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Rebecca Gatward on The Merchant of Venice

The central character of the play, for me, is Bassanio. Shylock is only in five scenes and part of a subplot. The play starts with Bassanio’s need to go to Belmont and win Portia so he can maintain the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed. He’s an irresponsible youth, who, through the course of the play, is forced to take responsibility for his actions. There’s darkness in the centre of the play, in that, in order to go to Belmont to win Portia, he has to borrow money, and the only way that he can do that is for Antonio to borrow it from Shylock, which is dangerous. Bassanio has to take responsibility for the borrowing of that money. So The Merchant of Venice is a play about a young boy learning to become a man.

The richness of Shakespeare’s text is thrilling. It works on several levels, but the motivations underneath it are still very naturalistic. When Bassanio opens the right casket, and wins Potia, in the Globe he inevitably gets a round of applause. This is something we didn’t realise would happen in rehearsals but it fits in perfectly, because of his following speech: 'Hearing applause and universal shout…'(3.2.143). It’s as though Shakespeare wrote it just for that space, for that response.

Every contract of love or familial contract in the play involves money. When Lorenzo steals Jessica, she throws him a casket of money, and he opens that and says 'Beshrew me but I love her heartily'(2.6.52). In a sense, she is throwing over her dowry. Bassanio pursuing Portia is a wager with a high pay out, and his success also affects the financial position of Gratiano and Nerrisa. Even with Gobbo and Old Gobbo the subject their relationship revolves around is money. Old Gobbo is hoping for a pay rise for his son with the gift he brings Shylock. Every relationship has a financial dealing. Even the language of the most beautiful speech that Portia has to Bassanio is all to do with money and contracts.

The Merchant of Venice is a very Christian play. In the 'quality of mercy' speech (4.1.201), Portia is sermonising in a very Christian way to a Jewish person, without understanding that he doesn’t think in the same way. I wanted Shylock’s forced conversion not to be a violent act to be an act of love from Antonio. From a modern point of view, it’s a horrendous thing for someone to do, but I think that that’s what Shakespeare meant: an act of love. The difference between appearance and reality is an important theme of the play. Initially, Bassanio falls in love with Portia via a rendering of her image and Portia and Nerrisa disguise themselves as men. But, for me, money and love are the most important themes.

(Rebecca Gatward is the Director of the Globe’s production of The Merchant of Venice)

Giles Block on The Merchant of Venice

Prose, in Shakespeare, is different from verse. Prose is chaotic. It has got a chaotic rhythm to it: it is a surprising rhythm and we never know where the beat is going to fall. In general, in prose there are many more unstressed syllables. This means that people tend to speak faster. Prose has got a rhythm but it's not the rhythm of our heart (like the iambic beat of verse) but it is the rhythm of our heads: it's the rhythm of ideas, people being clever, and sometimes people trying to control their extreme emotions and losing a grip on sanity.

One of the most interesting scenes in The Merchant of Venice is Act 3, scene 1, is all written in prose. It contains the famous - 'hath not a Jew eyes…' (3.1.52-3) speech. One way to think of prose is that it points to something that is hidden. What is hidden here in the language is the effect of Jessica’s elopement upon Shylock; he has gone mad. 'I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear: would she were hears'd at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin' (80-82): to me, that’s the prose of madness. I don’t think Shylock thinks right at the beginning of the play: ‘I’m going to cut Antonio’s heart out’. It’s only because of what happens to Jessica that he’ll actually do it. He talks about plaguing him, torturing him and it’s only by the end of the scene that he says 'I’ll have the heart of him if he forfeit' (116-7). It’s an instinctive turning point in the play. Later, in the trial scene, he says: 'I have a daughter…' (4.1.291); he doesn't say ‘had’. His love for his daughter is still there, in the present tense. This, the most powerful thing Shylock says, in a personal sense, in the whole trial scene, concerns the loss of Jessica. We all find it hard to stomach the fact that Antonio says that Shylock has to become a Christian, but his heart, his daughter, has become a Christian already. The last act of the play is Jessica getting a gift from her father, saying that his fortune will all be hers. He’s lost the right to retain his faith, but in some way he’s been brought back to his family.

A question rarely asked is, why does Portia go and take the part of the judge in the trial? The moment that she realises the importance of relationship between Bassanio and Antonio (3.2.), she must realise that if Antonio were put to death, it would probably spell the end of their marriage as Bassanio would never forgive himself, because he’s borrowed the money from Antonio in order to woo her. This being a man’s world, the only thing is for Portia to become a man and become the judge. Portia tests the relationship further, with the comedy over the rings, and sees from Bassanio’s behaviour that, for her, there’s still a problem. So the last scene, on one level, is about Antonio giving up Bassanio. She makes him play the role, makes him say: 'I once did lend my body for his wealth, / Which but for him that had your husband's ring / Has quite miscarried. I dare be bound again' (5.1.249-54).

(Giles Block advises on text in performance at Shakespeare’s Globe)

Dominic Droomgoole on The Merchant of Venice

The Complete Works sat in the centre of my mother’s home. It was the family bible. She speaks often of her first lessons on Shakespeare. She remembers the class, the light in the room, the other pupils, Miss Brown’s tight bun. They did The Merchant of Venice, a play whose characters she found less gripping, but she was starting to fall in love with the poetry:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears.

We all need a sugar rush of sweetness to bounce our spirits up higher at different times. As a kid it’s coke from a slim glass bottle on a hot day; as a youth it’s the milky sluice of a long first kiss; a little later it’s the cooing and crooning of a popular melody; but at a certain moment only a good rush of sublime poetry will do. When your soul is starting to flex its muscles and wants to be taken for a walk, only poetry can match its pace. Slowly, through the gentle nudging of Miss Brown, my mother started to understand where Shakespeare was taking her, and how joyous the journey was going to be.

In 2003, myself and three others began a long march from Holy Trinity church, Stratford-upon-Avon, to the Globe Theatre – a distance of around 140 miles, intended to take seven days. On the third day we passed into the vast estate of Blenheim. The contrast from the openness of the ridge to the enclosure of the woodland brought relief, and a flush of that subdued, fresh magic that lives within the enclosed light of trees. One of my companions capped the feeling with some of the most delicate descriptive writing Shakespeare achieved. It comes from The Merchant of Venice. They are the same lines that woke my mother up to all the potential in Shakespeare. The artificiality of the verse, summoning beauty through confidence and charm, rather than through truth, was the perfect compliment to Blenheim.

(Dominic Dromgoole is the Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe. This is an edited extract from his book, Will and Me – How Shakespeare Took Over My Life, Penguin, 2006)

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