The Merchant of Venice (El mercader de Venecia), and: The Merchant of Venice (review)

“El amor genera amor, el odio genera odio—y no importa ni la raza ni la religión.” Love begets love and hatred begets hatred, regardless of race and religion; such was the premise underlying Denis Rafter’s production in Spanish translation of The Merchant of Venice. It did not center singularly and visibly on Shylock’s decision to take revenge against the merchant and, by extension, get back at the entire Christian community of Venice, but appealed rather to the pain and humiliation suffered by all of wronged humanity. Rafter tipped the scales away from the play as a metaphor, on the one hand, for capitalism with its big money deals, and on the other, for identified racial tensions and persecution, as post-holocaust readings have tended to do. He opted instead for a more “studied, narrative-driven neutrality,” to cite Michael Billington’s phrase, penned in respect of Tim Carroll’s coetaneous production of the Merchant with the RSC. Although Billington believes that such “neutrality” is “admirable in theory,” the Stratford Merchant prompted him to query reprovingly, “Who, for instance, is Shylock?” insofar as Carroll had stripped the play of social context and denied it any interpretive angle, so that it was “in the end morally evasive” (Guardian, 11 April 2008). Similarly, Benedict Nightingale criticized the neutrality of Carroll’s Merchant, lamenting the loss of “the love, the hate, the terrible energy that can make the play so gripping” (Times, 11 April 2008).

In Rafter’s production, by way of contrast, the so-called “neutrality” worked well in both theory and (theatrical) practice; the problem of anti-Semitism was not foregrounded but allowed to emerge unconstrained, as were issues of religion, prejudice, justice, and finance. It was clear that if the play “raises disturbing questions about attitudes to race, religion, sex and money” (Billington), it is also a “comical history,” as its 1600 printed title indicates, which tells multiple stories about complex human relationships. In his mise-en-scène for the Merchant, Rafter transcended the national stereotypes associated with Portia’s suitors, the material cli-chés related to the Venetian merchants, and the anti-Semitism linked to Shylock. Moreover, he did not allow narratives of hatred to predominate over tales of love, the tragic to appropriate the comic (the hilarity of the scene between Lancelot and Old Gobbo drew from the director’s special penchant for circus and...