The Merchant of Venice: Second edition

Founding editor: J. R. MULRYNE

General editors:

CAROL CHILLINGTON RUTTER, ROBERT ORMSBY

The Merchant of Venice

Second edition

Already published in the series

Carol Chillington Rutter Antony and Cleopatra

Geraldine Cousin King John

Anthony B. Dawson Hamlet

Mary Judith Dunbar The Winter’s Tale

Jay L. Halio A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2nd edn)

Michael D. Friedman Titus Andronicus

Andrew Hartley Julius Caesar

Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Carol Chillington Rutter The Henry VI plays

Bernice W. Kliman Macbeth (2nd edn)

Alexander Leggatt King Lear

James Loehlin Henry V

Scott McMillin Henry IV, Part One

Robert Ormsby Coriolanus

Lois Potter Othello

Hugh M. Richmond King Henry VIII

Margaret Shewring King Richard II

Virginia Mason Vaughan The Tempest

The Merchant of Venice

Boika Sokolova and Kirilka Stavreva,

with James C. Bulman

Second edition

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Boika Sokolova and Kirilka Stavreva, with J. C. Bulman 1991, 2023

The right of Boika Sokolova, Kirilka Stavreva, and J. C. Bulman to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First edition published 1991 by Manchester University Press

This edition published 2023 by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5009 7 hardback

This edition first published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

For Elliot Leader and Douglas Baynton

Contents

List of illustrations

Series editors’ preface

Prefatory note

Prefatory note to second edition

Part I

IAn Elizabethan Merchant: performance and context

IIHenry Irving and the great tradition

IIIWayward genius in the high temple of bardolatry: Theodore Komisarjevsky

IVAesthetes in a rugger club: Jonathan Miller and Laurence Olivier

VThe BBC Merchant: diminishing returns

VICultural stereotyping and audience response: Bill Alexander and Antony Sher

VIIShylock and the pressures of history

Part II

Segue: The Merchant of Venice: pressures of war, ideology, and the crises of late capitalism

IMagical spectacles and nightmarish times: Max Reinhardt’s productions of The Merchant of Venice

IIPeter Zadek’s challenges to the post-war German legacy of The Merchant of Venice

IIIA post-Holocaust balancing act: The Merchant of Venice directed by Trevor Nunn at the National Theatre, London (1999)

IVDesperate outsiders in a money-drunk world: The Merchant of Venice directed by Daniel Sullivan (2010) and Rupert Goold (2011)

VCrises of the new millennium: The Merchant of Venice directed by Robert Sturua (2000) and Edward Hall (2009)

VIThe Merchant of Venice on film

VIIThe search for justice: The Merchant of Venice in Mandatory Palestine (1936) and the Venetian Ghetto (2016)

Appendices

A. Some significant twentieth- and twenty-first-century productions of The Merchant of Venice

B. Major actors and creative staff for productions discussed

Bibliography

Index

List of illustrations

1 Henry Irving as Shylock at the Lyceum Theatre, 1879. [Courtesy of The Mansell Collection Ltd.]

2 Setting by William Telbin for Act II of Charles Kean’s production, 1858. [Courtesy of the Shakespeare Centre Library, Stratford-upon-Avon.]

3 The Venetian set for Theodore Komisarjevsky’s production of 1932, designed by Komisarjevsky and Lesley Blanch. [Courtesy of the Shakespeare Centre Library, Stratford-upon-Avon.]

4 Joan Plowright as Portia and Laurence Olivier as Shylock in the trial scene of the National Theatre production directed by Jonathan Miller, 1970. [Courtesy of The Kobal Collection.]

5 Bassanio (John Nettles) makes his choice: Oliver Bayldon’s set for Belmot in the BBC production directed by Jack Gold, 1980. [Courtesy of BBC Enterprises Ltd.]

6 Gemma Jones as Portia and Warren Mitchell as Shylock in the trial scene of the BBC production, 1980. [Courtesy of BBC Enterprises Ltd.]

7 Antonio (John Carlisle) bullying Shylock (Antony Sher) in I.iii of the RSC production directed by Bill Alexander, 1987. [Courtesy of Joe Cocks Studio.]

8 ‘What demi-god / Hath come so near creation?’ Bassanio (Nicholas Farrell) to Portia (Deborah Findlay) in the RSC production of 1987. [Courtesy of Joe Cocks Studio.]

9 Seth Rue as Bassanio, Maren Bush as Portia, and Celeste Jones as Nessa in District Merchants by Aaron Posner, directed by Michael John Garcés, Folger Theatre, 2016. [Photograph by Teresa Wood. Courtesy of © Teresa Wood, Folger Shakespeare Library.]

10 The ‘Resolution’ of the trial in The Merchant of Venice, directed by Nicolas Stemann, Munich Kammerspiele, 2015. [Photograph by David Balzer. Courtesy of © david baltzer / bildbuehne.de.]

11 Campo San Trovaso before its transformation for Max Reinhardt’s 1934 production of The Merchant of Venice for the first Theatre Biennale of Venice, with the bridge over the Rio degli Ognissanti in the middle, and the back entrance to the squero (boat-building shed) on the left. [Courtesy of © Archivio Storico della Biennale di Venezia, ASAC.]

12 Scenic design by Duilio Torres for Max Reinhardt’s production for the 1934 Theatre Biennale of Venice. [Courtesy of © Archivio Storico della Biennale di Venezia, ASAC.]

13 The court scene in Max Reinhardt’s production for the 1934 Theatre Biennale of Venice. [Courtesy of © Archivio Storico della Biennale di Venezia, ASAC.]

14 Gert Voss as Shylock in Peter Zadek’s production for the Vienna Burgtheater, 1988. [© Gisela Scheidler, Roswitha Hecke and Reinhard Werner, courtesy of Archiv Burgtheater, Vienna.]

15 Gert Voss as Shylock and Pavel Landovský as Tubal in Peter Zadek’s production for the Vienna Burgtheater, 1988. [© Gisela Scheidler, Roswitha Hecke and Reinhard Werner, courtesy of Archiv Burgtheater, Vienna.]

16 Derbhle Crotty as Portia and Alexander Hanson as Bassanio in Trevor Nunn’s production for the National Theatre, London, 1999. [Courtesy of © Donald Cooper / Photostage.]

17 Tom Scutt’s casino set with Rebecca Brewer as Stephanie (front left), Susannah Fielding as Portia (rear left), Emily Plumtree as Nerissa (rear right), and Merry Holden as Conscience (front right) in Rupert Goold’s revival of The Merchant of Venice at the Almeida Theatre, London, 2014. [Courtesy of © Donald Cooper / Photostage.]

18 The ‘Destiny’ TV show hosted by Portia (Susannah Fielding) and Nerissa (Emily Plumtree) in Rupert Goold’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, 2011. [Courtesy of © Donald Cooper / Photostage.]

19 Alexander Kalyagin as Shylock in Robert Sturua’s production for the Et Cetera Theatre, Moscow, 2000. Frame capture from the play’s trailer. [www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmJNFiLBa0s]

20 Kelsey Brookfield as Portia in the production of Propeller and Watermill Theatre Newbury directed by Edward Hall. Liverpool Playhouse, Liverpool, 2009. [Courtesy of © Donald Cooper / Photostage.]

21 Waihoroi Shortland as Hairoka (Shylock) next to a painting of the owl Kaitaki by Selwyn Muru, in Don Selwyn’s film, Te Tangata Whai Rawa O Weniti, or The Maori Merchant of Venice (2001). Frame capture.

22 Al Pacino as Shylock and Jeremy Irons as Antonio at the loan celebration banquet in Michael Radford’s film, William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (2004). Frame capture.

23 Studio portrait of Aharon Meskin as Shylock in Leopold Jessner’s production for the Habima Theatre, Tel Aviv, 1936. [Courtesy of the Israeli Center for the Documentation of the Performing Arts, Tel Aviv University.]

24 Studio portrait of Shimon Finkel as Shylock in Leopold Jessner’s production for the Habima Theatre, Tel Aviv, 1936. [Courtesy of the Israeli Center for the Documentation of the Performing Arts, Tel Aviv University.]

25 The trial scene in Leopold Jessner’s production for the Habima Theatre, Tel Aviv, 1936. [Courtesy of the Israeli Center for the Documentation of the Performing Arts, Tel Aviv University.]

26 The five Shylocks lament Jessica’s flight in the Compagnia de’ Colombari’s production of The Merchant in Venice, directed by Karin Coonrod, 2016. Left to right: Ned Eisenberg, Andrea Brugnera, Adriano Iurissevich, Sorab Wadia, Jenni Lea-Jones. Frame capture from the production trailer for the performance. [www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rdl31DoPJE]

Series editors’ preface

Since this pioneering Series was first launched in 1984, the study of Shakespeare’s plays as scripts for performance has grown to rival the reading of Shakespeare’s plays as literature among university, college, and secondary school teachers and students. The aim of the Series remains today what it was then: to assist this study by exploring how Shakespeare’s texts have been realised in performance, in a multitude of different ways by actors, directors, and designers, and in the various media for which the plays have been adapted.

The idea of what constitutes performance has itself changed considerably in the past few decades, promoted by cultural anthropologists who have defined performance as a more inclusive set of social practices than theatre historians ever envisioned, a continuum of human actions ranging from ritual, sports, popular entertainments, and the performing arts to the enactment of social, gender, race, and class roles in everyday life. Advances in digital technology, too, have led to an expansion of what forms Shakespearean performance can take in various media – in theatres and less conventional playing spaces, in the cinema, and on the computer screen. They have also led to a fundamental questioning of what ‘live’ performance means – liveness being a basic tenet of performance studies – and to a better understanding of how viewers can become players in interactive performances. The rapid growth of media and digital technology, furthermore, has created a global market for Shakespeare that has not only encouraged intercultural exchanges by theatre companies, but also created new audiences for ‘local’ adaptations of the plays in parts of the world that once would have had scant familiarity with Shakespeare.

Each contributor to the Series has selected a number of productions of a given play and analysed them comparatively. Drawn from different periods, countries, and media, these productions were chosen not only because they are culturally significant in their own right but because they illustrate how the convergence of material conditions can shape a performance and its reception: the medium for which the text is adapted; the language in which Shakespeare’s text is spoken; the performance style and aesthetic decisions made by directors and whether they embrace or flout tradition; the production’s set, lighting, music, and costume design; the bodies, genders, and abilities of actors working individually but also in an ensemble; and the historical, political, and social contexts which condition audience responses to the performance.

We hope that audiences, by reading these accounts of Shakespeare in performance, may enlarge their understanding of what a playtext is and begin, too, to appreciate the complex ways in which any performance is a deeply collaborative effort. Any study of a Shakespeare text will, of course, reveal only a small proportion of the play’s potential meanings; but by engaging issues of how a performance essentially translates a text into a work with cultural resonances and meanings beyond anything Shakespeare as author could have anticipated, our series encourages a kind of reading that is receptive to the contingencies that make performances of Shakespeare an art unto themselves.

James C. Bulman and Carol Chillington Rutter,

Founding Editors

Prefatory note

The theatre is a wonderful teacher. The many productions of The Merchant of Venice I have seen during the past twenty years have taught me more about the play than countless readings, and some of what I learned from them I hope to share with readers in the following pages. My responses to those productions, however, have not gone untested: they have been challenged, sharpened, and enriched by friends who have read the manuscript in whole or in part. I am especially grateful to my colleagues Doug Lanier, Jim Ogden, and Brian Rosenberg, three of the most generous readers one could hope to find; to my meticulous editors, Ronnie Mulryne and Margaret Shewring; to Miriam Gilbert and Bob King, who shared their production notes with me; and to Werner Habicht, whose knowledge of Shakespearean production in Germany helped me to flesh out Chapter VII (Part I).

I am grateful, too, to the librarians at the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford-upon-Avon – Marian Pringle, Sylvia Morris, and Mary White – whose patience and good humour are legendary; to Andrew Kirk at the British Theatre Museum and Bob Taylor at the Museum of the City of New York for their kind co-operation; to Liz Page in the Script Department of the National Theatre for allowing me to use Jonathan Miller’s prompt book and other production materials; and to the staffs of the Lincoln Center Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Senate House Library at the University of London, the British Library, and the Pelletier Library.

I am deeply indebted to Dan Sullivan, Andy Ford, and the Faculty Development Committee of Allegheny College for their unstinting support of this project; to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a fellowship which allowed me to undertake the research for it; and to the University College of Wales for providing me with an office – and the comforts of home – while I wrote the final draft. To all, my thanks.

J. C. B.

March 1990

All references in part I, unless otherwise noted, are to the New Cambridge edition of The Merchant of Venice, ed. M. M. Mahood (Cambridge, 1987).

Prefatory note to second edition

In writing this book we have incurred many debts. First and foremost we owe a debt of gratitude to Carol Rutter for entrusting us with the project, and to James Bulman for his generously shared knowledge, support, and meticulous reading of the final draft.

This analysis of the multicultural and multilingual European reception of The Merchant of Venice has only been possible thanks to the research and friendship of colleagues from ESRA, the European Shakespeare Research Association. Thank you all for years of generosity and support.

We would like to thank Shaul Bassi for warm hospitality and for enabling our research in Venice, Sabine Schülting for providing us with films of German productions and for her inspiring scholarship, Douglas Lanier for giving us access to a manuscript before its publication, Shelly Zer-Zion for her timely assistance with access to materials from the Israeli Center for the Documentation of the Performing Arts and the Habima Theater Archive, the late Mariangela Tempera for sharing copies of Merchant films, and the late Michael Hattaway for opening doors in New Zealand.

We extend our sincere appreciation to Miriam Gilbert and Jay Halio, colleagues who have dedicated years of their professional lives to the study of The Merchant of Venice and have been cherished personal friends.

Our institutions, Cornell College (Iowa, USA) and the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA) in England, have provided indispensable funding and research time. We are also grateful for the generous support of the Fulbright Commission and the Shakespeare In and Beyond the Ghetto Project.

The Folger Shakespeare Library has been a privilege and pleasure to work in, as have the ‘Sts. Cyril and Methodius’ National Library in Sofia, Archivio Storico della Biennale di Venezia, the libraries of the Shakespeare Institute and the Shakespeare Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, the National Theatre Archive in London, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Deep down the line of debts stands the Department of English at the University of Sofia, where our paths as scholars began, and where our professors, Marco Mincoff and Alexander Shurbanov, kindled our love of Shakespeare and taught us about research discipline and ethics.

Last but not least, our families, semper eidem, semper fideles, have endured endless hours of discussions, debates, and absences. Without their patience, humour, and sheer tenacity, we would not have succeeded. Anna Baynton’s precision and writerly insights saved us from various infelicities; those that remain are our own.

B. S. & K. S.

March 2023

Part I

I

An Elizabethan Merchant: performance and context

If history is any judge, the crucial problem in staging The Merchant of Venice is how to balance its two distinct and seemingly unrelated plots. Although both ultimately derive from folk tales, Shakespeare dramatised them in such disparate styles that they seem to compete with rather than to complement one another. The casket plot, involving the winning of Portia by a lottery, is romantic, even at times Lyly-like: the scenes of wooing are witty; their pace, leisurely; their ethos, courtly. Above all, they are dominated by the comic resourcefulness of an aristocratic woman. The sordid bond plot, on the other hand, betrays its origins in darker legend. Dominated by men of business, the Venetian scenes have an urgency at odds with the leisure of Belmont: their prosaic idiom contrasts with the poetic formality of the wooing scenes, and their mercantile ethos calls into question the aristocratic assumptions of comic romance. By working such a tonal division between the two plots, Shakespeare made it difficult to bring them into an effective theatrical balance with one another. Venice and Belmont seem to belong to different plays.

To compound this difficulty, Shakespeare allowed the bond plot, to which he actually allots less stage time, to keep subverting the romance plot. The juxtaposition of the play’s twin climaxes illustrates this subversion. Bassanio’s winning of the lottery and Portia in III.ii, a scene full of romantic hyperbole, is immediately preceded by the passionately colloquial scene in which Shylock vows to take revenge on Antonio. Our knowledge of this sober turn of events invariably colours our response to Bassanio’s victory, just as the power of Shylock’s idiolect, with its unconventional rhythms and biblical repetitions – ‘no ill luck stirring but what lights o’my shoulders, no sighs but o’my breathing, no tears but o’my shedding’ (III.i.74–6) – sets in arch relief the artifice of the verse spoken by Portia and Bassanio. When, therefore, a letter from Antonio interrupts the festivities in III.ii, it recalls us to Venice and to the bond plot. The nuptials are effectively broken, or at least postponed, by the obligation Bassanio feels to assist his friend; and in the eyes of many, a latent rivalry between Antonio and Portia for Bassanio’s love here becomes overt (Kahn, pp. 104–12). In this scene, the bond plot intrudes on and threatens to overwhelm the comic romance.

Harley Granville-Barker, a pioneer in twentieth-century Shakespeare production, identified the rivalry between these plots as symptomatic of a problem in the play’s design:

How to blend two such disparate themes into a dramatically organic whole; that was [Shakespeare’s] real problem. The stories, linked in the first scene, will, of themselves, soon part company. Shakespeare has them run neck and neck till he is ready to join them again in the scene of the trial. But the difficulty is less that they will not match each other by the clock than that their whole gait so differs, their very nature.

(p. 71)

At the time Granville-Barker made this observation, The Merchant had virtually become Shylock’s play, a vehicle for star actors. Belmont, as a result, had been butchered, and on occasion performances even concluded with Shylock’s exit from the court, leaving the lovers’ plot unresolved – and, one assumes, of little consequence. Given this history, it is no wonder Granville-Barker thought that the problem was inherent in the text: ‘How’, he asked, ‘is the flimsy theme of the caskets to be kept in countenance beside its grimly powerful rival?’

It is a question any director of the play must ask. Most have found a true balance impossible to achieve. For reasons I shall discuss later, a growing fascination with Shylock as a symbol of oppression, representative of all Jews, has lent a cultural resonance to the bond plot that has made the lottery seem insubstantial, if not frivolous, in comparison. Those directors who have achieved a balance usually have done so by denying that resonance, insisting that both plots be taken on their own terms as folk tales, unencumbered by social and political history. After all, a Jew bargaining for a pound of Christian flesh is no more real than an heiress winning a husband by lottery or a condemned man being saved by a cross-dressing lawyer; all such absurdities require a willing suspension of disbelief. In such productions, The Merchant becomes a fairy tale wherein characters are types, action is allegorical, and Belmont proves as theatrically credible as Venice.

Certainly this was true of Terry Hands’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1971, which, more than any other in recent memory, attempted to honour both plots as playful fictions. His intention was clear in the opening scene, where fantastically dressed merchants rolled giant dice and pushed ‘enchanting toy galleons’ (Daily Telegraph, 31 March 1971), replicas of Antonio’s argosies, across a stage floor that was a mosaic of azure oceans and golden continents. Here, in miniature, was a model of life: the serious business of trade was encoded as a game of Ludo. Hands thus introduced a metaphor for all the ‘games, gambles, wagers, bonds’ that were to follow in both Venice and Belmont (Birmingham Post, 31 March 1971). Understood in this way, Bassanio’s hazarding for Portia became just as significant as Antonio’s gambling with his ships: its magnitude was signified by the giant caskets of gold, silver, and lead from which he had to choose, the last of which contained a life-size effigy of Portia herself. Such romantic fictions, of course, work against any notion of bourgeois realism in this most money-oriented play; and Hands tried to solve the problem, as one critic observed, by ‘siting the play in no place at all – or perhaps I should simply say in a theatre’ (Financial Times, 31 March 1971). Such self-reflexive theatricality was reinforced by groups of spectators who from time to time stood at the rear of the stage looking on, as an audience at a play.

Shylock, too, was appropriately fantasticated. An extravagantly theatrical villain who spoke with a Yiddish accent tinged with the native Welsh of actor Emrys James, he bared his teeth at his enemies, bayed like a dog for Christian blood, and even barked at Antonio on the line, ‘But since I am a dog, beware my fangs!’ (Prompt book III.iii.7). As several critics noted, James conceived of Shylock as an actor and stole shamelessly from the bag of tricks of Shylocks past – ‘a stage villain,’ according to John Barber, ‘barefoot, robed in old curtains, with a mouthful of spittle and plenty of oi-yoi-yoi’ (Daily Telegraph, 31 March 1971). An exotic among other exotics, he was not so much an outcast of any recognisable Western society as the ogre of a fairy tale. One could readily believe that he wanted his pound of flesh because, in fairy tales, ogres eat people.

Within the assumptions of such implausible fictions, Shylock’s villainy at the trial was strikingly credible. He flourished his props – knife and scales in either hand – like an allegorical figure of Justice untempered by Mercy (Slater, p. 177). As his moral opposite, the Portia of Judi Dench proved equally credible: charmingly boyish, confident, authoritative. When her pleas for mercy met deaf ears, however, she became visibly uneasy. Then, in the nick of time, just as Shylock moved behind the flinching Antonio and placed the dagger on his bare chest (see cover photograph), Portia screamed ‘Tarry a little’ (IV.i.301), surprising even herself with the sudden inspiration to save the day with a legal quibble. Hands’s staging of the trial, by critical consensus, thrillingly dramatised the allegorical oppositions inherent in the play: the victory of Mercy over Justice, of the New Law over the Old, of Charity over Greed, of Belmont over Venice.

There are consequences for staging The Merchant in this way, however, for fantastication suppresses the individuality and psychological subtlety with which Shakespeare invested his characters. As B. A. Young observed, Hands so deliberately under-emphasised the personalities of the characters that their performances were ‘externalised’, every point made by some simple visible means (Financial Times, 31 March 1971); and Jonathan Raban concurred that characters were ‘dehumanised … stereotypes’ serving what he took to be Hands’s moral theme (New Statesman, 9 April 1971). Romantic comedy, however, despite the implausibility of its plots, is deeply concerned with the plausibility of human behaviour; and in the modern theatre, its success depends on the ability of actors to get an audience to respond to them as real people. This may not have been entirely true of the Elizabethan theatre, in which actors submerged the individual in the type: they strove not to create particular ‘identities’ or ‘inner selves’ for their characters as actors do in naturalist theatre, but rather to imitate behaviour that would be understood as appropriately and recognisably general (Hattaway, pp. 72–9). Today, however, to make their performances convincing, actors must seek humanly explicable motives for the things they say and do. It is not sufficient for them simply to think of their characters as moral abstractions. Characters in The Merchant, however fanciful, may be seen to act in ways so complex and ambiguous as to cast doubt on any simple allegorical assumptions.

Antonio, for example, the most enigmatic character in the play, is willing to sacrifice himself for his friend. Some critics posit that he embodies the ideals of platonic friendship or Christian caritas. But this does not explain why he acts as he does, nor why audiences sense in him a languor and a self-deprecation – ‘I am the tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest for death’ (IV.i.114–15) – that lead him to want to martyr himself and, by doing so, to bind Bassanio to him for life. ‘Commend me to your honourable wife,’ he tells Bassanio:

Tell her the process of Antonio’s end,

Say how I loved you, speak me fair in death,

And when the tale is told, bid her judge

Whether Bassanio had not once a love.

(269–73)

Actors would have difficulty understanding an abstract motivation for such lines: can caritas explain the emotional burden Antonio now places on his friend? Rather, these sentiments have suggested to actors that Antonio may feel an unfulfilled, possibly homosexual longing for Bassanio: even the comic matter of the rings wherein Portia tests Bassanio’s fidelity to her often becomes, at Antonio’s insistence, a test of Bassanio’s love for him instead (Tennenhouse, p. 62). Psychoanalytic explanations are usually more useful to actors than allegory.

Nor are Portia’s motives free from question. Allegorically, she may be the embodiment of mercy, functioning like the Virgin Mary of medieval miracle plays who, as Molly Mahood reminds us (p. 9), interceded with divine grace on behalf of the hero. By saving Antonio’s life, furthermore, she frees her husband from a guilt that might forever burden him, and thus spares their marriage into the bargain. More realistically, however, Portia, as a woman in a patriarchal society, may betray a desire to usurp male prerogatives. She has no power herself: her fate has been dictated by her father’s will, and all she inherits is won in an instant by Bassanio. Is she sensible of this disempowerment? And if so, does she go to Venice in male disguise more to test her mettle in a man’s world than to administer divine mercy? Such questions lead one to examine the nature of her ‘inspiration’ in saving Antonio. Has the quibble occurred to her on the spot, or does her knowledge of the law – gained perhaps from consulting Doctor Bellario, and demonstrated when she lists the penalties for an alien’s seeking the life of a citizen – suggest that she has plotted her strategy well in advance? We may reasonably conclude that she arrives at court with her trump up her sleeve: ‘no jot of blood’ (302). But if this is true, why does she wait so long to play it? Does she want to allow Shylock sufficient opportunity to show mercy, knowing that the law will come down on him hard if he does not? Or, less charitably, does she simply allow him rope enough to hang himself? Furthermore, does she realise that by saving her trump to the last possible moment, she brings extraordinary anguish to Antonio and to her husband? Or might that be – as psychoanalytic studies have suggested – precisely her intention?

This potential for dramatising relationships in The Merchant as shifting and unpredictable defies the neat schematisation towards which allegory tends. How audiences view the play thus depends on how directors adjust the balance between psychological realism and the play’s deep allegorical structure. Directors usually find that the play resists any attempt to strait-jacket it with one particular concept. Hands certainly found this to be true. Despite his uses of enchantment, the actors’ search for credible motivation kept disrupting the fantasy, with Portia so sensitive to her rivalry with Antonio that she became, in the words of the actress who played her, a most unpleasantly ‘neurotic’ heroine (Biggs, pp. 153–9). Conversely, directors who privilege the play’s realism often do so at the expense of the allegorical constructs that give the play its moral grounding. They tend to foreground the plight of Shylock, who in many ways is the least conventional, most believably idiosyncratic of all the characters, and relegate the romantic artifices of Belmont to a subordinate role. This happened in Jonathan Miller’s famous ‘Victorian’ Merchant for the National Theatre in 1970. His Venice was so authentically detailed, so rich in social nuance, that Belmont simply could not provide a credible alternative to it: thus Miller satirised the casket plot as a patently insincere fiction by which the bourgeoisie disguised their avarice. Such choices suggest that we, in our century, conceive of drama more categorically than Shakespeare could have anticipated. One reason for this may be that the nature of theatre itself has changed. The Merchant is a play whose potential to be various things at once – allegory and folk tale, romantic comedy and problem play – may have been realisable only on the Elizabethan stage (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Henry Irving as Shylock at the Lyceum Theatre, 1879. Courtesy of The Mansell Collection Ltd.

Shakespeare’s theatre was unlike our own. Audiences stood or sat very close to a bare, thrust stage, and such intimacy fostered a participatory pact between actors and audience in which actors relied on the audience to piece out a performance’s imperfections with their thoughts. The participation of the audience was necessary to foster any illusion of reality because the bare stage itself did not. Props were few; costuming, most of it Elizabethan, was eclectic; and plays were performed during the afternoon, in broad daylight. Such conditions, far from a liability, were in fact liberating: they attested to the Elizabethan audience’s capacity for multi-consciousness, for adjusting imaginatively to a complex mixture of formal and realistic elements, and for losing themselves in the play while remaining aware of its artifice (Styan, Shakespeare Revolution, pp. 164–5).

On such a stage, actors could move in and out of their roles more easily than actors do today. They could speak in character yet at the same time signal to the audience their conventionality, thereby preserving their fictive credibility while acknowledging their status as players. As Michael Hattaway has argued, the conception of acting as ‘personation’ paradoxically involved not only a quest for authenticity of character, but also an element of feigning or self-conscious role-play – as the etymology (from the Latin persona, mask) suggests – at odds with the modern notion of personality (pp. 78–9). Actors would use mimicry and stand ‘apart’ from the characters they played to achieve the desired response from the audience. Such flexibility may best be seen among those low comedians who played the clowns, such as Lancelot Gobbo, whose debate with his conscience over whether to leave Shylock’s service owes a debt to the psychomachia of Morality plays. Drawing on a primitive theatrical tradition, Lancelot’s comic monologue often proves a stumbling block in modern productions: it is not comfortably contained within the frame of naturalistic theatre. Its effect on the Elizabethan stage, however, would have been different, the actor performing much as a stand-up comedian would perform today, addressing the audience directly, at once in and out of character, and, by eliciting their response, making the scene a participatory experience. By all accounts clowns like Will Kempe, who probably played Lancelot Gobbo, exploited this potential for give-and-take, altering material at each performance, extemporising, milking an audience for laughs. As Peter Thomson suggests, Hamlet’s complaint about clowns – ‘Let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them …’ (Hamlet, III.ii.43–51) – may have been Shakespeare’s ad hominem attack on Kempe (p. 35). The idea of adlibbing, of course, may offend our notion of the sacredness of Shakespeare’s text; but in fact, as recent scholarship has shown, texts of his plays were unstable (see Honigmann; also Goldberg). As part of a rapidly changing repertory, they were modified to suit theatrical exigencies – what actors were available, and how many – and no doubt were unwittingly altered by actors who, pressed by the demands of a gruelling schedule and little rehearsal time, had to depend on their ability to extemporise simply to get through a performance. Clowns like Kempe, therefore, only did by design (and perhaps to excess) what was common practice among actors.

Direct address to the audience may have characterised the acting of Shylock as well. We cannot know whether the actor who first essayed the role exploited its comic potential (doubtful tradition has it that young Richard Burbage played Shylock in a red wig), but certain devices suggest that he may have bid for audience response in a way comic villains since the days of the Vice had done. In his first scene, for example, Shylock acknowledges his intention to catch Antonio on the hip in an aside that is disarmingly direct: ‘I hate him for he is a Christian’ (I.iii.34). Later, the scene affords the actor an opportunity for mimicry in the comic vein of Lancelot Gobbo, as when Shylock feigns the role of humble supplicant before Antonio:

Shall I bend low, and in a bondman’s key,

With bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness,

Say this:

‘Fair sir, you spat on me on Wednesday last,

You spurned me such a day, another time

You called me dog …’

(115–20)

This is very much an actor’s turn, a flamboyant appeal to the audience. And when, after he has been ridiculed for crying in the streets over the loss of his ducats and his daughter, he delivers his vehement self-defence as a Jew, he again may speak both in and out of character. On the one hand, he attempts in the speech to justify an odious revenge against Antonio, something he has already confessed to the audience he hungers for. Yet the series of rhetorical questions he asks – ‘Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?’ (III.i.46–7) – extends beyond the immediate context of the play to become an overarching plea for toleration; and it is quite possible that the actor delivered this speech directly to the audience, as a soliloquy, rather than to Solanio and Salarino.

The same may have been true of Portia’s eloquent plea for mercy. Certainly this rhetorically sophisticated speech would seem a bit out of character for the mere youth she pretends to be: it stands as a set piece, an expression of Christian values at once of the play and beyond it. Its original delivery would have been complicated by another convention of Elizabethan theatre, that of male disguise. Shakespeare’s audience accepted disguise as an artifice far less alien to reality than we regard it today. It suggested a conception of character more ludic than our demands for naturalism will allow. Further, the trying-on of roles signified the potential for one character to have a multiplicity of selves: it revealed that Portia, like other disguised Shakespearean heroines, understood how to think and act like a man. Her anticipation of cross-dressing prompts a satiric evaluation of the masculine behaviour she will imitate:

[I will] speak of ’frays

Like a fine bragging youth; and tell quaint lies

How honourable ladies sought my love,

Which I denying, they fell sick and died –

(III.iv.68–71)

Yet in court, Portia’s ‘worthy doctor’ outwits men at a more serious game. Her knowledge of the law, a male preserve, is greater than theirs, her eloquence more persuasive, her authority surer. And by maintaining her authority throughout the charade with the rings in Act V, Portia differs from other heroines such as Rosalind who relinquish control when they shed their male disguises.

The Elizabethan practice of boy actors playing women’s roles complicated matters further. No doubt boys did a creditable job of impersonating women, and audiences readily accepted them as such. Such acceptance, however, does not imply the same thing as our contemporary notion of suspended disbelief, for, as we have seen, certain signals reminded the Elizabethan audience of theatre’s essential artifice: the audience would have accepted a boy as Portia and yet remained fully cognisant that Portia was a boy. This multi-consciousness made particularly playful the scenes of cross-dressing in which onstage ‘women’ assumed male ‘disguises’, which paradoxically allowed the boy actors to resume their male identity – to drop their dresses, put on pants, and speak and act as boys. In The Merchant Shakespeare provides three cross-dressings, Jessica’s, Nerissa’s, and Portia’s, the compound effect of which is to insist on the artificiality of the convention (Shapiro, Boy Heroines, p. 110). Jessica’s disguise would have been most familiar to Elizabethan audiences, because it drew on Italian comedy for the resourceful, headstrong daughter determined to deceive her father by escaping his house in male attire. This conventional use of disguise, however, barely anticipated the more intricate effect of Portia’s cross-dressing at the trial.

It has been argued that on the Elizabethan stage, Shakespeare submerged Portia’s gender identity so completely in the fusion of Balthasar with the boy actor that the audience would have perceived her only as male (Geary, p. 58). Indeed, unlike other disguised heroines who keep us aware of their gender through periodic asides and soliloquies, Portia never breaks her cross-gender concealment. Yet in subtler ways, as Michael Shapiro points out in his study of Boy Heroines in Male Disguise (pp. 117–20), Shakespeare insists on the presence of ‘Portia’ throughout the trial and thereby keeps the dynamic of sexual transformation before the audience. When Bassanio, for example, generously offers Shylock twice, even ten times the money owed him – Portia’s money – it is ‘Balthasar’ who disallows the offer. In the theatre, this confrontation often brings Bassanio face to