In Discussion

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Philip Bird (Duke of Venice), Philip Cumbus (Bassanio), Pippa Nixon (Jessica) and Professor Gordon McMullan (Kings College, University of London) give their opinions, in discussion, of the themes of MONEY, RELIGION and RELATIONSHIPS in The Merchant of Venice.

MONEY

Philip C: Bassanio is quite forward in his attempts at getting money and, when he gets it, he can live the life he wants. Money brings him to Portia. For Bassanio money can lead to something positive.

Pippa: With the Jessica-Lorenzo relationship it is when she steals her father's money that Lorenzo falls in love with her. When he opens the casket his first line is ‘Beshrew me for I love her heartily’ (2.6.52). Jessica has to buy her freedom and, in some ways, this is her dowry.

Gordon: In rehearsal, did you find any social relations in the play that weren’t dependent on money?

Philip C: I don’t think so. There are certainly relationships that have other qualities to them - I like to think that Graziano and Bassanio have been friends for life, that their love and respect for each other is not solely based on money, but living in Venice, a city of commerce, and being surrounded by money on all sides, they have become reliant on it.

Gordon: That’s the fundamental problem in the court case: the duke cannot dismiss the court case because Venice depends upon everybody who isn’t Venetian knowing that they can freely indulge in commercial activity. If the state dismisses Shylock’s court case then that threatens Venice’s profit. In the end Venice needs to make money, and everybody is subordinate to that.

Pippa: In the pre-show, as the audience are coming in - we have all of these commercial exchanges happening, other places in Europe are brought into Venice through trade, exchange and profit. Venice is the centre, the capital of commerce.

Gordon: What is interesting is that the premise of Venice at the time was non-racist. In other words, if everybody interacts commercially, then there shouldn’t be any racial issues. The notion is of capitalism producing equality through trade and making prejudices irrelevant, because all that matters is making money. In this play that is shown not to be true in Venice: there is viciousness going on precisely because of the money that can be made. Non-Venetians have to believe that they are free to trade here, and the state depends on this money-making. Antonio accepts that no one is going to throw his court case out, because if they did Venice would lose money.

Philip B: That’s something brilliant about Shakespeare: in the telling of the story, the money and the transaction has become the currency of the language.

Gordon: It is impossible to separate the money from anything else in the play. Look at the language Portia uses: 'I would be trebled twenty times myself, / A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich, / That only to stand high in your account' (3.2.153-5). It is the language of accounting not the language of love.

RELIGION

Philip C: In the court scene Antonio says to Shylock that he must 'become a Christian' (4.1.383), and there hasn’t been a single performance in which nobody has laughed at that, which is quite unsettling. A lot of the laughter from the audience in that section of the play comes out of their being uncomfortable. It’s not necessarily that the audience are finding it hilarious that this man is being forced to give up his faith; I think that a lot of the laughter comes out the audience not quite knowing how to respond to the situation.

Gordon: I find it fascinating being a groundling. There is a particular audience dynamic in the Globe. The audience want to be amused, they want to laugh. They laugh along with Salerio and Solanio taking the mickey out of Shylock, and the laughter becomes complicit in the anti-Semitism, very uncomfortably, but it’s an interesting tension that the production sets up.

Philip B: Sometimes some people are laughing and are aware of it, and other people are looking around uncomfortably. In the 'my daughter, O my ducats' scene (2.8), people do laugh.

Gordon: Some people were just laughing and not noticing that by laughing they were complicit in the anti-Semitism. Some people were half-laughing, thinking 'am I supposed to be laughing at this?'

Pippa: The line 'Who comes here? Lorenzo and his infidel' (3.2.217) gets a massive laugh. At that stage in the show everyone has got quite involved in the play, but it's that quite extraordinary to hear that.

Gordon: There’s an in-draw of breath. They’re almost saying: 'he can’t just have said that'.

Pippa: But it stops. They don’t laugh again.

Philip C: But that’s what good comedy should do: there should be an awareness in the person laughing about why they’re laughing and what’s making them do it and what they’re laughing at, and that’s what Shakespeare’s good at: not just making bawdy comedy, but bringing our attention to difficult subjects, making people think about things.

Philip B: I read a letter in a newspaper recently about the conversion of Jews to Catholicism which said that, up until the 1970s in the Latin Good Friday Mass, there was a prayer that translated roughly as: 'and we pray that the veil may be removed from the Jews’ hearts'. So it was considered normal for a Catholic to wish that Jews would convert. Now we think it an infringement on human rights to ask somebody to change their religion.

Gordon: It’s important to think about what the Elizabethan audience would have got from that. Because Jessica's conversation with Lancelot - in which he says she will be damned and she says she will be saved through her husband – is astonishingly awkward, but some people must have thought that what Antonio does is save Shylock from damnation by forcing him to convert.

Pippa: That’s certainly what Antonio thinks.

Gordon: But we also know that, to Shylock, Antonio is doing the most vicious thing he could possibly do. What Shylock demonstrates is that the Christians are even more vindictive than he is in the course of the play. You could argue that he’s won at the exact point at which Antonio forces him to be converted. And yet a contemporary audience would seen that as a positive thing for Shylock: Jessica gets saved through her husband; Shylock gets saved through the obligation to convert.

RELATIONSHIPS

Philip C: As with all the relationships in this play, Antonio and Bassanio's relationship is one which has its imperfections. It is based on a love for each other but also I think that Bassanio is fully aware of his power over Antonio. Bassanio uses Antonio’s love for him to get money, but I think Antonio is aware of it. Something ought to be said about the difference in attitudes in Venice, at that time, towards homosexuality and attitudes today. In Venice at that time the term ‘homosexual’ wasn’t used.

Gordon: The word didn’t exist until the 1870s, but of course what we would call gay relationships did, and certain kinds of close male bond were recognised and accepted. Close male relationships were perceived differently then.

Pippa: The response from the audience when Bassanio and Antonio seal their agreement with a kiss is huge.

Philip C: It’s astonishing how that can still get such a profoundly uncomfortable reaction.

Gordon: What is disturbing about the play in production now is that it can bring out both anti-Semitism and homophobia in some of the audience. It’s very uncomfortable.

Philip C: I find it odd that, in a play that deals with all these issues, one of the biggest laughs goes to a joke about the French – Solanio says: 'I reasoned with a Frenchman yesterday' (2.8.27), and there is raucous laughter, which makes me smile when you think of people talking about the awfulness of anti-Semitism, and then, through Shakespeare’s wit, find themselves howling at some joke about the French.

Philip B: Is ‘marriage’ in the play nothing more than a property transaction?

Gordon: The married couple made up a stable unit of the state and, at a certain class level, consolidated property and family finances. What was established by marriage was the relationship between husband and father. And what is absent from The Merchant of Venice is…

Pippa: Fathers!

Gordon: Portia’s father is dead, and what happens in the Jessica-Lorenzo relationship is the necessary absence of the father, because he wouldn’t allow the union.

Pippa: Belmont is interesting because although it is run by Portia, the presence of her father looms over her. At the end of the play the three couples are together, but they have all run away from Venice to try and make their relationships work in Belmont.

Gordon: But, I don’t think there is any difference between the two places. Jessica's conversation with Lorenzo in Belmont, towards the end of the play, is about people who have lost faith in each other. There’s nothing very romantic about it.

Pippa: They’re all star-crossed lovers. There are cracks in their relationships, and in many of the relationships in the play.

Philip C: Bassanio’s dream of what Belmont is like is different to the actual Belmont.

Gordon: It is a romantic, fantasy realm where treasure can be discovered; essentially it’s all about money.

Philip C: Absolutely. And it becomes clear that it is not as perfect as they had hoped; it’s got its flaws.

Gordon: There was a decision about the set in your production: you open the discovery space and there is a pastoral scene when you’re in Belmont, so the audience views this as a totally different place from commercial Venice.

Philip C: To begin with you have this paradise of Belmont juxtaposed with Venice, and those worlds collide with great viciousness in the trial scene.

Gordon: Venice and Belmont are as different, or not, as Christian and Jew, as tragedy and comedy, and that is what gives the play its tension: they are neither separate, nor are they identical.

Pippa: I think, for Jessica, Venice represents a place where she is confined. She can’t go out into the wide range of the city because there are curfews and so, for her, falling in love with a Christian is a way of getting out.

Gordon: That’s interesting, I hadn’t thought of that. The shift of location is more important for Jessica than anybody because for the first time you become on an equal footing in Belmont, which you couldn’t possibly have done back in Venice.

Pippa: Exactly, but also that equal footing and that freedom come at a price.

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