Is successful matrimony a reasonable thing to hope for in an imperfect world, or are men so unworthy of women’s devotion that life with them is a constant trade-off, with women constantly refashioning themselves in men’s image but ultimately forced to accept men’s infidelity for the pleasure of their company? This seems to me the primary question asked by “The Merchant of Venice,” a play in which all of the principal women dress up as men and most of the men end up betraying their wives. The center of the piece, of course, is not Shylock but Antonio, the Venetian merchant who hazards his fortune for love of a friend and comes close to dying for it; and it’s Antonio who bridges the play’s two plots—the story of Portia and the three caskets and that of Shylock’s Jessica. For Bassanio (Portia’s sweetheart), Antonio becomes indebted to Shylock for “a pound of flesh”—that is, his life, which Portia saves when she outwits Shylock during the trial scene. The ruse with which Portia and Nerissa induce Bassanio and Gratiano to betray them is provoked by the two men’s declarations that for Antonio’s sake they would willingly sacrifice Portia and Nerissa. Antonio’s significance is plain: he represents that thing which men love more than they love their wives. But what of Shylock, who links the two stories thematically, if not structurally? What does the Jew represent?
According to Peter Hall’s production, which opened December 19th at the Forty-sixth Street Theater, with Dustin Hoffman in the role of Shylock, the Jew’s essential characteristic is his Jewishness, which isn’t quite as tautological as it sounds. Hoffman’s Shylock might have stepped out of a Central Park West consulting room. He’s witty and urbane, with a penchant for musing irony, but with none of the savagery that punctuates Shakespeare’s text. A tendency to embody a long tradition of dignified suffering is just about the only unassimilated aspect of Hoffman’s Shylock, but his most modern and immediately recognizable feature is his relationship with his daughter. Hall makes the central fact of Shylock’s situation the ambivalence of his overprotected child. Jessica’s distaste for Shylock set against his essential niceness (and Hoffman’s performance seems largely informed by a reluctance to play a character unsympathetically) makes you feel very sad, and once or twice, toward the beginning of the evening, there are moments when you feel your heart could break.
If this version of Shylock doesn’t lead anywhere in particular (and it doesn’t: at the most crucial points—the “Hath not a Jew” speech and the trial scene—Shylock always seems the least vital force), the production is no less rife with instances of what it is that makes Hall great as a director of Shakespeare. He is a master at bringing subtext to life onstage—finding it out or creating it where none exists. He invests a throwaway line like Lorenzo’s parting shot to Bassanio (“I pray you have in mind where we must meet”) with a quality that somehow makes it clear to us how Bassanio fell into debt in the first place. Hall looks at a line or an exchange, a strain of imagery or circumstance, and draws conclusions from it. He looks at the opening conversation between Antonio and Bassanio and notices that the latter couches his courtship of Portia in terms of money. He looks at the description of Antonio and Bassanio’s parting (“I think he only loves the world for him…”) and notices that much more is being suggested than a Sunday-football friendship. He looks at the famous string of similes exchanged between Jessica and Lorenzo (“In such a night stood Dido with a willow in her hand…”) and notices that all the love affairs alluded to end badly. And from these observations (among others) Hall emerges with a “Merchant” that is almost more about male bonding than about love and marriage.
This exploration of subtext (an approach to Shakespeare of which Hall is as much an inventor as a practitioner) is highly vulnerable to perverse interpretation. There is, of course, no reason in the world for that scene between Jessica and Lorenzo to be played as though the two were having a bitter fight, just one of a long series in a disastrous marriage quite obviously on the rocks; no reason to dress Bassanio up like a figure in a mannerist painting as though to belie his rejection of surface beauty; no reason to have Shylock’s turncoat servant, Launcelot Gobbo, treat Jessica with hostility and contempt, or to transform Jessica herself into a kind of Amanda Plummer creation—all darting looks and quasi-psychotic glances—so that we’re less concerned with the general fate of true love than with the specific fact that poor Lorenzo has his hands full. Those ambivalences about fathers, about women and men, about Christians and Jews are there in the text: we don’t need to be hit over the head with them.
Fortunately, the experience of seeing this “Merchant” turns out not to be about either Hall’s interpretive quirks or Hoffman’s Shylock. It’s about seeing and hearing Shakespeare performed without fanfare or flummery, in a setless, Lincoln’s Inn Fields–type Jacobean playing area (designed by Chris Dyer), by a company of schooled Shakespearean actors—actors like Leigh Lawson, Nathaniel Parker, Richard Garnett, Donald Burton, Gordon Gould, Peter-Hugo Daily, Leo Leyden, Julia Swift, Michael Carter, and, most particularly, Michael Siberry and Geraldine James, who as Gratiano and Portia, give tour-de-force performances. As for Hoffman, you learn nothing from him about fathers, Shylock, or the quality of mercy; but, knowing that in the imperfect world of Broadway this production probably couldn’t exist without a star, you admire what he does that’s moving, and respect the grace with which he seems willing to eclipse himself for the general good. And you leave exhilarated and uplifted, feeling that it was a worthwhile tradeoff: Hoffman and some minor infidelities in exchange for the pleasure of Hall’s company.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, January 1, 1990