Customer Reviews

BBC Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice

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To briefly answer the reviewer who had trouble with the sound, I didn't have any. But I have had that trouble with other feeds that reviewers did not report, so I wonder what is the cause.

I liked this production very much. You may recognize the actress who plays Portia as the mother from the 1995 Sense & Sensibility.

Like many BBC Shakespeares, the faces don't seem right for a few minutes. Hollywood spoils us with pitch perfect prototypes. But after they settle in, the language takes over. The play itself is very powerful, and maybe the best the actors can do is not get in its way.

I was deeply moved by the court scene. The theme of mercy over justice (though it is bittersweet considering Shylock's end) has seldom found better expression.

A funny thing: the sound of the music being played at Portia's house starts to drag and whine right when Lorenzo is giving a speech about music appreciation. It sounds like a cassette getting half stuck in the old tape players.

I do like the Pacino and Irons production a lot, too, but I'm glad I chose this one to get ready (I almost said "to make ready myself" - it's tempting to talk that way after these plays, isn't it?) for class. The less expensive productions seem to let the language through cleaner.

If all is well when all ends well, It is a comedy, and yet it is a pure drama in many ways. A Shakespearean drama for sure, but a drama nevertheless. And none of its value has disappeared today.

The first absolutely modern question is that of Jews, their presence and treatment in and by society. In Venice they are tolerated which creates some problems. Shakespeare describes them with tremendous accuracy. First there is the problem of their wealth that creates jealousy against them and that gives them a tremendous power since they can lend money at usurer's rates. In this play the payment, if the borrower defaults on it, becomes a pound of flesh taken from his breast. This clause is absurd in itself, barbaric in many ways, but it is a vengeance from Shylock, the Jew, for his stolen daughter who married a Christian and became Christian in so doing.

Shakespeare tries to equalize the situation with the famous and ever quoted long intervention from Shylock himself: "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 shall we not revenge?" In fact that does not equalize anything since it shows Shylock's only aim is not justice, not benevolence, just vengeance. And in this case the wrong done to the Jew is the theft of his daughter, hence the negation of his father's rights, of his condition of father. Where is the first disruption of the status quo?

But the play in its entirety implies this is normal: a Jew has to be converted sooner or later to Christianity. In other words his religion is rejected and considered as both inferior and just tolerable but not acceptable. Is vengeance the normal reaction? For any human being, yes. Why not for Jews? But then it creates the sorry situation we are discussing here: the forfeiture of one pound of flesh to compensate the loss of a defaulted loan.

But the play goes a lot farther. It plays with words, laws and legal terms to destroy the Jew in the end: one pound of flesh you can take, but you must not take one drop of blood nor of course cast one drop of blood. Mission impossible. Then the request to be given that pound of flesh was a direct and indirect jeopardizing of the life of a Christian Venitian and that means three punishments: half the property of the culprit given to the endangered person; half of his property confiscated by the state, and his death penalty that can be pardoned by the Duke who imposes instead the conversion of the Jew to Christianity. This is a total full destruction of the Jew and the play does not leave one single doubt about his being utterly destroyed.

The second modernity is the freedom of women in front of marriage. Shylock's daughter marries the man she wants and chooses against her father's will. Then Portia and Nerissa marry the men they choose and select, and Portia's selection is long and very challenging for the suitors. Then the two latter women give a ring to their husbands who are obliged to swear they will never part from them, but the two women become the lawyer and clerk in the trial and they exploit the situation they create with the judgment and sentence against Shylock to, under the cover of them being men, literally force the two men to forfeit their rings. You can imagine the exploitation of this fact at the end. We will though pass on the gay innuendo which is nothing but fun and has no fundament, and was even funnier in Shakespearean times when female characters were played by male actors and Portia was thus authorized by her husband to spend the night with the lawyer, and Nerissa with the clerk, boy with boy in both cases.

Then at the same time there are some signs that Shakespeare considered this situation as not entirely solved, as if containing some danger for the future. The play ends with three marriages. Three is the number of disorder and disruption. Of course three couples make six people and we have there Solomon's number, and the judgment and sentence were typically a judgment and sentence that Solomon's wisdom could have produced, at least so far as forcing Shylock to drop his claim. After that, his complete discomfiture is in no way Solomonic. The thrice-fair lady (Act 3 Scene 2) is also more menacing than friendly, especially when we know that for Shakespeare the thrice-crowned goddess is the triple goddess Hecate-Selene-Diana, a very somber goddess. The fact that Portia has three suitors and the third one is the good one, Bassanio, competing with two "exotic" suitors: the Prince of Morocco and the Prince of Arragon.

And a remark is important because it is in a way an enormous tongue in an enormous cheek: "How every fool can play upon the word! I think the best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence, and discourse grow commendable in none only but parrots." (Act 3 Scene 5) Shakespeare is making fun of his own wit, or of one of his character's wit. It is slightly more than that when we know the witty remark has to do with the "Moor", Shylock himself, the Jewish father of Jessica. I would even say that this "wit" is slightly "sick", even in Shakespeare's times, hence his remark.

The BBC production is brilliant in many ways and has some great interest in some iconic scenes like the "If you prick us..." bravado. But the end implies that suspended unquiet, dissatisfaction, with Antonio climbing, when all the others are gone, the stairs in the garden and staying a long time on the terrace and sitting on a bench without going out. The action is in a way in mid-air.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

I liked what I saw of it, but for some reason, no matter where I went, the video and audio started to unsync after the first act. I never got past Act 1.