Staging The Merchant of Venice in Spain (2015): Felicitous "Romancing" with Money and Willful Ambiguity?

If James Shapiro's groundbreaking study of Elizabethan anti-Semitism, Shakespeare and the Jews, both explodes the myth of the absent Jew and explores how fluid the by now established understanding of "Englishness" once was, it also urges against censoring The Merchant of Venice (1596–98) and against failing to present the play in its "complex entirety," insofar as "it scrapes against a bedrock of beliefs about the racial, national, sexual, and religious difference of others" (228). Yolanda Pallín's adaptation of Merchant, staged by Eduardo Vasco with Noviembre Compañía de Teatro,¹ did not exactly heed Shapiro's exhortation about neither censoring nor compressing, shorn as it was of dialogue, characters, and scenes deemed "nonessential," so as to fit "the two hour's traffic of our stage" with no interval.

The Merchant of Venice has, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, become subject to an "anxiety of influence" around religion and prejudice, the portrayal of Jews and Christians, and issues of sexuality, gender, and difference (Bloom); as Harold Bloom puts it bluntly, the process is one of "selecting highly selective contexts for the actual Shakespearean text" (xxv). Shylock often turns into the play's central focus, especially after the courtroom scene. For Vasco, however, Merchant became more neutrally a "comedia romántica de amantes [a romantic comedy of lovers]" (Díaz Sande). Shylock's presence needed to balance the course of three sets of lovers in a romantic comedy or "comical history," as it was first denominated, but not without taking into account events of the recent past and of the current moment. In an interview, he commented:

We wanted to tell the story from beginning to end. Typically the lovers' final happiness is cut short, ending up somewhat bittersweet. We have tried to present Shakespeare's work without shifting the genre to which it belongs. Our intent in the Matadero theatre space is to recount a story that has transcended the passage of time and refashioned itself as all good works do. It is not possible to tell the Jew's story without taking into account everything that occurred in the 1930s. Nor is it possible to talk of loans without considering what has happened in Spain over the past several years, which does not mean throwing fraudulent affairs into relief, nor underlining them by displaying ubiquitously the logo of Bankia and the like. I would not know where to incorporate today's financial holocaust. On the other hand, the play has a certain period feel; it is of another time, but the word "Jew" conjures up a certain context for a modern audience. There is a moment in which Antonio declares that justice serves no purpose because the grandeur of Venice is based on the rights of moneylenders and those rights, above all, must be protected.² The allusion could not be clearer.

(Díaz Sande, my translation)

Though Vasco was too astute a director to make such financial allusions explicit on the stage, they were clear for many critics who "read" the performance, and presumably for many spectators as well; almost invariably, latter-day anxieties of influence led to some connection between capital and credit in the play and prevailing financial scandals in Spain, as representative comments reveal. Purificación Marascall, for example, opined that

[t]here are those who look in N. Gregory Mankiw's Principles of Economics—the highly publicized bible on the subject—for clues as to the art of finance. But already inscribed in Shakespeare are some of its most basic and cruel fundamentals. The Merchant of Venice speaks to us of the danger of trusting in the compassion and forgiveness of moneylenders; it warns of the consequences of signing a bank contract under irregular conditions: the loss not only of property but also of life itself. Does that ring a bell?

(my translation)

In parallel fashion, Estrella Savirón suggested that

[t]here is a weighty presence in the work, that of Shylock the moneylender, who collects interest on loans by applying abusive "legal...