The Merchant of Venice: what happened next

Then there’s Shylock and The Merchant of Venice. And here, I think, things get a lot more complicated. Shylock wants to cut a pound of flesh out of the body of a Christian. Very Prioress’s Tale. He’s obsessed with his “stones” and wears a “Jewish gaberdine”; like a denizen of Dorian Gray’s grimy streets.

He is not, though, just a caricature. Like other tragic heroes, such as Hamlet or Macbeth, Shylock gets to stand in the centre of the stage, explaining how he sees things. Antonio has thwarted him, laughed at him, spat into his beard. Why? “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” Shylock says to the audience, I’m just like you. I want revenge just as you would want it if these things had happened to you.

The play has thematic business that makes a straightforwardly antisemitic reading difficult. There’s a curiously frothy subplot about Portia’s suitors having to choose between caskets — where the moral is that a good person can look beyond the surface of things. A funny moral to have in the play if we’re supposed to just accept at face value that the Jew with the pointy beard is evil. There’s a subplot in which rings represent fidelity, virtue, commitment. Two husbands are given rings by their wives and then faithlessly give them away. Shylock has his ring stolen: “It was my turquoise; I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor.” He wouldn’t have given it away for all the world, he cries. So there’s the Jew; a committed family man, more loyal than the play’s Christian husbands.

Shylock is not alone in the play. He lives in the ghetto, which Shakespeare would have known was notorious around Europe; Venice was the first city in the world to have the brilliant wheeze of gathering all its Jews into a single area, the old foundry or “ghetto”, and locking them up at night (Venice is also “celebrating” an anniversary in 2016, as it’s 500 years since the ghetto was founded). And Shylock has a daughter, Jessica.

Jessica is an intriguing character. She falls in love with a Christian, Lorenzo. She leaves Shylock. It’s her leaving, I think, that destroys him. The point when he decides to enforce his bargain with Antonio with all the disaster that inevitably spells for him is the moment after Jessica leaves. He tells us so. She runs away and he declares: “I say, my daughter is my flesh and blood,” moments before affirming that he will seek his pound of flesh from Antonio. He wants his flesh and blood back, in whatever nightmarish Freudian way he can get it. This is a complex portrait of a family, a father-daughter relationship every bit as compelling as Lear and Cordelia, Polonius and Ophelia or Leonato and Hero: three other Shakespearean fathers who dealt badly with perceived lack of faithfulness in their daughters.

I have been fascinated by Jessica since I first found her in The Merchant of Venice. She’s funny. She and Lorenzo talk about themselves in the third person; she wryly compares their love to a variety of tragic figures whose romances ended terribly. He suggests she could be Dido, killing herself for love of Aeneas. She replies she’s more like Medea — who takes bloody vengeance on her unfaithful husband. Jessica’s last line in the play is: “I am never merry when I hear sweet music”; intriguing, melancholy, perhaps realistic about her chances of happiness in the undeniably antisemitic world of Renaissance Venice.

For years I have wanted to write a play with Jessica as the star. In The Wolf in the Water, we rejoin Jessica 20 years after The Merchant of Venice. Shylock is long dead, and Jessica and Lorenzo are wealthy and important Venetian nobles. However, when a Papal legate is murdered and the Jews of the ghetto are accused of the crime, Jessica finds herself drawn back in to the Jewish world she thought she had escaped.

What I can say of The Merchant of Venice is that it gives me a character to play with, in Jessica, who is subtle and interesting. Is the play antisemitic? Yes. Is it only antisemitic? No.

There’s a way of talking about antisemitism — and about all sorts of prejudice — that misses subtlety. As we can see in The Merchant of Venice, you can be antisemitic while also deeply accepting the humanity of Jewish people. You don’t have to hate all Jews all the time to hold some views and say some things that are somewhat antisemitic.

There’s also the matter of context. When The Merchant of Venice was written, Jews had been expelled from England for more than 300 years. Shakespeare had imbibed some of the antisemitic ideas of his time but he was pushing against them, straining at their limits, when he created his complex, fascinating Jewish characters. He was ahead of his time, but Ken Livingstone, with his recent remarks, is behind ours.

We swim in a cultural world that is still full of nasty ideas about different kinds of people. We take those ideas in without realising. Sometimes they just pop out of our mouths; we didn’t mean it to happen, it just happened. The only thing to do then, really, is to think hard about what happened, apologise, try to learn to do better in future.

The work of rooting out one’s internalised prejudice takes patience, time, thoughtful conversation, the ability to reflect on oneself and try to change. Not many of us have Shakespeare’s commitment — extraordinary for his time — to finding the humanity in every character. None of us are so pure that we will never make mistakes and need to apologise. And that, I’m afraid, includes Ken.
The Wolf in the Water will be broadcast on Radio 3 on May 22 at 9pm