Shakespeare in the Park in New York City
I’m leaving the director of this marvel nameless.
(Oil on canvas, 166.5 × 109.5 cm)
BY Maurycy Gottlieb
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons
In summer 2010 one of the offerings was The Merchant of Venice starring — there is no other verb — Al Pacino. The play is a sore subject with me, because I have wasted countless hours trying to convince people that Shakespeare was not an anti-Semite. Pointing out that Shylock is in love with Antonio, and says so, has no effect. Pointing out that Shakespeare was at pains to draw all the Christians in the play as egregious, money-grubbing, slave-owning, fornicating, anti-Semitic and generally abusive swine has no effect. Pointing out that the Jews treat the Christians with kindness and get ruined for their pains has no effect. Pointing out that “Shylock” is not and never was a Jewish name, and that perhaps, in a play filled with locked caskets and keys, Shakespeare was making some point (“shy lock,” get it?) — more wasted breath. My arguments resemble Lear’s conversation with the elements on the heath, except that, compared to the Shakespeare-was-an-anti-Semite crowd, the winds, cataracts and hurricanes are unprejudiced and sympathetic listeners. I see I’ve wandered from the subject and begun to froth at the mouth and drool into the keyboard. Let us return to Central Park.
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LAUNCELOT Yes, truly; for, look you, the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children: therefore, I promise ye, I fear you. I was always plain with you, and so now I speak my agitation of the matter: therefore be of good cheer, for truly I think you are damned. There is but one hope in it that can do you any good; and that is but a kind of bastard hope neither. JESSICA And what hope is that, I pray thee? LAUNCELOT Marry, you may partly hope that your father got you not, that you are not the Jew’s daughter. JESSICA That were a kind of bastard hope, indeed: so the sins of my mother should be visited upon me. LAUNCELOT Truly then I fear you are damned both by father and mother: thus when I shun Scylla, your father, I fall into Charybdis, your mother: well, you are gone both ways. JESSICA I shall be saved by my husband; he hath made me a Christian. LAUNCELOT Truly, the more to blame he: we were Christians enow before; e’en as many as could well live, one by another. This making Christians will raise the price of hogs: if we grow all to be pork-eaters, we shall not shortly have a rasher on the coals for money. (Enter LORENZO.) JESSICA I’ll tell my husband, Launcelot, what you say: here he comes. LORENZO I shall grow jealous of you shortly, Launcelot, if you thus get my wife into corners. (The Merchant of Venice III.5.1-27) |
It seems reasonably clear that the despicable Launcelot hounds little Jessica around the stage with his anti-Semitic rantings until he finally backs her into a corner. Imagine my surprise (I doubt that you can) when this scene was staged with Launcelot leading Jessica in a jolly waltz in great swoops across the stage. I think it was a waltz. When you are in the presence of something incredible, sometimes the brain refuses to record it properly. It is difficult to know what the director had in mind. Shakespeare, as I’ve nagged you, wasn’t an anti-Semite, but the Christians in the play are definitely such, and Launcelot Gobbo is one of the most despicable, so his dance with Jessica was so far out of contact with anything else in the play that my comprehension burned out. I suppose people unfamiliar with the play somehow integrated the dance into their concept of the plot. I don’t know how. The nagging suspicion began to creep into my evil brain that perhaps the genius behind Twelfth Night had not been the director, but had been the composer and his associates — the difference between the two productions was so very great.
(My friend, who saw this production with me, has insisted that I note that the production dramatized Shylock’s baptism, unaccountably left out by Shakespeare. Stagehands lifted the lid off an Olympic-sized swimming pool for Al Pacino to be dunked in, so that Shylock became not just Christian, but specifically a total-immersion Baptist.)
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