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 took me a while to come to terms with the fact that I didn’t really care for this one, or any of the problem plays.
Merchant isn’t one of the plays I particularly look out for, or really care about (last time I read it was to hunt for a line that Leroux might have referenced in Phantom), unless its live, with a really, really powerful cast. Character by character, every one gets a lot of short monologues and there’s a lot of space for actors and directors to play around. Also Portia is a g-ddamn delight. Just…I would read/watch a set of plays about her owning/out smarting every single man in Venice.
Personal disclaimer: 1. All’s Well will forever by the oh my god I hate this??? Shakespeare. Nothing is ever going to make that less squicky. I cannot suspend my 21st century perspective long enough to tolerate it. 2. Merchant was one of my first classroom interactions with Shakespeare, and I’m tempted not to count the only previous (Romeo and Juliet) becuase I was 14 and didn’t really care about the bard yet….at all. I read Merchant in class with one of my favorite teachers I’ve had in my entire academic career.
That teacher suggested we see it as a tragicomedy (and it is often lumped in with the problem plays)–a dark story with a handful of wry jokes and characters to prevent the audience from hating it. I’ve always read it then as a tragedy in which no one physically dies. There’s emotional death in it, Shylock and Antonio are destroyed by the end of it (Shylock is obvious; the argument for Antonio is in love with Benvolio). Alternate readings to “Antonio is gay/bi” (which he is, ironically enough the probably gay/bi character in Twelfth Night).
There’s a also a really thinly stretched theory out there that Shakespeare’s emotional lines from Shylock in his defense near the end were to make the audience think about how they were treating the Jews in England: the pograms and other forms of violent anti-Semitism were still going on in England, and perhaps Shakespeare was trying to make a statement, he made cryptic political statements before? Again, its a stretch but its a common thought.
The easy counter-agrument: then why the HELL was Shylock not absolved/treated better at the end? More likely: Shakespeare wasn’t making a massive statement so much as doing what he’s very wont to do: taking a stock character (in this case “The Shylock/The Moneylender/The Jew”—yes Renaissance literature was prone to be that gross) and fleshing the character out in ways that no author had thought to do yet.
The argument is similar to the one with Othello, and I think part of the reason the Merchant one exists with only just enough evidence to pass a thesis board, is that Shakespeare has become such a sainted figure amongst scholars and casual readers that no one really wants to say he was probably, even if less violently than the majority, Anti-Semantic, and more than likely, racist. The Othello theory of course is that Iago being a racist dick was a political statement, being black in England in the 16th century wasn’t nearly as negative in the eyes of the white populace as was being non-Christian, but there was still racism, and Shakespeare crafted a scene with Barbantio where he basically says “I like Othello as a worker and friend but HE CAN’T TOUCH MY DAUGHTER,” as one level of racist, and Iago as Shakespeare’s “You see this asshole? Do not be this asshole.”
TL:DR I mean….its low on the list, but not the worst/most unreadable; the characters are all really interesting, and despite the play itself being rather weak, all the characters can stand on their own as individuals. And Portia is possibly The Best.
You know, that’s true. I did not address Portia at all in my post, but if there is a saving grace of the play, it’s definitely her. She is quite an interesting character.
Ugh…reblogged onto the wrong blog – sorry! Moving over to the right one…
