The visual marketing of UNITEC’s The Merchant of Venice suggests that this will be a rather traditional take on one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays: neck ruffs, big hats with feathers, puff sleeves, tunics and a sinister, traditionally-clad and moustachioed Shylock. It invokes memories of craft-rich acting, blank verse and, perhaps, some self-important classical posturing. 

The first 10 minutes of this two hour journey puts paid to those ideas and leaves me somewhat perplexed as to what it was I’ve sacrificed my warm lounge to experience as there isn’t a morsel of my preconceptions in evidence and what is in their place is not altogether immediately satisfying. I am filled with a perplexing debate: “Don’t they teach craft anymore?” I ask myself, and earworms from my past materialise to remind me that if you can hear an actor’s feet then he/she doesn’t know what she/he is doing’.  

I settle back satisfied that this isn’t going to be one of UNITEC Performing and Screen Arts’ more memorable works.  I am wrong.

While I don’t resile from the views already expressed – loud feet in clunky shoes and a palpable lack of evident ‘craft’ – something else much more powerful than either of those perhaps pretentious fripperies is going on and I find myself liking this Merchant very much indeed.

Evidence suggests that Shakespeare penned the play between 1596 and 1598 but, despite receiving a helpful mention in Francis Meres’ Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), it wasn’t included in The Stationers Register until 1600 where it appeared under the dual titles of The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Venice, after which, later that year, it was printed in the ‘First Quarto’. The ‘First Quarto’ publication is considered to be exact and dependable and has been the base for all subsequent publications of the play. Well done, everyone; would they were all like that!

*In 1623, two of Shakespeare’s colleagues and contemporaries, Henry Condell and John Heminges, produced what has commonly become known as the ‘First Folio’ which contained the text for 36 plays attributed to The Bard and which was printed, again, by ‘The Stationers Company’. The Merchant of Venice was categorised in the ‘First Folio’ as a comedy which somewhat belies its dramatic and its romantic power.

The apparent simplicity of the narrative disguises many of the sub plots and eccentricities of the work and, despite its locale being an imaginary Venice, the references to 16^th century London and the social milieu and culture of that city are palpable and cannot be ignored. 

Shakespeare, never one to overlook someone else’s great ideas, used the common practice of bondsmanship in 16^th century London⁽¹⁾, much of the plot of Il Pecorone (The Simpleton) by Giovanni Fiorentino (1565) ⁽²⁾ and The Orator by Alexandre Sylvane (1596) for further details for the trial of Shylock.⁽¹⁾  Il Pecorone was never translated into English during Shakespeare’s lifetime so it can be assumed that the clever Bard read it in the original Italian. The casket choosing game, played by Portia’s three suitors – but sadly not included in this production – is borrowed from the Gesta Romanorum, ‘a medieval collection of stories translated by Richard Robinson, and published in 1577’ and subsequently reprinted in the edition of The Merchant of Venice famously edited by H H Furness.⁽³⁾ 

Shakespeare may also have seen a play entitled The Jew, which is referenced in Schoole of Abuse, containing a pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters and such like Caterpillars of the Commonwealth (1579) by the singularly unpleasant Stephen Gosson. He mentions briefly that a play by that name was once performed at the Bull Inn, but no other details are known.

Shakespeare may also have known of the novel Zelauto: The fountaine of fame by Englishman Anthony Munday (1580). Munday has created a character not dissimilar in many ways to the Bard’s Jessica but without that character’s finesse or depth.

It should also be remembered that Shakespeare’s great contemporary and rival Christopher Marlowe had a huge success with his play The Jew of Malta (1589/1590) and may well have used the same sources that were available to Shakespeare. What better reason for Shakespeare, almost a decade later, to attempt to replicate Marlowe’s success by writing his own version of Fiorentino’s The Simpleton. 

Whatever way we choose to look at it, Shakespeare was certainly a reader and probably did so in a number of languages, and felt no compunction whatsoever in using what he had access to as a means to creating his superior art. 

The UNITEC theatre is a clunky beast but the welcome is always warm and friendly and the foyer invariably crowded with young hopefuls and older, but not necessarily wiser, seasoned professionals. I say that, of course, with loving affection. It’s a fine mix, rather like a good red wine and an elegant cheese, and I always enjoy being there. 

Brent Hargreaves’ advent calendar of a set is sublime. Full of tricks and quirks, secret entrances, trapdoors, a water feature and the odd dungeon, it livens up and serves this production – and its alternate evening twin ‘Twelfth Night’ – superbly.

We’re welcomed into the space by mist, a jagged-edged harbour, some rocks, a couple of curved ramps, wide central steps up to a second, interior level as well as a couple of steepled windows providing for two elegant but visible interiors. All of this is lit in a clear, elegant light blue (Nicole Astrella) and we are welcomed to Venice’s Rialto – and a whole bunch of other places that Hargeaves has cleverly woven into his design.

I am particularly interested to see how the socio-political nature of Shakespeare’s play would pan out, particularly as the treatment of minorities (Jews and homosexuals in Elizabethan England) is at the heart of the play’s polemic debate. History tells us that Elizabethan England wasn’t a great place to be a Catholic but if you had the misfortune to be Jewish it was far, far worse. Catholics and Protestants alike saw Jews as heretics and the whole kit and caboodle tracks back to the 13^th century and the hate-filled reign of Edward I.

Following the execution in 1255 of a number of Jews suspected of orchestrating the murder of Hugh of Lincoln, anti-Semitism grew to such a degree that Edward I declared that Jewish people were a threat to the country because of suspected devil worship, the possession of magical powers, and the ridiculous belief that they had spread Bubonic Plague and other diseases throughout the Protestant population. As such, they were required to wear a yellow star to identify them in public.

Subsequently, Edward decreed that all the heads of Jewish households should be arrested and many were taken to the Tower of London and executed.

Finally, in 1290, Edward banished all Jews from England’s shores and it wasn’t until 1655 that Jewish scholar Manasseh ben Israel obtained Oliver Cromwell’s assent for Jews to return to London.⁽⁵⁾

The small number Jews in Elizabethan England were required to outwardly conform to the Protestant religion so any Jewish practices, as was also the case with Catholics, had to be undertaken in secret. Jews were restricted to two occupations, money lending and life as a peddler, and theatre audiences would have expected their Jews to be portrayed according to this Jewish stereotype and the dramatists of the Elizabethan era largely gave their audiences what they expected to see.

In Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, Barabas is depicted as a cruel, egocentric, and avaricious man whereas Shakespeare’s Shylock can be played in a much more empathic way. It could be said that, via Shylock, Jessica and Tubal, Shakespeare exposed those who were open to learn to the understanding that, like them, Jews were human and this is no better conveyed than in Shylock’s well-worn words:

“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.” 

It’s difficult to believe that the classic Shakespeare world-view would suddenly stoop so low as to adopt a racist position simply to please the ears of the groundlings when there was a bigger picture to present, one critical of the ruthless and barbaric way in which the smug Christian characters ridicule, humiliate and ultimately destroy Shylock and his place in this world and the next. 

The play also has a gay theme, albeit oblique, and whether this is real or not has been hotly debated since the earliest modern productions took to the stage. There is textual evidence that supports the view that Antonio, the merchant, is homosexual and hopelessly – and fruitlessly – in love with Bassanio. The play opens with a melancholy Antonio who is not able to articulate why he is sad. He’s certainly in love with the ne’er-do-well spendthrift Bassanio, though whether it’s sexual or platonic love is only alluded to and Bassanio’s clear predilection for Portia makes it a no-go area anyway. As often happens, Shakespeare provides the best character clues through the voice of others. Shylock, when asked why he won’t forgo his suit against Antonio says:

“So can I give no reason, nor I will not,
 More than a lodged hate and a certain loathing
 I bear Antonio, that I follow thus
 A losing suit against him. Are you answered?” 

Of course he hates Antonio; he’s been taunted, spat on, beaten and kicked so his hatred is understandable. We even get a clear picture from Shylock’s mouth of how Antonio has treated him:

“… you say so;
 You, that did void your rheum upon my beard
 And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
 Over your threshold: moneys is your suit
 What should I say to you? Should I not say
 ‘Hath a dog money? Is it possible
 A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ Or
 Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key,
 With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this;
 ‘Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last;
 You spurn’d me such a day; another time
 You call’d me dog; and for these courtesies
 I’ll lend you thus much moneys’?” 

Shylock also hates Antonio because he is a Christian, he says so more than once, but ‘loathing’, that’s a different packet of pork altogether. Shylock says’ he ‘loathes’ Antonio and, while he has no trouble articulating why he hates him, he will not say why he loathes him. Loathing is an emotion that the religious often save for those who are homosexual and, if we consider Shylock’s first words to Antonio when they meet on the Rialto, words that elicit a passionate yet somewhat unreasoned ‘cut to the chase’ response from the Merchant, we may get a clue:

“Rest you fair, good signior;
 Your worship was the last man in our mouths.” 

What better way to wind up a gay man in the company of the man he loves than with a line like that?  I’d go further and suggest that Antonio’s acceptance of his fate is further grounds that support my belief that Antonio is homosexual:

“I am a tainted wether of the flock,
 Meetest for death: the weakest kind of fruit
 Drops earliest to the ground; and so let me
 You cannot better be employ’d, Bassanio,
 Than to live still and write mine epitaph.”

Sadly these lines were cut from this production.  So be it.

These are the two themes in the play that seem to be of vital importance and I’ve entered the theatre fascinated to see how these would resolve.

First let me say that the production is rich in love. It doesn’t plumb the emotional depths necessary to mould Shylock (a sensitive Ziad Al Tarek) as anti-hero but it does allow the actor the opportunity to display a truthful response to the loss of his daughter Jessica (the excellent Tomai Ihaia), his possessions and his soul in a manner that is often truly moving. Al Tarek makes fine choices and his is a performance of true sincerity.

The court room scene is great, as it invariably is (it’s wonderful writing) but there is (as there should be) that sense of inevitability that the deck is well and truly stacked against the Jew from the outset, and it’s only the brutality of the resolution that really comes as much of a surprise. Shylock’s house is gone, his daughter has left, his money is dispersed and all his possessions scattered so what more can be taken from him? After all, Poor Shylock, not realising that the worst is yet to come says:

“You take my life
 When you do take the means whereby I live.”

Portia, in a rare moment of compassion, asks, “What mercy can you render him, Antonio?”  Antonio’s response should be devastating but there’s no real sense in this production that Antonio’s somewhat glib response has the gravitas it should have.

“Two things provided more,” Antonio says, “that, for this favour
 He presently become a Christian;
 The other, that he do record a gift,
 Here in the court, of all he dies possess’d,
 Unto his son Lorenzo and his daughter.”

Shylock’s daughter has married a Christian and he has to leave them everything he has in his will. Worse, by becoming a Christian, he loses his own hope of eternal life. That’s pretty big stuff to take so lightly.

However, this production concentrates more on the personal relationships and the romances of the happy Christians (and Jessica), and there’s sadly a sense of ‘thank God the trial is over, now let’s get on with the party’ about what follows.

Antonio (Marwin Silerio) plays the merchant straight down the line. It’s a nice performance but Silerio gives little away and the production denies us his moment of singular solitude at the end of the play, as the couples all jig off into the night. This, plus the cutting of some key lines and the happy, happy-joy, joy of the opening scene, denies the audience any real anchors with which to assess just who this dude with all the ships actually is. 

Bassanio (Ritchie Grzyb) is a delight, so much so that we tend to overlook the fact that he’s a wastrel and a ne’er-do-well – but maybe that’s the point. He’s hooked Antonio for 3,000 ducats and Portia (Valda-Anne Shadbolt-Sullivan) for twice that, and it’s hard not to think that Antonio is better off out of it. Grzyb is a lovely actor and by the end of the evening I’ve quite forgiven him, and others, their appallingly loud feet and inability to hug each other with any sense of dignity or beauty. He knows exactly what he was doing – the whole cast does – and they’ve created a delightful evening out even if parts of what Shakespeare wrote have been left tantalisingly in the shadows. 

There are some fabulous moments and super performances. Shadbolt-Sullivan’s Portia gets better as the evening progresses. A tad strident at the start, she warms to her task, and her ability to collaborate with Nerissa (the delicious Moana Johnson), her sister in naughtiness, and to convince us of her passion – and I mean PASSION – for Bassanio, is a delight. Gratiano (Tyler Warwick) and Salanio (Shannon Quinn) make up a quintet of men about town who are up for anything and loving every minute of it.

While all the sexy romance is scrumptiously handled from beginning to end, the pick for me is the fervent disrobing – if that’s what pulling off your boots and rolling down your hose is called – of Jessica and Lorenzo (Gracie-Rose Kay) by the pool. It manages to be charming, sweet, sensuous, delicate and hot all in one and I basically love it. All of it! Gracie-Rose Kay is certainly an actor to watch. Her Lorenzo is delicately played and complete, subtle and present and I thoroughly enjoy the selfless way she goes about her man’s work.

Overall, it is a fun evening where talent, ensemble, excellent direction (Elena Stejko) and design, plus lashings of unbridled happiness, shine through and I feel frequently during the performance that the rehearsals must have been an absolute riot. I won’t deny that I am bemused by some of the cuts and the underplaying of Antonio but the play holds together and is more than the sum of the parts even if the dramatic core ps somewhat lost.

If you choose to attend, you’ll have a great night. If Shakespeare had been in the audience, I reckon he’d have given it 16 out of 20 before heading off into the frosty dark for a transcendent evening with a mysterious dark lady and, for dessert, some divinely delicious, striking young man.

References

(1) Muir, Kenneth (2005). “The Merchant of Venice”. Shakespeare’s Sources: Comedies and Tragedies. New York: Routledge. p. 49. ISBN 0-415-35269-X.

(2) Bloom, Harold (2007). Heims, Neil, ed. The Merchant of Venice. New York: Infobase. ISBN 0-7910-9576-2.

(3 Mabillard, Amanda. Shakespeare’s Sources for The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare Online. 20 Aug. 2000. (Accessed 02 June, 2014)

(4) Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). “Gosson, Stephen”. Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

(5) http://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/queen-elizabeth-i-jews-catholics.htm (accessed 02 June, 2014)

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