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August 8, 2016 - Av 4, 5776

VENICE AND THE GHETTO

Discomfort in Laguna

By Stephen Greenblatt*

There is something very strange about experiencing The Merchant of Venice and knowing that you are somehow imaginatively implicated not only in the play’s romantic hero and heroine but also, and to an even greater degree, in its villain. You laugh when Shylock’s servant, the clown Gobbo, runs away from his penny-pinching master. You smile when Shylock’s daughter Jessica, having escaped from her father’s dark house into the arms of her beloved, declares, “I shall be saved by my husband. He hath made me a Christian.” You shudder when the implacable Shylock sharpens his knife on the sole of his boot. You applaud the resolution of the dilemma, when the clever Portia comes up with the legal technicality that undoes Shylock’s murderous plan. He who had insisted upon the letter of the law is undone by the letter of the law.
But, all the same, you feel uneasy. What exactly is it that you are applauding and smiling at? How do you view the Jewish daughter who robs her father and bestows the money on her fortune-hunting Christian suitor? Do you join the raucous laughter of the Christians who mock and spit on the Jew? Where are you, at the end of the harrowing scene in the courtroom, when Portia asks the man she has ruined whether he agrees to the terms she has dictated, terms that include the provision that he immediately become a Christian: “Art thou contented, Jew? What dost thou say?” And what do you think the Jew actually feels when he answers, “I am content.”

*Stephen Greenblatt is a professor at Harvard University. This article was published in the booklet by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Compagnia de’ Colombari and Committee for the 500 years of the Ghetto on the occasion of the new production of The Merchant of Venice performed for the first time in the Ghetto. The picture is by Giovanni Montenero.

VENICE AND THE GHETTO

Vexing Questions

By James Shapiro*

Four centuries after it was written and first staged, The Merchant of Venice continues to cast a long shadow. It is a deeply enigmatic work of art, raising many more questions than it answers. Is the disguised Portia’s question upon entering the courtroom— “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?”—to be taken seriously or intended as a laugh-line? Do we follow the 1623 Folio text when Gobbo says of Jessica that “If a Christian do not play the knave and get thee, I am much deceived,” or the text of the 1632 Folio, where that “do” is altered to “did” (a reading preferred by many modern editors, one that suggests that Shylock has been cuckolded and Jessica’s real father was a Christian)? Is Portia a racist for saying of her unsuccessful wooer, a dark-skinned and Muslim Moroccan prince, “Let all of his complexion choose me so”? Is Antonio “so sad” because of his financial worries or because his unsanctioned love for Bassanio is unrequited? Is the play troubling because its portrayal of Shylock is nakedly anti- Semitic? Or, alternatively, is it so disturbing because it exposes what ugly myths lead those with insecure identities—Gentile or Jew--to think and do when threatened, and for intimating that hostility to difference of all kinds (racial, national, sexual, or religious) deforms those who are intolerant and coarsens any society that condones it? Each production or rereading of this haunting play challenge us to wrestle yet again with these and many other vexing questions.

*James Shapiro a professor at Columbia University. This article was published in the booklet by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Compagnia de’ Colombari and Committee for the 500 years of the Ghetto on the occasion of the new production of The Merchant of Venice performed for the first time in the Ghetto.The picture is by Giovanni Montenero.

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Realizzato con il contributo di: Francesco Moises Bassano, Susanna Barki, Amanda Benjamin, Monica Bizzio, Angelica Edna Calò Livne, Eliezer Di Martino, Alain Elkann, Dori Fleekop, Daniela Fubini, Benedetta Guetta, Sarah Kaminski, Daniel Leisawitz, Annette Leckart, Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Yaakov Mascetti, Francesca Matalon, Jonathan Misrachi, Anna Momigliano, Giovanni Montenero, Elèna Mortara, Sabina Muccigrosso, Lisa Palmieri Billig, Jazmine Pignatello, Shirley Piperno, Giandomenico Pozzi, Daniel Reichel, Colby Robbins, Danielle Rockman, Lindsay Shedlin, Michael Sierra, Rachel Silvera, Adam Smulevich, Simone Somekh, Rossella Tercatin, Ada Treves, Lauren Waldman, Sahar Zivan.