FLOODESIGN

Judith Butler 3 . Of course "The Merchant of Venice" is anti-Semitic. It is anti-Semitic in that small, innocent way, the same way in which "Girls" is racist, "Miss Julie" is classist, and "The Iliad" perpetuates rape culture. Its microaggressions are intended as broadly humorous; they were written at a time when it was possible not to take the offense, because all violence looks like jolly jabs when its power is unassailable. After the Holocaust, it is impossible to enjoy this play innocently 4 . The task for anyone staging "The Merchant of Venice" since 1945 is to find a way to its core humanism, its provocative questions of justice and mercy, without succumbing to apologia. Karin Coonrod embraces this task, with interventions into the tone, structure and staging; pointing out the motherly relationship of single father Shylock to Jessica; emphasizing the hypocrisy of Portia's appeal to mercy; zooming in on the losses that abound in this play. Coonrod gives us Shylock in the bodies of five different (very different) performers, in multiple contemporary and historical languages, so that the "broad, strong outlines of a national character" can disappear in the cacophony of common humanity. Theater can do this; film cannot. Amazing what theater can do. Coonrod's production was first staged in Venice, in the ghetto itself. It is an odd place, the ghetto, old and not entirely un-cheerful. Walled and canal-ed on all sides, it could only grow upward: today it has some of the tallest residential buildings in Venice, and some of the lowest ceilings. It is cheap and popular with students (the Jewish community has never recovered its prewar numbers). One walks around expecting ghosts at every corner, expecting tragedy. But that is not how the world works. "The Merchant of Venice" is a play that can never be a comedy again, perhaps should not have been a comedy then, yet is a comedy — and its place in the canon is as immovable as the UNESCO-protected bricks in Venetian walls. Learning how to speak with, to and about texts like these is one of the great tasks of our time. There are some plays that over time, for all their beautiful sentences, complex character psychology and powerful monologues, become like an embarrassing uncle. "The Merchant of Venice" isn't "Mein Kampf." It is a comedy, of the sort in which the boy marries the girl, and the boy's best friend marries the girl's lady-in-waiting. But the humor of this play, as well as its plot, hinges on the ludicrousness of the idea that a Jewish lender in medieval Europe might get his comeuppance against his gentile client. Shylock appears in five scenes only — and yet has haunted Western culture ever since. Philip Roth writes, "In the modern world, the Jew has perpetually been on trial [...] and this modern trial of the Jew, this trial which never ends, begins with the trial of Shylock." The Rev. Henry Hudson, in his preface to the play, published for school use in Boston in 1892, notes offhand that in Shylock, we see "the broad, strong outlines of national character in its most revolting form." By the 19th century, Shylock was a synonym for greedy Jew in Australian political pamphlets, in books about the Jewish corruption of finance and politics, in the rants of Ezra Pound. The play was a favorite in Nazi Germany, with more than 50 productions performed there between 1933 and 1939. (Jessica, Shylock's daughter, in these productions was sometimes made an adopted Aryan child, to solve the problem of her "racially mixed" marriage to Lorenzo.) A performance was commissioned to celebrate that Vienna had become "Jew-free" in 1943. Shylock was played as a monster. Harold Bloom writes, "I am hurt when I contemplate the real harm Shakespeare has done to the Jews for some four centuries now. No representation of a Jew in literature ever will surpass Shylock in power, negative eloquence and persuasiveness." Explicitly anti-Semitic interpretations of the play were a modern invention, and scholars still debate whether the script itself is anti-Semitic and whether Shakespeare, therefore, was an anti-Semite 2 . Shylock is an odd character, bigger and heavier than the comedy surrounding him. It is speculated that Shakespeare attended Lopez's trial and witnessed its cruelty, that this is why some of the most beautiful monologues in his entire oeuvre belong to Shylock. "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" We always want our literary greats to be equally morally great. But there is no actual evidence that Shakespeare was politically motivated, not in this case. To read these critics is to be astonished, again and again, at the vast moral and political oversimplifications they trade in, the ways in which they are blind to intermediate shades of responsibility between organized state oppression and individual culpability, the ways in which they ignore the vast work developed among Althusser, Foucault, James Baldwin, 14 www.peakperfs.org Coonrod gives us Shylock in the bodies of five very different performers, in multiple contemporary and historical languages, so that the "broad, strong outlines of a national character" can disappear in the cacophony of common humanity.

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