s a reason Brecht loved Shakespeare.
You have a point about plot unity, but then again, Shakespeare is never particularly bothered about unity. That’s not really an early modern writing criteria, since it’s before the whole Aristotelian unities thing gained popularity. The different plots can compliment and comment on each other very well when done well. The fairytale element of the casket scene in Belmont, for instance, shows that the ‘romantic’ element of the wooing is a fantasy. I won’t say the characters aren’t in love, but one way of taking it is that the fakeness of the wooing exposes the financial basis of the whole courtship. It’s an interesting play in many ways.
See here for my thoughts on the anti-Semitism question.
Those are great points! I love your post about this (and the one you shared about anti-Semitism).
I recognize that comedy as a genre doesn’t mean “funny.” To me, it felt like there were things in the text that we were supposed to find amusing but that I saw as just mean-spirited. Perhaps if I were to take a look at it again in the future, I wouldn’t see it that way, but that’s my thinking now.
The version I watched probably had something to do with it, like you said, but I have given this play so many tries at various times. It hasn’t worked for me no matter what I’ve tried. I hope in the future I can come back to it and see it a little differently.
And your point about plot is, again, a very good one.
(I also love the points in your tags! So true!) 🙂
Ugh…reblogged onto the wrong blog – sorry! Moving over to the right one…
