The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare Page B

visiblebeneath the waistcoat. The ritual-like garment and its wearing was an invention of the designer’s, though based on photographs of Russian Jews in the nineteenth century, who wore a yellow sash over a long frock coat. We wanted to avoid any excessive sense of Jewishness or foreignness in appearance but this detail, almost unnoticed in the earlier scenes could, in the court, be boldly worn over the frock coat as a proud demonstration of Shylock’s racial difference. In the early scenes, however, I was anxious to minimize the impression of Shylock’s Jewishness. Whenever I had seen either a very ethnic or detailedly Jewish Shylock I felt that something was lost. Jewishness could become a smoke-screen which might conceal both the particular and the universal in the role. See him as a Jew first and foremost and he is in danger of becoming only a symbol, although a symbol that has changed over the centuries as society’s attitudes have changed. 29
    Stewart’s Shylock was in effect a “bad Jew,” totally motivated by money with little regard to the ethics of his religion. In this production the words “Jew” and “Christian” were merely labels, with neither set of characters demonstrating any of the traits of their creeds. Set in the late nineteenth century,
    The Christians are, on the whole, a spoiled, boorish bunch, much given to throwing bread-rolls, shooting off cap-pistols, and other types of horseplay; and the shock provoked by their deep, instinctive prejudice is the shock of recognition, because they wear the suits some of our generation’s grandfathers wore at public school or Oxbridge. The upper crust yob Gratiano, whose pet idiocy is dog-imitations, represents this faction at its most gruesome. And yet behind the witty, teasing front displayed by Patrick Stewart’s Shylock, there festers a no less nasty temperament … 30
    One of the RSC’s most controversial productions, directed by Bill Alexander in 1987,

    3. Patrick Stewart as Shylock: not so obviously Jewish in appearance, but unashamedly motivated by money.
    grappled with the play’s offensive subject matter more daringly than any production in recent memory. Refusing to either rehabilitate Shylock as the play’s moral standard-bearer … or to treat him from a safe historical distance as a comic “Elizabethan” Jew … Alexander courted controversy, seeming almost to invite accusations of racism. The controversy sprang in part from his refusal to honour the distinctions between romance and realism, comedy and tragedy, sympathy for and aversion to Shylock, from which stage interpreters have traditionally felt they had to choose. By intensifying the problematic nature of the text, Alexander modulated the dynamics of audience response: he goaded audiences with stereotypes only to probe the nature of their own prejudices; he confrontedthem with alienation in different guises in order to reveal the motives of scapegoatism. His Shylock was grotesque—at once comic, repulsive, and vengeful. Yet he was made so in part by those Venetians who need someone on whom to project their own alienation; Venetians who, in their anxiety over sexual, religious, and mercantile values, were crucial to the transaction Alexander worked out between Shakespeare’s text and contemporary racial tensions. 31
    Antony Sher, who played Shylock as a very exotic and very foreign-looking Jew, stated:
    There have been a lot of productions set in the turn of the century—or in the last century—where he’s dressed in a frock coat like everybody else and is an assimilated Jew. To me, that is nonsense, because clearly he sticks out like a sore thumb in society … We chose to make him a Turkish Jew using a Turkish accent. What we were doing with that was trying to extend the racism and by just making him a very unassimilated foreigner, very foreign, rather than very Jewish, we hoped to slightly broaden the theme of racism. We also wanted to make the racism as explicit and