The Shylock and the Shakespeareans

Today, June 15, it so happens, is the anniversary of the death of Will Sommers in 1560. History lovers, especially performance history lovers, may recognize the name, but I imagine few others will. Sommers is one of the most famous and well-documented of all the professional court jesters, tickling the funny bones of three English monarchs: Henry VIII,Mary I (during whose reign he made a sort of team with Jane Foole), and Elizabeth I (he died a few months after her coronation). We mention it because it’s relevant to the history of comedy and the variety arts (the topic of jesters has been visited in my books and on this blog from time to time), but also because it’s relevant to the show we saw last night, Edward Einhorn’s The Shylock and the Shakespeareans, which contains more than one Elizabethan clown.

The popular esteem of even the greatest poets and authors ebbs and flows as centuries pass, and I have a daring prediction about the long term fate of Shakespeare. Following over two centuries of ascendancy (beginning, really, with the great actor-managers of the 19th century) the vogue for the Elizabethan poet-playwright will finally wane in the not-too-distant future, for a time, anyway, if not permanently. Nothing is ever erased; he will simply be reduced in stature as a produced author, and taught differently in school, into something more proportionally equal with his contemporaries Marlowe, Jonson, Fletcher, etc. His impact on the English language will naturally remain unquestioned, and he’ll remain in the heady company of Milton, Chaucer, John Donne, etc as one of the great transformative literary masters. But, as time goes on one has to agree with Shaw on the topic of Bardolatry. I’ve been a Shakespeare lover since I was in my early teens, mostly as a fan of the language, but increasingly I don’t see the point in producing him. 95% of actors, even the best ones, do a lousy job of interpreting him (to my satisfaction, at any rate). And, dramatic value notwithstanding, a huge proportion of his plays, even the best ones, have become almost prohibitively problematic. Othello, Shrew, Richard III — they’re increasingly hard to do nowadays without an elaborate apparatus of apology: program notes; post-show discussions; color blind and gender neutral casting. In addition to the author’s treatment of people of color, non-Christians, women and so forth, I find that I increasingly have trouble with his (naturally) Medieval political philosophy. They’re all of a piece really. He’s the ultimate evangelist for acceptance of the world order as it was handed to us. While he is plainly approving of human virtues like mercy and benevolence, he is for all that nonetheless authoritarian, patriarchal, jingoistic, racist, etc. No more so (indeed perhaps less so) than his contemporaries, but that doesn’t mean we have to love that about him now.

A little known (or little stressed) fact about Shakespeare, is that he was the favorite classical playwright of Nazi Germany. Actual German authors like Goethe and Schiller were not as sanctioned by the party propagandists because they were too humanistic, too democratic, too questioning. But, Shakespeare? There’s a guy they could warm up to. The English-speaking world walks around with a superior and false idea that they are clean of the sins of European anti-Semitism, which would be hilarious if it weren’t also tragic. Jews were banned from England entirely between 1290 and 1656, and certainly persecuted there before and after that. In England and America they were banned from clubs and businesses. If Hitler had succeeded in his military movements westward, the British Union of Fascists was waiting in the wings to assist him in his aims. England’s ostensibly liberal opposition to Nazism was a difference of degree rather than one of kind. Germany had its liberals; England had its Fascists. In each example, it was a matter of who got the upper hand politically. “It” can and has happened everywhere.

The play that inspired that lengthy preamble is of course The Merchant of Venice. I’m pretty sure I’ve never met a Jewish person who had any time for the half-truth that Shakespeare is doing the world a big service by humanizing his only Jewish character with the “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech. The Bard just writes a kick-ass monologue, which is far and away the thing most people love best about him. It’s among the chief things actors (and back in the day, orators) pride themselves on doing: performing those monologues. So Shakespeare stood in Shylock’s shoes for a brief moment — and even then couldn’t resist using the speech to fuel the character’s dark promises of revenge. Shylock is kind of the Ur-supervillain. It seems to me he is the inspiration for numerous Dickens’ characters, especially Scrooge and Fagin. The thing is, in all likelihood, Shakespeare never met a Jewish person in his entire life. An inexhaustible researcher and autodidact, he certainly read about them and heard about them. He certainly knew Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. While there are certainly those who argue differently, it seems plain to most people with eyes and ears that Shylock is an unfair and libelous stereotype, a smear and demonization of the Jewish people as greedy, cruel, and shifty. It’s kind of like a dramatic iteration of every paranoiac’s conspiracy theory about what Jews are capable of if “we” don’t watch out. Sure, if you tie yourself into pretzels you can put a different spin on it. But doesn’t that raise the question: why do you have to? And more than that: why would you?

In The Shylock and the Shakespeareans, Einhorn gets his hands dirty in this question with a delightful passion, a goblet full of delicious and righteous venom I’ve not experienced before in any of his works. Don’t mistake me. Like the main character of this play, a money lender named Jacob (Jeremy Kareken) the writer/director is too much a lover of peace and reason to mount a full fledged attack upon his bugaboo (which would be more MY style). But his sadness and perplexity and frustration shine through, enough to awaken some satirical instincts and a biting wit. As you anticipate from all I’ve written thus far I hope, the play is a deconstruction of A Merchant of Venice. Properly speaking Shylock is not a character, but just a slur, a nickname imposed on the protagonist Jacob, which he grins and bears as best he can. The plot is the same as that in Merchant, except flipped on its head in terms of point of view. As it should be. After all, which group has been persecuted in Europe for centuries, almost to the point of extinction? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t white Christians. To bring the point home about the majority culture’s complicity in the past two millennia of injustice, the villain of the peace is Shakespeare himself, whom Einhorn has transformed into a kind of mix of Hitler, Trump, and V from V for Vendetta (reinforced by the headgear his followers all wear, a kind of combined Guy Fawkes mask and KKK hood). In a Joycean spirit, Einhorn transforms the character of Gobbo (Craig Anderson) into something like Goebbels, as Shakespeare’s propagandist and right arm. Thus, a reality that Shakespeare refers to in a sort of minor way in Merchant, that Antonio (Eric Oleson) had spat on Shylock in the marketplace, and called him names and so forth, gets foregrounded into something proportionally more like reality. The entire CULTURE, law, society, exponents of religious indoctrination and so forth, were agents of oppression against Europe’s Jewish minority. Making Shakespeare, the literary Saint of the very language we speak, into a motive force for that hatred is a bold and necessary slap in the face, just a really strong statement about who is involved here (all of us) and to what degree (a lot). Not to mention, what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

There were a couple of moments that so strongly expressed Einhorn’s feelings, they filled me with admiring glee, and these were moments when he dissed Merchant‘s two sacrosanct speeches. When Portia (Nina Mann) is about to wax philosophic about the “quality of mercy” another character shuts her up completely. And the play’s culminating moment where Shakespeare enacts a highly “stage Hebrew” rendition of “hath not a Jew eyes” is warmly appreciated by an enraptured audience of goyim. Guilty as charged, brother! Thank you for breaking the spell and helping us see it. Brecht could do no more. Nor Stoppard (thinking of such things as Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern and Leopoldstadt).

Another wonderful moment, striking an entirely different emotional note, was Jessica’s keening, Mourning Kaddish for her father, performed by Yael Haskal, one of the play’s several stand out performers, among whom I would also include Karaken and Oleson.

You have four more chances to catch it! And furthermore it’s also one of your last chances to see a show at the New Ohio Theatre. So get your tickets here.

And if you’re especially feeling the Shakespeare-revisitation spirit this weekend, with a bit of clever scheduling you can also catch Shakespeare’s Prisons: Tales of Conscience and Illusion at TheaterLab.