"Barbaric Laws, Barbaric Bonds": Arnold Wesker's The Merchant

"Barbaric Laws, Barbaric Bonds": Arnold Wesker's The Merchant ISKA ALTER If The Merchant oIVenice is not the most problematic of Shakespeare's plays, it cerrainly has become one of the most provocative, not to say provoking, for the contemporary sensibility, schooled by histoty to the horrific outcome of anti-Jewish prejudice in the twentieth century. A tentative hint suggesting the possibility of a production is often enough to generate a cause celebre, prompting attacks on the playwright, cries of outrage against the theatre, and the inevitable demands for censorship among those who view the playas an antisemitic desecration. Once a production has been mounted, unless Shylock has been interpreted as an appropriately heroic if frequently sentimentalized figure, attacks often recur. I Like Dickens's Fagin who seems to take over Oliver Twist for many readers, transfonning the novel into an antisemitic tract, so too does the usurious Shylock - vengeful, evil, demonic - become the dynamic center of The Merchant oIVenice, dominating and reshaping the comic action for numbers of the audience as an emblem of the Christian stereotype of the Jew. British playwright Arnold Wesker belongs to that company who find themselves "[s]eething at his pornait of a Jew, unable to pretend this is simply another Shakespearean character through whom he is exploring greed. ..."2 To Wesker, The Merchant oIVenice is not just "a silly play'" but an irredeemably antisemitic one: All the productions I've seen of The Merchanl o/Venice have failed to hide the message which insists on coming through clearly and simply. No matter with what heavy tragedy the actor plays the role, no matter how thuggishly or foolishly the Venetians are portrayed, no matter in what setting, .. the image comesthrough inescapably: the Jew is mercenary and revengeful, sadistic, withom pity.4 There is nothing familiar in Shakespeare's pornaits of Jews or Jewish life Wesker's The Merchant 537 save the shame of caricature: Shylock resembles no Jew that Wesker has ever known; and vengeance, he decrees, plays linle part in the Jewish character.5 How, then, to rescue Shylock from Shakespeare's lies and Jewish life from ignominy? At ftrst I wanted to direct ''The Merchant of Venice" so that it would emerge the way I understood it. But then I realized how much rewriting would have to be done. So I wrote a play using the same stories that Shakespeare used, but with reconceived characters as stepping-stones to a completely different piece of land.6 The Merchant 01Venice - structure altered, characters refashioned, authorial concerns refocused - becomes The Merchant. At this point, an observation is in order, self-evident though it may be: notwithstanding his hostility to the original or his seemingly naive reactions to the unavoidable critical comparisons ,' Wesker's relationship to The Merchant 01Venice must, perforce, be an ambivalent one. It is not only that without the emotional spur provided by the earlier work the later version would not have been written~ nor is it the additional fact that the Shakespearean source supplies the characters and the particular situations for Wesker's revisionary interpretation; it is also the equivocal recognition that knowledge of Shakespeare's play deepens the ironies of the modem adaptation. In The Merchant, Wesker has replaced the older dramatist's carefully crafted binary structure, in which alternating scenes present the various embodiments of the opposing values that activate the play, with "a kind of panoramic world where life is going on . .. continuously...8 This horizontal design strives for an "epic visual quality,..9 allowing action to flow easily from scene to scene. The Ghetto world, in particular, is filled with this highly energized movement, reflecting "the kind of comings and goings and rapid exchanges of conversation ,..lo that Wesker believes to be typical of Jewish family and communal existence. The available revisions of The Merchant indicate that the playwright was constantly reworking his material, even to the extent of moving Portia and Belmont to the second act in the most recent edition ofthe play, so as to enhance the audience's sense of uninterrupted experience. I I Perhaps the major factor in determining Wesker's use ofsuch an epic format is the way he conceives of and...