MERCHANT OF VENICE

"if doing was as easy as knowing what doing good ,
chapels would have been churches and hovels
humble palaces of princes"
(William Shakespeare "Merchant of Venice ")

 

 

 

 

The "Merchant of Venice", one of the most famous works by William Shakespeare, set in the well-known lagoon town, is perhaps one of his most discussed and controversial creations, and because of that, he was accused of anti-Semitism by many people. At a first reading, in fact, the protagonist of the story, the Jewish Shylock may just have the appearance of an evil man, who conceives the perverted idea of lending some money to a Christian and exacting a pound of his flesh as compensation, demanding what is due to him with merciless and inhuman harshness. Yet a second reading allows us to understand as Shakespeare did not deal with the usual anti-Semitic stereotypes at all, because the harsh attitude of Shylock is explained by the wrongs he endured and which have hardened his heart, or rather, we can say that the final part of the work contains a real invective against the cruelty of which the Christian world is guilty towards the Jewish people.

And it is no coincidence that just Venice is used as the background for the story. Venice is the town of merchants, the symbol of a concrete world based on power and trading, and just there the word ‘Ghetto’ was coined, as there the most ancient ghetto in history was built. As a matter of fact, since ancient times the town has allowed the Jewish to work peacefully as usurers (in which town where lots of money circulates are the banks for loans and for developing business not necessary?) and as doctors, and so it tolerated their presence even if at a certain time in the evening they were locked up, by means of an enormous padlock, in the area where they lived, namely the site of an ancient foundry for lead, just the ‘jet’, from which the word "ghetto" derives

 

 

The extraordinary plot of the ‘bloody’ bond between the Jewish usurer Shylock, driven by an everlasting thirst for revenge caused by the insults he endured because of his greed and ‘outcast condition’, and the Christian merchant Antonio, the ‘new’ man of a middle-class society based on business, full of noble feelings but afflicted with and endless existential melancholy and maybe, who knows, with a secret love for Bassanio, develops in Venice, while Belmonte, representing a mythical universe plunged in a tale of chivalry atmosphere between a fairy-tale and reality, is the setting for the story of the marriage of Portia, the sorceress-queen, a middle course between a languishing Ginevra and a cruel Turandot, who is obliged by his father’s will to marry the ‘suitor’ who will pass the test of the three caskets. Only the nobleman who will choose the correct casket, among the gold one, the silver one and the lead one, will have the opportunity of marrying the beautiful Portia.

The ring of conjunction between these two opposed universes bound to join together and explode, is Bassanio, a penniless nobleman who is, at the same time, the cause of the treacherous contract binding Antonio’s flesh to Shylock’s deep hatred and Portia’s ‘predestined’ spouse:he will use his excessive and ambiguous ascendancy over Antonio to make him lend him the money necessary to look like a noble prince, as to win Portia’s hand in marriage.

Beside these main plots, some parallel stories develop, such as the story of Shylock’s daughter Jessica, who elopes from her father’s house, disowning him and robbing his possessions, with her Christian lover Lorenzo; the story of Launcelot Gobbo, the hideous and busybody character who does not hesitate to barter the property of the old Jewish master with the ‘mercy’ of the new Christian master Antonio; the story of the garrulous and idle Graziano who, arrived in Belmonte with his friend, will marry the lady-in-waiting Nerissa, playfully overturning the symbolic romanticism of the union between Porzia and Bassanio.

 

Then avoiding to stop before appearances by superficially labelling the work as anti-Semitic, we cannot help being deeply fascinated by the ‘Merchant’ just for his deep ambiguity, the extremely delicate balance of such masterpiece hovering between intolerance and racism, ethics and condemnation of false appearances. After a deeper reading it appears as a difficult and mysterious text, leading to a genuine adventure with no way out and it places us before the complex range of human contradictions, as well as men’s incapability of building a world suitable for their keen aspirations.

 

The concrete world of Venice is opposed to the mythical world of Belmonte, but the problems of the men and women who live there are the same ones: the love melancholy, the value of money which is not sufficient for enriching life, the problem of choosing one’s fate, the desperate search of an impossible steadiness and an indefinite happiness.

 

Both the rich Venice and the dreamy Belmonte become traps with set courses that though the apparent happy end, are full of omens towards an unavoidable collapse. And as such parallel universes become interwoven, mirroring each other, - still in the clash of different situations and atmospheres -, any alleged certainty begins to deteriorate and create another probable content, while the double or elusive nature of all the characters reveals itself. The ‘heroes’ reveal their own weaknesses and the evil ones can explain the reasons of their hatred, which always derives from mutual violence, in turns inflicted and endured.

 

All the characters – young lovers and garrulous noblemen, Christian merchants and Jewish usurers, beautiful heiresses and hideous servants – trouble about their own survival and happiness, making use of a fierce determination to defend their ideal kind of life as the only achievable one, treading tolerance and blindly relying on the power of money.

 

The world seeming so balanced to us, clearly divided into the good and the evil, the guilty and the innocent, the elect and the outcast, displays its cracks and reveals itself as fragile, precarious, relative, just like the human condition itself.

 

We suppose of having understood but realize that reality can be another one. It is clear, thus, why Shakespeare starts his work with the wonderful remark by Antonio ‘ …this melancholy confounds me… and I do no longer know who I am’: at that time as nowadays, the deepest root of abundance and well-being escapes us, as we keep paying attention to see to a survival we would like to be everlasting, and we find ourselves involved in fighting with hells of war, overpowering and emptiness we ourselves have created. Only by giving up the temptation of stopping life by acquiring some weak certainties, we can comprehend the deepest meaning of the work: a great tenderness for the wild but still disarmed struggle for existence which joins all the people, just this one -beyond any race, wealth or natural talent- deeply needs mutual tolerance and respect which still all the characters of the drama do not seem to accept.

 

The director Michael Radford, the cheered author of ‘The postman’ as well as of the more original and undervalued ‘Dancing at the BlueIguana’, decides to undertake the cinematographic reading of what may be considered as the most complex and ambiguous (as for the range of registers and themes) play by Shakespeare, resulting in a transposition which, can be defined as absolutely literal as far as the text, the language and the narrative structure of the work are concerned and you can observe the real Venice.