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August 22, 2016 - Av 18, 5776

VENICE AND THE GHETTO

The perfect Play for Our Time

By David Scott Kastan*

We live at a moment in which our dreams of a common humanity may well seem naïve and sentimental as we watch the repetitive intolerance of our present history. And yet we also live at a time in which, as those degrading repetitions testify, it has never seemed as urgent to keep those dreams alive.
This year is the 500th anniversary of the formation of the Venetian Ghetto and the 400th of Shakespeare’s death. Compagnia de’ Colombari’s production of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, performed inside the walls of the Ghetto in the summer of 2016, brilliantly brings those anniversaries together. Their production finds in the play the voice of both the dream and the difficulty of achieving it. The play is arguably, though unnervingly, the perfect play for our time, speaking to the differences that we think divide us and to the shared hopes and anxieties that show us how little those differences should really mean.
It is not a comforting play. It tells us truths about ourselves that we may not wish to hear: we are often alike in ways that are unflattering, and different in ways that we should not take pride in. It tells us that it is often easier to hate than to love, but also that love is always complicated and often compromised. But the play, both as it is written and as it is performed, is the sign of the conviction that art can be a place where truth and love can be salvaged from the vulgarity and brutality of our history—and perhaps a means by which that history can be salvaged from itself.

*David Scott Kastan is a professor at Yale 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 in Venice" performed for the first time in the Ghetto. The picture is by Andrea Messana.

VENICE AND THE GHETTO

The Women in The Merchant

By Carol Chillington Rutter*

When we address The Merchant of Venice today, it is quite tempting to focus on the men. Let us reverse the gaze. Let us take a long look at the women. Let us consider the play as a romantic comedy that pursues a double ‘quest’ to ‘get the girl’. Is that the play’s ‘problem’? Is the ‘quest’ heroic or tawdry, the male questers Jasons -- or pirates? Are the women trouble makers or trouble shooters? Is the elopement of Jessica the crisis that turns her father murderous? Is the ‘mercy’ the law clerk offers the appellant in court in place of vindication a saving grace that, denying him judicial killing, saving him from murder, preserves him from the irreparable mistake that (in Shakespeare) is always (pace Macbeth) a form of suicide? Does ‘Tarry, Jew’ have the women in man’s clothing merely reinstantiating the patriarchal law-of-the-father (parodied in the lottery to determine which of Portia’s suitors will be vindicated) that makes a mockery of ‘mercy’? Or are all of these binaries -- that shadow the binaries the play sets up, Jew/ Christian, Venice/Belmont, law/mercy, profligacy/usury, the prodigal wastrel/the careful father -- finally incommensurate with the complexities the play traffics?

*Carol Chillington Rutter is a professor at Warwick Unversity. 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 in Venice" performed for the first time in the Ghetto. The picture is by Andrea Messana.

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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.