Well, less disputatious and declamatory, which might not have suited Shylock.
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Laurence Olivier (Shylock) and Joan Plowright (Portia) might seem plummy voiced or old school now, but thanks to Miller's vision this was the radical post-Holocaust production that turned Shylock from traditional villain to modern victim.
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SHYLOCK IS MY NAME"The Merchant of Venice" RetoldBy Howard Jacobson275 pp.
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Right now I'm Fatman," and, "You think he's Shylock Holmes, Jew Detective?
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Of course Shylock, in all his incarnations, sounds a disruptive note of discord.
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Shylock refuses to assimilate; Othello is eager to belong and show his loyalty.
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His 1999 book "The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel" chronicled the mishaps that followed his effort to reimagine Shylock, the Jewish villain of Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice," after watching a performance by Laurence Olivier in 1973.
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We meet both a contemporary British Shylock, an art collector named Simon Strulovitch, and the original Shylock, teleported forward to our time, into whose monologues we peer, and with whom Strulovitch has intense exchanges about money-lending, circumcision, and Jewishness generally.
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Shylock is taken to trial, and the play concludes with him converting to Christianity.
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SHYLOCK IS MY NAME: William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" Retold, by Howard Jacobson.
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He was never subjected to anti-Semitism, yet he wrote the character of Shylock.
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Ms. Coonrod's attempt to solve the problem of Shylock by multiplication is surprisingly effective.
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As long as Othello and Shylock are needed, they are called by their names.
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Over the years he played Cyrano de Bergerac, Prospero, Shylock, King Lear and Hadrian VII.
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Shylock gets to make that famous "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" speech.
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Like Shylock, in the Merchant of Venice, they are determined to extract their pound of flesh.
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The legal principle upon which Shylock insists has nothing to do with tolerance or human rights.
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It didn't seem much interested in understanding Shylock, who was represented by an empty picture frame.
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Operation Shylock, 20123 In Roth's "novel, 'Operation Shylock: A Confession,' an American Jewish novelist called Philip Roth suffers a breakdown in 22012, probably as a result of using Halcion, a sleeping pill with malign side effects in some," wrote D.M. Thomas in our review of the book.
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Of his novels set in Israel, "The Counterlife" was published in 1986 and "Operation Shylock" in 1993.
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But before Shylock exacts this cruel retribution, a friend of Antonio's makes a fascinating appeal in his favor.
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Sher, who has delivered memorable interpretations of Richard III, Shylock, and Macbeth, had never considered taking on Falstaff.
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We read of shocked spectators jumping to the rescue of Desdemona or fainting when Shylock whets his knife.
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The best things in the book are often the most discursive, the philosophical-historical exchanges between Strulovitch and Shylock.
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For better or worse, Othello and Shylock have appeared so real and lifelike to both scare and enthrall their viewers.
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Shakespeare's Shylock, the Jewish money-lender of The Merchant of Venice who demands a pound of flesh from his victims, was inspired by Barabas, the murderous Jewish money-lender of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta — but The Merchant of Venice cares about how Shylock thinks and why he would demand a pound of flesh.
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He had learned that the Rialto was the site for news and for trade, and that Shylock would conduct business there.
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Osmin, in the original a cruel, vindictive overseer, is reimagined as a kind of philosopher-monk: artistic, melancholy, a Shylock figure.
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The play ends—Shakespeare's original play ends—with Shylock on the skids, condemned to wander, without a family, a business, a home.
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The protagonist of "Operation Shylock" is a character named Philip Roth, who is being impersonated by another character, who stole Roth's identity.
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But this is not a Shakespeare play, and Bloomberg is not Shylock, nor is he a stand-in for all Jewish people.
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It was "The Merchant of Venice," in which Mr. Hoffman played Shylock — not "Death of a Salesman," in which he played Willy Loman.
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Shylock, unlike nearly every other character in the play, is unable to employ figurative language, and the metaphors he attempts are few and simple.
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Shakespeare bothered to give the hated Jewish moneylender Shylock a point of view; Mark Twain bothered to imagine emotions for the runaway slave Jim.
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Shylock, the most infamous moneylender in literature, has just discovered that his daughter has absconded with his ducats to elope with a mercenary Christian.
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A production of "The Merchant of Venice" that treats Shylock as anything other than the most interesting person in the play will always fail.
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Christmas cards: Dear Shylock, in this seasonWhen we're all bereft of reason,As upon my rent you gloat,I would like to cut your throat.
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The punishment, as agreed upon between the two men as a condition of the deal, is that Shylock may remove a pound of Antonio's flesh.
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" She added, to laughter, "And finally, after four centuries of delay in seeking payment, we think that Shylock is out of time in asking for interest.
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The production, which stars a deeply moving Jonathan Pryce as Shylock, does begin on a frolicsome note, with masked actors dancing onstage, as during Venice's carnival.
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That includes the title character, Antonio (Toussaint Jeanlouis), who disastrously borrows money from Shylock, and the best friend he is trying to assist, Bassanio (Titus Tompkins).
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It begins outside the United States, with an unkind ferment of older stereotypes: the non-Christian other, the money-lending Shylock, the petty bourgeois European nebbish.
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If Shylock had behaved himself and remained a mere comic foil—like Don John the Bastard, in " Much Ado About Nothing "—there would have been no disturbance.
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He was the first three-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, honored for "Operation Shylock" in 1994, "The Human Stain" in 2001 and "Everyman" in 2007.
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The exception, to a degree, is Mr. Pryce's eloquent, beautifully rendered Shylock, whose abuse at the hands of the Christians of Venice is drawn in stark relief.
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Though Shylock says that he will not pray with the Christians or eat their nonkosher food, he enumerates the many ways in which he routinely interacts with them.
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There's a harrowing moment toward the end when Shylock, having lost his case to extract a "pound of flesh" from Antonio, steps from the stage into the audience.
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The mock appeal began where the play ended: Shylock, the conniving Venetian Jewish moneylender, insists on collecting a pound of flesh from Antonio, who has defaulted on a loan.
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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in Venice this week, watching her grandson perform in a production of "The Merchant of Venice" and presiding over a mock appeal by Shylock.
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The banks claim that to deprive them of their flesh would be to deprive them, and so the Republic, of life: Shylock, in his bloodlust, must be a savage.
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" The answer: "Because we, the real Jews of Venice, are not afraid of Shylock, our secret sharer; we loathe him, but he can help us think about anti-Semitism.
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Howard Jacobson, who is famous as a sort of English Philip Roth (though often making one more grateful than ever for the American one), was a natural for Shylock.
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The relationship between Shylock and his daughter Jessica, who converts to Christianity, becomes central: In the closing seconds, she is heard, wracked with regret, reciting the Kaddish for her father.
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Shylock tries to destroy his Christian enemy legally by enforcing the letter of the bond; Portia succeeds in destroying her Jewish enemy by outwitting him at his own hairsplitting game.
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The Catholic Church forbade usury, so Jews thrived as moneylenders - the trade of Shylock in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" - and ran pawn shops, both activities for a mostly Christian clientele.
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In "The Merchant of Venice," the attitude toward Shylock is similar to that of people who find Israel's claims to victimhood hypocritical in the light of its ongoing treatment of Palestinians.
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This became clear to Franz when his teachers in Berlin cast stealthily malicious glances at him when Jewish characters — such as Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice" — came up in literature.
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He spoke with the same zeal we expect from Shylock, had the same demands for justice, the same ludicrous faith in the judiciary, and even—I swear—some of the same desires.
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This is the case in William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," when the Jewish moneylender Shylock brings his nemesis and lifelong tormentor, the Christian merchant Antonio, to court over an unpaid loan.
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He used his medical experience to direct Michael Hordern as a senile King Lear and elicited a major performance from Olivier himself as a Shylock intended to resemble a 19th-century Rothschild.
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Then a set that recreates the stage of the Globe Theater of London will be loaded into the Rose for the Globe's production of "The Merchant of Venice," starring Jonathan Pryce as Shylock.
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Shylock came perilously close to wrecking the comic structure of the play, a structure that Shakespeare only barely rescued by making the moneylender disappear for good at the end of the fourth act.
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Jacobson's Shylock is a 21st-century art dealer and philanthropist, Simon Strulovitch, who becomes enraged when his daughter falls for a non-Jewish athlete known for giving Nazi salutes on the soccer pitch.
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They all take on other roles as well, and we see each transformed (by changes of Stefano Nicolao's costumes) sequentially into Shylock, whose depiction as a villainous Jew has provoked centuries of debate.
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In the case of Shylock, it is wildly unlikely that Shakespeare had ever encountered a Jewish usurer, but he may have been drawing on his father's moneylending and, for that matter, on his own.
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And partly because much of the acting is without sharp psychological shading — and because people change character with their clothes — you start to think that any of those onstage could be transformed into Shylock.
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In "The Merchant of Venice" Portia saves Antonio by arguing that though he agreed to forfeit a pound of flesh to Shylock if he defaulted on a loan, he did not agree to lose blood.
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Shakespeare supplies us with no scene in which Shylock speaks in normal and sympathetic tones, prays in a synagogue, invites a friend to supper, or cracks a joke that is not designed to hurt someone.
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But a lawyer, actually Portia disguised as a man, finds Shylock guilty of conspiring against Antonio and rules that he must hand over half his property to Antonio and the other half to the state.
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When it comes time to repay the loan, the banks refuse, claiming that they can't, which only means that they won't, and so Sanders/Shylock hauls them to court and demands repayment of his bond.
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Only conversion—in the case of Shylock's daughter, her marriage to a fortune-hunting Christian; in the case of Shylock himself, conversion under the threat of execution—can dissipate hatred and save the play from bloodshed.
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When Shylock learns that his daughter exchanged a turquoise ring for a monkey—a turquoise ring that she stole from him, and that had been a gift from his dead wife, Leah, his anguish is unmistakable.
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Antonio says he will forgo his half, on the condition that Shylock convert to Christianity and will his estate to Jessica, Shylock's wicked and rebellious daughter, who has run off to Genoa with Lorenzo, a Christian.
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Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday about a mock appeal hearing held in Venice for the character Shylock from "The Merchant of Venice" referred incorrectly to the disguise Portia adopts in the play.
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For "Merchant," which begins performances at the Tina Packer Playhouse on Friday, July 1, she reconceives a play she staged for the troupe in 1998, with the same actor, Jonathan Epstein, playing the much-maligned usurer Shylock.
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The pound of flesh he exacts, the 3,000 ducats he loans, the revenge he hankers for — Shylock embodies the most entrenched anti-Semitic clichés: The Jews pursue vengeance over mercy; the Jews are inextricably linked to money.
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The most famous literary embodiment is Shylock, the Jewish moneylender from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, who gives up on collecting a pound of flesh only after he's convinced that it's more legal trouble than it's worth.
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In the portrayal of Merchant's Shylock, literature's most famous Jew, Shakespeare neither condones nor condemns the anti-Semitism of his time (and ours), simply depicting a nasty Jew, nasty Christians and the social causes of their mutual suspicion.
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But, of course, Shylock also locks the world's joys outside — the pleasures of music and play — feeding the discontent and yearning for freedom of his daughter, Jessica, here played with rich feeling by Mr. Pryce's daughter, Phoebe Pryce.
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The central action turns on the footballer's proposal to Strulovitch's daughter, and on Strulovitch's insistence, as a conscious parody of the demand of Shakespeare's Shylock for a pound of flesh from Antonio, that the Gentile athlete be circumcised.
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He did so not by creating a lovable alien—his Jew is a villain who connives at legal murder—but by giving Shylock more theatrical vitality, quite simply more urgent, compelling life, than anyone else in his world has.
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THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Five actors of varied race and gender share the role of Shylock in the director Karin Coonrod's interpretation of this Shakespeare play, thus making the infamous antagonist more complex than simply a victim or villain.
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The novelists include Howard Jacobson, who has done "The Merchant of Venice" (as "Shylock Is My Name"); Anne Tyler, who's done "The Taming of the Shrew" (as "Vinegar Girl"); and now Margaret Atwood, doing "The Tempest" (as "Hag-Seed").
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In between there are two slim, (relatively) straightforward memoirs about Philip Roth (The Facts and Patrimony), and two novels about a fictionalized "Philip Roth," one of which, Operation Shylock, features a Roth imposter running around Israel evangelizing for a reverse exodus.
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The long shadow of Shylock still shrouds the history of the real Venetian Jews, those who were bound to provide loans of 3 ducats or less and were forced to pay a rent higher by one-third than the Christians.
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But he greets this debasement, and more, with a degree of measured calm that suggests that Shylock has known — or fears — far worse, and must temper his reaction to suit what he knows of the world in which he lives and prospers.
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Mr. Pryce's Shylock, meanwhile, evinces little rage and thirst for vengeance — he knows better than to fall into the traps laid for him — but instead argues his case with a measured rationality that, despite its monstrous consequences, never feels tinged with unbridled malice.
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" Wigginton rarely gave interviews, but in 1964, in conversation with The Daily Mail, she adapted a line from Shakespeare, saying: "There were times when I was doing the announcing when I wanted to shout aloud like Shylock, 'Hath not woman eyes, ears, senses?
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But I much prefer the three books that came before these and propose them as his finest and truest work: "Patrimony" — a heartbreaking memoir of his father; "Operation Shylock" — witty, brilliant, complex and political; "Sabbath's Theater" — brimming with ribaldry, fury and tenderness.
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As soon as the formal legal issue shifts unexpectedly from a civil to a criminal matter—that is, to a Jew's attempt to take the life of a Venetian Christian—Shylock is no longer regarded in the eyes of the court as Antonio's equivalent.
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Shakespeare and Jews Stephen Greenblatt's essay on his Jewish family, his experiences with anti-Semitism at Yale, and Shakespeare's character Shylock, in "The Merchant of Venice," overlooks the way that Shylock's language limits his participation in Venetian society (" If You Prick Us ," July 10th & 17th).
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For Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — longtime liberal standard-bearer, recent Donald J. Trump critic — this year's answer is: Go to Venice, watch your grandson perform in a production of "The Merchant of Venice" and preside over a mock appeal of the city's most notorious resident, Shylock.
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But this supposed comedy's humorous aspects are largely handed over to Stefan Adegbola's wily, exuberant Launcelot Gobbo, who invites two members of the audience to join him onstage, embodying his debate about whether to abandon his Jewish master, Shylock, and throw his lot in with the Christians.
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The scream comes from the actress Lynda Gravatt, one of five performers portraying Shylock in the Compagnia de' Colombari's production of Shakespeare's thorny comedy of love and law, which runs through Sunday as part of Peak Performance's season of music, dance and theater works by women.
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"Operation Shylock" (218), which Mr. Roth pretended was a "confession," not a novel (though in the very last sentence he says, "This confession is false"), involved two Roths, one real and one phony, and the real one claims to have been a spy for the Mossad.
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And so, on Wednesday afternoon, in the monumental 16th-century Scuola Grande di San Rocco, beneath ceiling paintings by Tintoretto, Justice Ginsburg and four other judges, including the United States ambassador to Italy, John R. Phillips, heard arguments on behalf of Shylock and two other characters, before reaching a unanimous ruling.
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For me, "Operation Shylock" — Roth's dizzying 1993 fantasy in which Philip Roth, the author, sets out to track down an impostor "Philip Roth" who's going around Israel promoting a scheme to get Israeli Jews to return to the lands of their East European ancestors — represents the zenith of Roth's talents.
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He began to experiment with new subject matter — retelling the story of Shakespeare's Shylock in "Overtime" (1996), probing the Middle East conflict in "O Jerusalem" (2003) and crossing the ocean to set his diffident alter ego to roam (and get lost) in Japan in his poignant, autobiographical "Far East" (1999).
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But that is a modern assumption: if we had asked Shakespeare or any of his company what to think about Shylock, we would have been told that it's a great part—giving full scope to human behavior, a mirror held up to nature—but not that he's a sympathetic man.
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On the other hand, Portia — disguised as the lawyer Balthazar, arguing for the life of Antonio — seems almost sadistic when she gives her verdict in Shylock's favor, only to reverse herself at the last minute and, with cool calculation, assert that Shylock himself is guilty of trying to take the life of a Christian.
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There's a familiar script we know is coming as soon as we see headlines about another mass shooting—this time at a synagogue, by a loner festering with rage and resentment and infected with anti-Semitism that's been inflamed by right-wing attacks on George Soros and the dreaded, horned figure of Shylock the globalist financier.
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Mr. Mafham's Antonio is shackled to an iron bar, his arms splayed out and his body lifted from the ground, in a pose that obviously evokes Christ on the cross, suggesting that those who are conducting this trial are intent on drawing the comparison, turning Shylock into the stock Jew of vile stereotype, the Christ-killer.
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The opening "Emeralds" is Romantic poetic medievalism set to items by Fauré (composed as incidental music for "Pelléas and Mélisande" and "Shylock"); the central "Rubies" is a modernist jazzy frolic to Stravinsky's Capriccio for piano and orchestra; and the final "Diamonds" is classically grand to the final four movements of Tchaikovsky's five-movement third ("Polish") symphony.
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We are asked to feel for Macbeth's victims' plight; given a discursive explanation of how Shylock came to behave as he does; presented with an understanding of why a woman might seem shrewish when she is only shy; shown Gertrude and Claudius grappling with their erotic compulsion toward each other in a manner essentially sympathetic to their entrapment.
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Though the apparatus of Jacobson's novel can be exhausting, several lovely turns and switcheroos lead us to a genuinely touching scene in which the original Shylock returns to Venice and paraphrases Portia's great speech on mercy ( rachmones , in Yiddish), reclaiming it as a Jewish invention: No man can love as God loves, and it is profane of any man to try.
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True, Shakespeare creates drama in every play by setting himself a drastic problem — the fairy queen enamored of an ass, the Scottish king who must commit crimes to keep his throne — but this one and "The Merchant of Venice" (in which Shylock the Jew is punished by being made to become Christian) are the two that have become, understandably, most difficult for modern tastes.
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This month she brings her very multicultural, world-traveling version of "The Merchant of Venice" to Peak Performances at Montclair State University in Montclair, N.J. First staged in what was once the Jewish ghetto in Venice, this production from Ms. Coonrod's Compagnia de' Colombari addresses the ever-knotty problem of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, by filling the role with not one, but five, performers of varying ages, genders, nationalities and ethnicities.
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Everything in Jacobson sounds as if it should be read out loud by Alan Rickman, as when Strulovitch speaks to Shylock about his daughter's suitor: Here I've been steeling myself against the next over-principled, money-hating, ISIS -backing Judaeophobe with an MA in fine art she's going to bring back from college and she hits on someone who's probably never opened a book and certainly never heard of Noam Chomsky—a hyper possessive uneducated uber-goy from around the corner.
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