On The Arts Fuse: Maiden Phoenix' THE WINTER'S TALE

On The Arts Fuse I review Maiden Phoenix Theatre Company's all-female outdoor production of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale that closes on August 30:

While I do note that there are at points where the production is uneven (some of this reflects more on the difficulty in staging any of Shakespeare's "problem plays" than it does on the company), it has many aspects that make it worth seeing, including how director Sarah Gazdowicz makes use of the landscape of Somerville's Nathan Tufts Park:

Sarah Gazdowicz bridges the shift in genre by shifting the playing space during the intermission. The tragedy is staged at the peak of Nathan Tufts Park by the historic colonial-era Powder House that gives the neighboring square its name. The comedy transpires by the cyclopean-style masonry that separates the upper and lower parts of the park. The stone Powder House is a wonderful backdrop, but the steeply sloping foot path and the large stones that challenge the leg muscles of kids and adults make for a more inspired setting. Gazdowicz’s tableau work is far more intriguing in the latter two acts. Her actors are sometimes half-hidden in crevasses, perched on irregular ledges, or have to adapt their stance to the incline — particularly during the festivities that are part of the sheep sheering ceremony.

And I am particularly excited by Juliet Bowler's performance as the paranoid and later penitent King Leontes:

Juliet Bowler is a powerful Leontes. Her vocal precision heightens the paranoia of the King in his madness; his carefully constructed walls of words are impregnable to any voice of reason. But she also does a fine job of portraying Leontes’ grief when he finally realizes what he has done, as well as well as his inability to forgive himself, even in the end, when others have forgiven at least some of his sins.

Read the entire review on The Arts Fuse!

On The Arts Fuse: Actors' Shakespeare Project's "Henry VI, Part 2"

On The Arts Fuse, I review Actors' Shakespeare Project's production of Henry VI, Part 2, which despite being the origin of the oft-quoted line, "The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers", is rarely performed. This presentation, currently running at The Modern Theatre at Suffolk University through June 7, is masterfully directed by Tina Packer. I was particularly taken with the character of Jack Cade, the villain of Act IV, played by Allyn Burrows:

However far he may depart from his ‘real life’ inspiration, Cade (Burrows) is unprecedented amongst Shakespeare’s characters: a truly lethal clown – through much of Act IV he and his followers ravage England, lopping off the heads of one nobleman after another to great comic effect. He even has his own convoluted claim on the crown, reciting his questionable pedigree — a parody of York’s own claims — even as he strikes the figure of a lord of misrule, espousing an incoherent philosophy that is alternately a parody of anarchy and communism (Shakespeare’s distrusted the hoi polloi as a political class). Behind the mayhem (York’s and Cade’s) is a thirst for absolute dictatorship – the famous line about killing all the lawyers (an ambiguous rallying cry for both tyrant and anarchist) comes from one of Cade’s followers. The historical Cade might have been less of a clown, but the theatrical one comes off as an unacknowledged forerunner of Alfred Jarry’s famous Père Ubu (as well as Mister Punch and Fredrico García Lorca’s Don Cristóbal) He is also a prescient parody of the political extremists and tyrants who have shaped the past century for the worse. Burrows’ portrayal of an ignorant but bloodthirsty imp of perversity is a rip-roaring joy.

I also suggest that perhaps the current pop-culture zeitgeist makes the time ripe for this particular play to be revived more often:

Given the current pop-culture climate in which audiences thrill to stories of cynical realpolitik handily trumping the virtues and idealism of public service (as in the case of popular series such as House of Cards, and Game of Thrones) – the zeitgeist is ripe for Henry VI, Part 2 to be revived – and perhaps, with the taste for long form storytelling so prevalent, Parts 1 & 3 may deserve some love as well. Nonetheless, Part 2 is sufficiently self-contained, beginning with the marriage of Henry and Margaret and ending with the First Battle of St. Albans and start of the Wars of the Roses. Familiarity with the oft-staged Henry V and Richard III provide more than adequate background on what happened before and what happens next.

Read the full review on The Arts Fuse!

On The Arts Fuse: I Review Bridge Repertory Theater's "Julius Caesar"

On The Arts Fuse, I reviewed Bridge Repertory Theater of Boston's production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. While I admire the visual style and the sonic rawness of this interpretation, I feel much of the story and political subtext is buried in the breakneck pacing.

Julius Caesar has long been the best known of Shakespeare’s Roman plays: its plot and the historical events that inspired it are common knowledge, and Marc Antony’s funeral oration has long been used as an object lesson in the rhetorical use of irony and sarcasm. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus are beginning to generate some more productions and interest, but for the time being, Caesar still reigns.

The Bridge Repertory Theater of Boston is currently offering a stripped-down, modern dress production that clocks in at about 100 minutes without an intermission. Director Olivia D’Ambrosio is due some praise for helming a visually distinctive minimalist presentation, but her breakneck ‘fast and furious” pacing ends up leaving the Bard’s poetry and the subtleties of the realpolitik narrative in the dust.

I was entertained by the roughly twenty-minute set of improv by Fine Line Comedy that followed in which they lampooned the play and production.

Read the full review on The Arts Fuse!

Richard II's Federalist Tea Party

(Part of a series in which I make up for not updating my blog recently.)

As in previous years, I attended the annual "Shakespeare & The Law" panel co-sponsored by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company and a local chapter of the Federalist Society, an association of politically conservative and libertarian judges and attorneys.

One of the featured panelists, David G. Tuereck, a Suffolk University economics professor with connections to the Tea Party movement, chose to read Richard II as an allegory of the current political situation and only days before Inauguration Day, stopped just short of advocating an armed coup d'etat against President Obama.

And then things got weird, as I recount at The Clyde Fitch Report:

Tuerck missed the most obvious reason why Thomas Jefferson never read Karl Marx or John Manyard Keynes: they hadn’t published anything of significance yet.

Of course, this little problem of chronology was the least of Tuerck’s problems. Like a great many associated with the Tea Party (and, for that matter, other cults), Tuerck is drunk on symbols. Without delving into his scholarly writings in economics, his public rhetoric indicates someone more interested in iconography and allegory than in evidence and hypotheses; free-association rather than reason and causality.

This is, of course, how lawyers seek to sway a jury if they think they can get away with it.

I previously wrote about the Federalist Society's and Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's takes on Henry V and The Merchant of Venice.

"Shylock Sings The Blues" Review and Interview

In The Arts Fuse, I review Shylock Sings the Blues a new musical based on Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice with lyrics by David Sokol, music by Dennis Willmott, and recorded by the Venetians.

...It is only natural that some artists would draw on the cultural mystique of The Merchant of Venice as source material for their own work. Burlington, Vermont-based lyricist and illustrator David Sokol (who did all the album art) and composer Dennis Willmott replace Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter and prose with blues, rock, and country songs in a concept-album entitled Shylock Sings the Blues. The story has been shifted from the Venetian Republic of the sixteenth century to 1950s Venice, New Jersey...

I also interview David Sokol (who as well as being a lyricist, is an illustrator who provided the cover art):

Sokol: I chose the blues number one because I am most familiar with it. Also the blues is the music of an oppressed people. I would love the stage presentation of Shylock Sings the Blues to have a black Shylock. I have just been turned down by a local radio station who refuses to play any songs from the album because “it is too dark! “How can blues be “too dark”? And there is humor in the musical—Jessica can be comedic and Launcelot is the truth telling fool.

The depth of anti-Semitism is intertwined with the darkest of human misery—and the Devil represents the latter. The fundamental basis of anti-Semitism is the belief that Jews don’t just act evil but that they embody evil itself. Possibly the lineage of European theater, morality plays, etc. and their depiction and teaching of good and bad through the use of devils and angels contributed to the Devil’s visits to the play. Also, in my quest to be entertaining and not pedantic, the Devil is a universal and simple dramatic tool.

Read more in The Arts Fuse!

Nothing But Trouble: Philistinism in the UK, Part II

Over at the Clyde Fitch Report, part II of my post-mortem on the on the attempt of British anti-Israeli activists to prevent the Israeli State Theatre, Habima, from performing at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London as part of the 37 play Globe to Globe Festival:

Given the Globe’s steadfastness that that it would not bow to any cultural boycott, the March 29th letter was doomed to have little effect; only gaining headlines due to the celebrity status of many of the signatories: film star Emma Thompson’s name appeared in much of the subsequent news coverage, as did that of Mark Rylance, who was former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe. It was little surprise to see the name of playwright Caryl Churchill, whose Seven Jewish Children has been widely criticized as anti-Semitic by such figures as Booker Award winning novelist, Howard Jacobson, attorney and literary scholar Anthony Julius and others due to its invocation of the blood libel, gross distortion of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and crude ethnic stereotypes of Jews. (Notably, The Guardian, which makes Seven Jewish Children available on its website has published numerous apologiae effectively making the paper the play’s corporate sponsor.)

With the March 29th letter, the story had gone from activists attempting to silence artists not because of the content of the work but for their identity, to that of artists attempting to silence other artists due to their identity: a particularly dangerous position for artists to take. Once an artist advocates the boycotting of another artist’s work because of their nation of origin or for taking a gig in a specific theatre, they have both given sanction to hooliganism seen on May 28th and 29th and sanction similar retaliation towards their own work.

Read more at the Clyde Fitch Report!

Nothing But Trouble: Philistinism in the UK, Part I

Photograph by Richard Millet. Used with permission.

I have a new column at the newly relaunched Clyde Fitch Report entitled "Nothing But Trouble". The CFR bills itself as "the nexus of arts and politics" and "Nothing But Trouble" will be focussing on just that nexus.

My column will open with a two-part series entitled "Philistinism in the UK" which is a follow-up and expansion upon an earlier piece, "Artistic Boycotts in the UK" and focusses on the attempt of British anti-Israeli activists to prevent the Israeli State Theatre, Habima, from performing at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London as part of the 37 play Globe to Globe Festival:

Outside the theatre, one anti-Israel protestor was photographed wearing what any commedia dell’arte enthusiast might see as a Pantalone mask but to most would be seen as the stereotype of the grotesquely long-nosed Jew; somehow it seems unlikely that he was making commentary on Shakespeare’s indebtedness to the Italian comedy.

Though the most vocal protestors were kept out, Habima’s performances were repeatedly disrupted by anti-Israeli activists, who were photographed waving Palestinian flags, and unfurling banners with anti-Israeli slogans, only to be escorted out by security. Reports describe a group standing silently with their mouths covered by either tape or adhesive bandages apparently in protest of the “censorship” of the more disruptive activists. Several sources that during the trial scene in Act IV, a protester shouted “hath not a Palestinian eyes?” echoing signs seen outside the theatre as well as demonstrating a lack of knowledge of the original text (Shylock’s famous “Hath not a Jew eyes…” speech is from Act III, Scene 3.)

Read more at the The Clyde Fitch Report!

Artistic Boycotts In The UK: Habima at Shakespeare's Globe

In recent months, part of my "beat" as a contributor to The Arts Fuse has been reporting on Israeli Stage, a Boston-based company devoted to presenting Israeli plays to an American audience, writing commentary on the work on Israeli playwrights Savyon Liebrecht and Motti Lerner as well as conducting an interview with Israeli Stage's Producing Artistic Director, Guy Ben-Aharon. Despite the the fact that I am new to the subject, this recent work has placed me in a position where I now have to pay greater attention to new developments.

On Thursday, March 29, 2012, The Guardian published an open letter signed by 37 British artists associated with film and theatre protesting Shakespeare's Globe's decision to invite the Israeli state theatre Habima (who were mentioned in the Ben-Aharon interview) to participate in an international Shakespeare festival in May. The text of the letter is as follows:

We notice with dismay and regret that Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London has invited Israel's National Theatre, Habima, to perform The Merchant of Venice in its Globe to Globe festival this coming May. The general manager of Habima has declared the invitation "an honourable accomplishment for the State of Israel". But Habima has a shameful record of involvement with illegal Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territory. Last year, two large Israeli settlements established "halls of culture" and asked Israeli theatre groups to perform there. A number of Israeli theatre professionals – actors, stage directors, playwrights – declared they would not take part.

Habima, however, accepted the invitation with alacrity, and promised the Israeli minister of culture that it would "deal with any problems hindering such performances". By inviting Habima, Shakespeare's Globe is undermining the conscientious Israeli actors and playwrights who have refused to break international law.

The Globe says it wants to "include" the Hebrew language in its festival – we have no problem with that. "Inclusiveness" is a core value of arts policy in Britain, and we support it. But by inviting Habima, the Globe is associating itself with policies of exclusion practised by the Israeli state and endorsed by its national theatre company. We ask the Globe to withdraw the invitation so that the festival is not complicit with human rights violations and the illegal colonisation of occupied land.

The March 29 letter is a restatement of the position taken in undated letter which (based on the date of the Ynet article that cites it) was published sometime prior to January 2, 2012. Boycott From Within, the organization that issued the letter, appears to be primarily made up of Israeli citizens who support the Boycott, Devestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that was initiated by a coalition of Palestinian NGOs in early 2005, several months after the Ariel Sharon-led Israeli government announced plans to withdraw the Gaza settlements, a plan that was accomplished in August of 2005, quite without the assistance of BDS. Indeed, it becomes hard to identify any concrete accomplishment of the BDS movement beyond providing a rallying cry for anti-Israel activists in the west; they certainly have not advanced the goal of a two-state solution, nor can they claim responsibility for any of the small victories of recent years, like Israel's dismantling of checkpoints within the West Bank or the Palestinian Authority's own crack down on militant groups in areas which it controls.

The Boycott From Within document, unlike the March 29 letter, specifically names the two West Bank settlements:

Ariel and Kiryat Arba, like most settlements, are surrounded by walls and fences, closely guarded by soldiers and their own armed security personnel. A theatrical performance in a settlement is by definition a performance to an exclusively Israeli audience, with Palestinians living even in the nearest village being physically excluded from any chance of attending.

[...]on this issue the management of Habima has taken a position which is remote from any kind of social engagement. Claiming to be "non-political", the management has reiterated its decision to perform in West Bank settlements, "like everywhere else". Moreover, the management specifically promised Limor Livnat, Minister of Culture in the Netanyahu Government, to "deal with any problems hindering such performances", i.e. to pressure recalcitrant actors into taking part in them, even against the dictates of their conscience. And it must be pointed out that for several months, Habima has indeed sent out its actors to hold theatrical performances in West Bank settlements, on a regular basis.

The first point that should be made, of course, is that while Ariel and Kiryat Arba are controversial, they are not, strictly speaking, illegal. While there are illegal settlements, of course, such as Migron (which the Israeli Supreme Court recently ordered the Israeli government to demolish), under the 1993 Oslo Accords, the status of settlements like Ariel and Kiryat Arba are pending final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. They might end up as part of a land-swap between the two states, they might be evacuated, or they might become an example of Jewish residents within the future Palestinian state much as there are Arab citizens in Israel (though that possibility is less likely, given recent statements by Mahmoud Abbas and his government.) So whether or not the settlements' establishment was legal (there are differing interpretations on whether the Fourth Geneva Convention applies) the Oslo Accords essentially table it as a legal issue, turning it into a political issue.

The question about the security measures around Ariel and Kiryat Arba are very simple: they exist under a different jurisdiction than the surrounding areas; the authorities on each side of the fences having not finalized a peace treaty. Despite efforts by the Palestinian Authority to crack down on militant groups operating in its own jurisdiction, recent examples such as the Itamar attack of March 11, 2011 in which five members of the Fogel family were murdered in their beds by terrorists, or an August 31, 2010 killing of four settlers in a drive-by shooting outside of Kiryat Arba make these security measures understandable, even if they result in audiences not being drawn from geographically adjacent areas. It should also be noted that under the Oslo Accords, Israeli citizens are essentially required to stay on their side of the fence as well (one of the ways by which Israeli courts determine if a settlement is legal or illegal.) This separation is thusly one that has been agreed upon by the governments representing the two peoples: whether these governments' leaders proceed wisely and courageously or foolishly and fearfully, the status of these settlements made the transition from legal matter to political matter 19 years ago.

Of course, both the March 29th letter and its undated antecedent read politics into Habima's performances in Ariel and Kiryat Arba. According to Haaretz Ilan Ronen, Habima's artistic director, responded thusly:

The attempt to portray Habima as a mouthpiece of this or that policy wrongs the creators, the actors, and anyone who is a part of our endeavor.

Performing in all of Israel is not the initiative of Habima, as the letter presents, by is a result of state law, to which all public cultural institutes are subject.

More recently, in The Guardian, Ronen further explained Habima's position:

It's a disgrace. We don't see ourselves as collaborators with the Israeli government over its West Bank policy. We don't remember artists boycotting other artists.

[...]It is important to emphasise, we express our political views in many of our projects. But like other theatre companies and dance companies in Israel, we are state-financed, and financially supported to perform all over the country. This is the law. We have no choice. We have to go, otherwise there is no financial support.

[...]Artists should create bridges where there is conflict; the issue of Israel and the Palestinians is an area in which European dialogue can be very helpful in creating a better atmosphere. To boycott us prevents any artistic dialogue.

Habima falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture and Sport which can mandate that Habima perform anywhere under Israeli jurisdiction much as the Israel Postal Company is mandated to deliver the mail. Minister of Culture and Sport Limor Livnat is a Likud member and generally considered to be rather sympathetic to the Israeli settler movement, and since her post in the Netayahu cabinet is a fairly minor one, there is little she can do for her political constituency but mandate that companies that receive state funding perform in West Bank settlements. Perhaps Habima would not be so mandated were the Ministry controlled by a more left-leaning or centrist party. Theatre artists who are not affiliated with the state are free to be politically engaged and choose to participate in a boycott or politically engaged and oppose a boycott. However, Ronen, according to the April 7th article in The Guardian, states that Habima-affiliated artists who had moral or political objections to performing in the settlements were able to opt-out without fear of retribution. The charge that Habima is somehow violating a principle of being "non-political" accepting its mandate while simultaneously allowing individual artists to opt out of this mandate is nonsensical.

Months before the March 29th letter, Shakespeare's Globe had already issued a response to Boycott From Within's letter on their Facebook page on January 6th, which also anticipates the position of March 29th letter:

[...W]e deliberated long and hard about the issue of inclusion and exclusion of companies – programming such a comprehensive festival requires a huge amount of such consideration, in order to ensure that it is truly an international event. We came to the conclusion that active exclusion was a profoundly problematic stance to take – because the question of which nations deserve inclusion or exclusion is necessarily subjective. Where does one start in such an endeavour? Clearly for you with Israel, but for many others, it would be with a host of different states. And more pertinently, where does one stop?

Rather, we wished to celebrate the huge variety of languages and cultures which have encountered, learnt from and extended the reach of Shakespeare’s work, and as such we were determined to reflect as wide and as comprehensive a variety of languages as possible. In creating our programme, we have tried our best to balance that universality with the infinite variety shown in Shakespeare’s works. Our commitment to universality is reflected in the fact that the Ashtar Theatre from Ramallah, who have done more than any other theatre group to highlight the nature of life in the Gaza Strip with their Gaza Monologues, are performing Shakespeare’s Richard II at Globe to Globe.

[...]Habima are the most well-known and respected Hebrew-language theatre company in the world, and are a natural choice to any programmer wishing to host a dramatic production in Hebrew. They are committed, publicly, to providing an ongoing arena for sensible dialogue between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians.

[...I]t remains our contention, and we think a suitable one for a Shakespearean theatre, that people meeting and talking and exchanging views is preferable to isolation and silence. For that reason, and for the others above, we remain convinced that it is right to work with all the companies we have chosen for the Globe to Globe Festival.

Several of the companies participating in the festival hail from countries undergoing protracted conflict or having recently emerged from conflict: there are companies not just from Israel and Palestine, but South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The People's Republic of China has a notorious human rights record, and is well known for its suppression of both the Tibetan and Uyghur peoples and political dissidents in general, yet the same figures urging a boycott of Habima are silent on the National Theatre of China's presentation of Richard III.

It is also apparent from even the most cursory investigation of the English language version of the Habima webiste, that the company not only employs and trains both Jewish and Arab artists, but also to performs to both Jewish and Arab audiences, which is as much part of their mandate to perform "in all of Israel" as performing in the settlements.

The great irony, of course, is that both Boycott From Within and the 37 British artists are protesting Habima's performance The Merchant of Venice, perhaps the single literary work that most defined the manner in which Jews are portrayed in British literature. Indeed, Habima's plan to perform The Merchant of Venice was received criticism in Israel, including from people involved with the theatre. Many have noted that the character of Shylock is the template from which the vulgar anti-Semitic stereotypes of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, T.S. Eliot's Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar, and Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children are cut (Churchill, not surprisingly, signed March 29th letter calling for the Globe to revoke Habima's invitation.) Ronen defended his choice to direct The Merchant of Venice this past December:

Dozens of the best Jewish actors, including Antony Sher and Dustin Hoffman, alongside other acting legends, have played the role of Shylock knowing that the play actually deals with the persecution of the Jew and xenophobia.

While it has become the fashion over the past few decades to represent The Merchant of Venice as an anti-anti-Semitic narrative, and see Shakespeare as a critic of prejudice (as the case with the acclaimed Dark Tresnjak-helmed production that had F. Murray Abraham in the role of Shylock) The anti-anti-Semitic reading frequently hinges on ignoring major themes and recurring motifs in the play, such as the theological grounding in medieval and early-modern anti-Judaic polemics, or the thematic linkage between Jews and the Devil that were part of that era's folklore as much as the bond of the pound of flesh. While I am certainly not privy to Ronen's take on the play, I would suggest that to make a truly anti-anti-Semitic statement with The Merchant of Venice one should deliberately horrify the audience by unapologetically playing up every anti-Semitic trope in the play, especially the ones normally ignored in modern productions.

What would banning Habima from performing accomplish when even Israeli governments that have been less friendly with the settler movement than the current one have not been able to reach a mutually agreeable peace with their Palestinian counterparts? Ultimately, the 37 theatre artists who put their names to the March 29th letter to The Guardian are not merely artists urging a boycott of other artists but British artists attacking Jewish artists interpreting the representation of Jews in English literature, which only underlines the anti-Semitic subtext of the "inclusiveness" that the signatories claim to support.

"It’s the playwright being tyrannical"

The New York Times recently posted a story about Paula Vogel's "playwriting boot camp." I am not sufficiently familiar with Vogel's work to have an informed opinion on either her playwriting or pedagogy; what stuck me most were the opinions expressed by one of the participants:

[Vogel] encouraged her writers, in their scripts, to consider leaving half a page blank to underscore the importance of wordlessness to directors and actors.

Such a heavy authorial hand drew heated complaints, however, from Nicholas Gray, a young theater director who had been invited by an associate. Mr. Gray railed against lengthy stage directions, saying he crossed them out in scripts before he would begin rehearsals with his actors.

“It’s the playwright being tyrannical over all of the other artists who will ever work on the play,” Mr. Gray said, adding that even “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” would not escape his pen.

His conviction drew out Ms. Vogel’s steely side for a moment — “that idea causes me a great deal of pain,” she said of his editing — before she regained her professorial posture

This passage, which was brought to my attention by Art Hennessey (who notes that both Vogel and Gray misunderstand Eugene O'Neil's authorial intent) was particularly striking-- in particular, Nicholas Gray's notion that he could so cavalierly edit a playwright's work simply because he feels that the script is "tyrannical."

The standard Dramatists' Guild contract prevents a producing company from altering the script without explicit written permission from the playwright or, if deceased, the playwright's estate (public domain works are treated differently.) However, alongside issues of copyright and contracts there is also the matter of artistic integrity and the moral rights of artists over their own work: assuming that the playwright has sufficiently mastered the craft that one sees the script as worthy of production, one should also assume that the playwright wrote those stage directions for a good reason. If the script specifies costumes, props, manipulations, specific actions, offers background information, it is to add to the story. They may relate, in an unspoken manner, to the causal relations that bring the narrative to its end. They might symbolically relate to the themes of the play. They may signify the relationships amongst the characters. They may provide some meaningful context that could prove useful to an inquisitive cast or production staff member.

There is a dramaturgical fashion to say that today's theatre is about "collaboration" (when has it not been?) and that playwrights who incorporate detailed stage directions or notes on settings are working against collaboration. Certainly there can sometimes be a temptation to contain more specificity than the story demands, meaning that the playwright is directing from the written page. However, can one argue that Tennessee Williams was "being tyrannical" he specified props or even the music and sound design for A Streetcar Named Desire? Would Not I be as powerful a play had directors exercised the freedom to ignore Samuel Beckett's stage directions?
Where Gray sees tyranny, a stronger, more confident director sees a challenge. Earlier this season, I saw Whistler in the Dark's production of Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet/Cahoot's Macbeth. During an exchange following Thomas Garvey's review. Stoppard's stage directions are copiously detailed and are a necessary part of the action of the play. However, since Whistler has such a distinctive style and it had been years since I read the script, I mistakenly thought the physical actions of the final minutes had been crafted by director Meg Taintor as opposed to the her staging of Stoppard's directions because once staged it looked like her work. Similarly, when I saw Imaginary Beasts' production of Eugene Ionesco's Macbett the production was in the company's distinctive style, despite Director Matthew Wood mentioning in conversation after the show that his contract with the Ionosco estate strictly forbade him from making cuts to the text. Imagine that: being true to one's own artistic voice while following the script to the letter!

When directors do exercise the freedom to cut, reshuffle, or rearrange plays that are in the public domain (and thus no longer protected by the Guild contract or a playwright or playwright's estate) the play in question is sufficiently familiar that audience members are able to judge for themselves whether the production honored the authorial intent or whether it even matters. For instance, while visiting Washington, D.C. I caught Washington Shakespeare Company Avant Bard's The Mistorical Hystery of Henry (I)V. This production not only compressed Henry IV, Part 1 & 2 into a single two hour and thirty-five minute show (bookended with short excerpts from Richard II and Henry V but staged the scenes of political intrigue and battle as a burlesque show performed by the harlots at Mistress Quickly's Boar's Head Inn. The concept was fairly radical in that it explored the relationship between power and power's parodists in an era where political satire could get the satirists killed once those in power are no longer amused by their caricatures. Director Tom Malin's adaptation was not a reaction against "the playwright being tyrannical" but a reimagining that both stood on its own and gained additional levels of meaning because much of the audience was familiar with the more conventional stagings of the play and so recognized the figures being lampooned by the harlots of Eastcheap. It was easy to imagine that the goings on of the Mistorical Hystery were occuring in the same world as the events in a straight reading of Henry IV 1 & 2. The point is that while Malin had no legal obstacles preventing him from making radical cuts to the original, he also had a strong enough concept to make something new, and the intellectual honesty to not pretend that this adaptation was the same play first performed in the late sixteenth century.

In short, if Mr. Gray feels that he is, as a director, under the yoke of tyrannical playwrights he has a few options:

1.) Stick to plays in the public domain or recent work by playwrights who are not willing to defend the artistic integrity of their scripts should they be notified of alterations.

2.) Find a playwright who has a strong voice yet also has philosophical reasons to allow others to radically rework his or her plays, as is the case with Charles Mee.

3.) Write and direct his own plays.

4.) Switch to film, where directors usually get to decide upon the final cut.

5.) Simply find a playwright who is easily bullied by a director. After all no playwright who cares about the integrity of their work is going to let Nicholas Gray direct their plays after reading his comments in the New York Times.

The Federalist Society and the Trial of Shylock

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011, I attended the eleventh annual staged readingand symposium on Shakespeare and the Law jointly presented by the Boston Chapter of the Federalist Society and the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. I did not know what to expect : last year's reading and discussion of Henry V had been little more than alove-fest for John Yoo and his legal arguments on behalf of George W. Bush's more controversial war-time decisions that inadvertently exposed Professor Yoo's intellectual poverty. However, since the play under consideration was The Merchant of Venice, a play that has been in my thoughts in recent years, I felt the need to attend. By coincidence, the Cutler Majestic Theatre, which hosted the event was the very same room in which I had seen Darko Tresnjak's Theatre for a New Audience production of Merchant of Venice

As with the previous year's presentation, the affair was a highly truncated reading by non-actors (in this case a cast made entirely of judges) that clocked in at about an hour, followed by a panel discussion on the legal themes. It was a pleasant surprise that this year featured as more sober, less partisan discussion than last.

Daniel J. Kelly, Chairman for the Boston Chapter of the Federalist Society, in his role as moderator, established the themes under consideration as "contract, equity, justice, and judging" as such, the scenes that were featured in the reading were those that focussed on the three types of contracts that appear in the play and their related trials: infamous bond of the pound of flesh between Shylock and Antonio and Act IV's trial scene, the will that stipulates the "obtayning of Portia by the choyƒe of three cheƒts" and the oaths regarding the wedding rings and comic early morning trial in Belmont. Helen M. Whall, professor of English at College of the Holy Cross, opened the after-play discussion, offering some of the scholarly insights that were lacking in last year's far more partisan presentation.

I am unable to account for all of the speakers and their insights but I will sketch out some notable comments as well as some general points of consensus.

Whall noted that prior to the incorporation of the first professional theatre company in England in 1576, the primary theatrical experience had been that of morality plays (a genre satirized in Launcelot Gobbo's monologue cut in this version) and thus Shakespeare's audience were accustomed to having such concepts of law, mercy, and justice allegorically dramatized on the stage. Most importantly, Whall underlined that from the Christian perspective of the 1590s, the forced conversion of Shylock from Judaism to Christianity that so upsets the sensibilities of those of us who live in countries that guarantee religious liberty would be seen as a favor (indeed, an act of "mercy.") As this theological perspective is central to my thoughts regarding the play, I will return to it later.

Judge Andrew Grainger of the Massachusetts Appeals Court, who had played the role of Shylock in the reading, was very quick to point out that despite the literary worth of The Merchant of Venice that not only was there a problem of overlaying our 21st century legal sensibilities upon a 16th century play that there were also limitations to how a literary and dramatic presentation can be seen as representing the operations of the law. This was a theme that several of the judges brought up (in fact, Gabrielle Wolohojia, also of the Appeals Court, who played Portia, expressed a strong distaste for Portia's legal practice): Portia's courtroom behavior would at the very least allow Shylock the right of appeal in a modern, western court. Besides impersonating a judge and entering the court under false credentials (not mentioned by the panelists) she has a number of conflicts of interest: the defaulted loan was taken on her husband's behalf, combined with her money being offered in settlement presents her with both a personal and financial stake in the outcome of the trial. Portia also, on a whim, changes roles from judge, to defense attorney, to prosecutor and back, while simultaneously turning what is essentially a civil trial of Antonio into a criminal trial of Shylock.

Daniel Kelly would point out that Portia reads all sorts of conditions into the bond that were not already in the bond in such a way that undercuts the rule of law (indeed, it is precisely by her reading in of conditions that she flips the trial of Antonio into a trial of Shylock.) Of course, several of the Judges present pointed out that whether Shylock was willing to accept a settlement or not, the conditions of his bond (the forfeit of the pound of flesh) were legally absurd and "void as against public policy"-- i.e. the contract would be dismissed because it required an illegal act for its fulfillment. Relying on Jean Favier's history, Gold & Spices: The Rice of Commerce In the Middle Ages it appears that courts did have the power to dismiss bonds of usury if it was determined that the contract placed too onerous a burden upon the debtor (such as something that would be otherwise illegal)-- in which case, the usurer might be subject to a small fine (but never one so harsh to keep the usurer from returning to the business) so despite even Antonio's claims that

The duke cannot deny the course of law:
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of the state,
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations…

(Act III, Scene 3, 26-31)

--the "course of law" did then, as it does now, provide an escape from the bond. It is precisely this principle of "void as against public policy" that allowed my parents to purchase the house in which I grew up despite a deed specifically barring "Jews and Negroes" from residing within; such restrictive covenants had been rendered unenforceable by Shelley v. Kraemmer (1948) even if the deeds continue to exist.

The point being that while Portia demands Shylock be merciful, rather than doing to merciful thing which would be voiding the bond (and perhaps returning Shylock's stolen property), she threatens Shylock with death.

We do see that Portia is quite willing to manipulate the law to further her own agenda not just in the Venetian court (where she is called in a judge, not as an advocate) but in regard to the trial of the three caskets: she is willing to play by the rules, but she also actively schemes to ensure that the suitor that pleases her choose rightly and the suitor that does not choose wrongly:

Therefore, for fear of the worst, I pray thee, set a
deep glass of rhenish wine on the contrary casket,
for if the devil be within and that temptation
without, I know he will choose it. I will do any
thing, Nerissa, ere I'll be married to a sponge.

(Act I, Scene 2, 91-95)

Or in this song to Bassanio:

Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart, or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?

(Act III, Scene 2, 63-65) [Emphases mine own; they all rhyme with "lead" as in casket.]

• • •

This of course, does beg the question as to what causes Portia to threaten Shylock's life, humiliate him, and force his conversion when there was a legal means of voiding the cruelest provisions of the bond and compelling a settlement by which Shylock would be paid the capital, as well as the secondary question as to what made this a pleasing resolution to an Elizabethan audience. First of all, we must follow Grainger's warning not to impose our 21st century sensibilities upon this 16th century play. Whall was correct to note that the forced conversion that is so offensive to 21st century American sensibilities, was, to the at least nominally Christian audience of the 1590s, an act of mercy. Not in the sense that he only had to change his house of worship to avoid the death penalty, but (as I have argued elsewhere) Christian theological positions with regards to Judaism.

As I have noted in my essayregarding the Theatre for a New Audience production, Darko Tresnjak did an excellent job of bringing The Merchant of Venice into the 21st century, and used the play to show how antisemitism can continue to thrive in our age, but in doing so, he lost sight of the anti-Judaism of the 1590s and how that informs both the language and ideology of the play and failed to explain why Jew-hatred is so atavistic: it is rooted not in simple doctrinal misunderstanding, but in folklore and in Christianity itself.

Until Shylock insists on collecting his pound of flesh, he commits no act of villainy. All crimes are committed by Antonio (who is proud to own up to kicking and spitting upon Shylock) and his gang of Bassanio, Lorenzo, Salerio, and Solanio who rob Shylock's house after Antonio lures him away from home. Why does Shylock demand a pound of flesh? When asked, Shylock can only answer:

You'll ask me why I rather choose to have
a weight of carrion flesh, than to receive
three thousand ducats: I'll not answer that!
But say it is my humour, --is it answer'd?

Act IV, Scene 1, 40-43)

The answer is that it is simply what Jews do in European literature. The tale of the Merchant of Florence, Bindo Scali, from Ser Giovani Fiorentino's Il Pecorone (Composed in 1378 though published in 1554), also has a Jewish money lender who demands a pound of flesh, as does the titular Jew of The Ballad of Gernutus. Indeed the story appears throughout European folklore. While storyteller, theatre artist, and folklorist, Diane Edgecomb has informed me that she has come across older versions of this story in Kurdish folklore, in which the money lender is a Christian, it should be noted that the "pound of flesh" dovetails with the blood libel. In short, while it takes an injustice to motivate Shylock towards revenge, the particularly grotesque nature of his vengeance conforms to European prejudices of how Jews behave.

The sentence is also grotesque by Venetian standards. While other Catholic nations allowed the the Universal Inquisition free rein, The Republic of Venice granted Marranos, Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity and their descendants who continued to practice some form of Judaism in secret, the right to revert to Judaism without persecution by the Inquisition (see either Cecil Roth's 1932 classic A History of the Marranos or Jane S. Gerber's 1993 The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience.) In other parts of the Catholic world, both in Europe and New World colonies, these Marranos were subject to imprisonment, torture, and execution. Forced conversions may have been the norm elsewhere in Europe; but not in the Serene Republic.

Leaving aside Portia's afore mentioned ethical lapses, it's a theological imperative that results in the sentence against Shylock. The law that is operative in Shakespeare's courtroom, isn't the law of the Republic of Venice, but scripture and its Christian interpretation. Furthermore, when Shylock defends his lending of money at interest as a profession, he does not reference a major trade empire's needs to acquire liquid assets with which to invest in a new venture or deal with an unforeseen setback (something a merchant prince like Antonio would understand) but with reference to scripture, using the story of Jacob tending the flocks of Laban to justify the practice. The question is not economic necessity but the status of Jewish scripture in Christian Europe.

(As a side note: given that loaning at interest a normal business practice in Europe at the time, especially in northern Italy, the fact that Antonio would be seeking a loan from the despised Shylock implies either a desire to set Shylock up or that Antonio has bad credit with all the Christian money lenders.)

As I have argued previously (most recently in my notes on Tresnjak's production) the issue of mercy in Act IV is a theological proposition of the superiority of Christianity over Judaisim: Shylock, the Jew, may have the Law, but he only receives God's mercy by becoming Christian; conversely, the Venetian and Belmontean characters all commit sins: they are accessories to theft, they break oaths, impersonate court officials, yet are recipients of God's mercy on account of being Christians.

This has long been, in the eyes of Christian theologians, the dividing line between Judaism and Christianity: Judaism is presented as a religion of strict laws while Christianity is the religion of mercy (again note Whall's point that Shakespeare's audience was familiar with the allegorical morality plays as well as the sermons of any number of Christian sects, both Catholic and Protestant and as such Mercy and Law could be real characters to them) so not only have we Shylock defending his profession through reference to scripture, but in the courtroom scene he proclaims:

My deeds upon my head! I crave the law,
The penalty and forfeit of my bond.

(Act IV, Scene 1, 202-203)

Note that this adherence to "the law" is in the same breath as a line that echoes the "blood curse" from Matthew, 27: 24-25 "His blood be on us, and our children" -- in short, the very passage that Christians had used to place the blame of Jesus' crucifixion upon Jews of subsequent generations.

"Law" in The Merchant of Venice is not merely civil law or criminal statutes, but also scripture. Consequently, this dichotomy between mercy and the law is also one of Christianity and Judaism as imagined by Christianity. Christianity has long had the ambivalent position of both insisting that Jewish scripture, the Tanakh was the proof that the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth had fulfilled messianic prophecy, and thus validated the new religion over the old, while also having to contend with the continuing existence of Judaism in the Christian era. The question became one of "if Jews know the prophecies, how could they deny Jesus?"

This question came to a head for Christian theologians during the late middle ages, when in 1230s, the Inquisition, whose mission had up until then to regulate the beliefs of Catholics, intervened in a theological dispute between rabbis over Moses Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed. While in 1240 Pope Gregory ordered the mendicant orders of the Dominicans and the Franciscans to seize and burn any copies of the Talmud and other Jewish texts a containing doctrinal error. Rabbis were summoned by the Inquisition. This continued under subsequent Popes. The belief was held that the Talmud and other interpretive commentaries had not only strengthened Jewish resolve to reject Christianity, but that exposure to Jewish texts would result in Christian heresy. In short, the Inquisition, with papal backing, decided that it had the authority to determine orthodox versus heterodox Judaism using the weapons of imprisonment, torture, and execution.[Note: I am greatly indebted to Jeremy Cohen's The Friars and The Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (1982) regarding the role of the Dominican and Franciscan orders in the persecution of Jews and the formulation of an anti-Judaic ideology.]

By the time of the Barcelona Disputation of 1263, Dominican Friar Pablo Christiani (a Jewish convert once named Saul) had gone so far as to argue that the Talmud reveals that Jewish sages were not merely misguided but that they believed Jesus to be both God and Messiah while also refusing to reject Judaism and adopt Christian rites and beliefs out of sheer wickedness. Rabbi Nachmanides' (who had been forced to defend Judaism in a court whose rules were determined by the Inquisition) response ultimately was that Christiani was presenting a heretical interpretation of the Talmud as well as misrepresenting the canonical status of Talmudic texts. The dispute was largely an aporeia, in part because Nachmanides was barred from presenting certain counter arguments at the very outset of the disputation. Both sides claimed victory, but ultimately the disputation failed to convert Spanish Jewry.

So by the time of Franciscan Hebraist Nicholas of Lyra (c. 1270-1349) composed his Quodlibetum de adventu Christi, he had actually argued that the sole reason the Hebrew text of the Tanakh provides enough ambiguity for Jews to deny that it validates and foretells Jesus' ministry, and his status as both God and Messiah, was that rabbis had deliberately altered the text to deny the Christian truth:

[The Jews] here pervert the true text and deny the truth just as they deny the divinity of Christ. This might best be done from ancient Bibles, which were not corrupted in this and other passages in which there is mention of the divinity of Christ, if they [these Bibles] can be had. In this way our predecessors used to argue against them [the Jews] over this and similar passages. Yet although I myself have not seen any Bible of the Jews which has not been corrupted. I have faithfully heard from those worthy by reason of their lives, consciences, and knowledge, who swear on oath that they have seen it thus in ancient Bibles

[Translation found in the aforementioned work by Jeremy Cohen.]

In short, after reading the Tanakh in Hebrew, Nicholas argued that since it did not actually state what his Church wanted it to say that the authentic Hebrew scripture had been suppressed, and that all extant copies (excepting those that he knew of through rumor) had been deliberately altered.

Despite England having recently become a Protestant country, these medieval Catholic views regarding Jews continued to be influential (Nicholas of Lyra's work was very influential on Martin Luther's 1543 polemic On The Jews and Their Lies) indeed it offers historical context to Antonio's response to Shylock's interpretation of the story of Shylock and Laban:

Mark you this Bassanio,
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,--
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

(Act I, Scene 3, 92-97)

I have more than once noted the usage of diabolic rhetoric regarding both Shylock and Jews in general throughout The Merchant of Venice but what is notable here and perhaps chaffing to the 21st century audience is that to Shakespeare's English audiences, the Bible is not a shared text common to both Christian and Jew, but a source of division: at once both holy word in the mouths of Christians and diabolic law in the mouths of Jews and simultaneously affirming both the Christian notion that that same law is superceded by Christianity.

So while I am inclined to view Shakespeare, the author, as a humanist, sensitive to the irony and ambiguity of human experience, the courtroom shenanigans of Portia, like the folkloric and literary sources he relies upon, effectively provide a theological trump to his humanism.

A Scene From A Rehearsal

TOUCHSTONE:

Good even, good Master What-ye-call't;

[TOUCHSTONE and JAQUES exchange bows.]

How do you, sir?

[They bow again]

You are very well met.

[And again.]

Goddild you for your last company.

[And again.]

I just split my pants. I am very glad to see you.

[They bow a final time.]

Even a toy in hand here, sir. Nay; pray be cover'd.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act III, Scene 3

Teatro delle Maschere does the Shakespeare Slam

On the afternoon of April 30th, Teatro delle Maschere will be performing a commedia dell'arte inspired version of a scene from As You Like It at the Shakespeare Slam, part of a day's worth of festivities presented and curated by Actors' Shakespeare Project and Orfeo Group but featuring contributions by a number of area theatre companies. It all starts with a parade at noon! (a full schedule is listed on ASP's website.

This time around, Teatro delle Maschere will feature Rachel Kurnos as Audrey, James Van Looy as Jaques, and myself as Touchstone, (all reimagined as commedia characters) with a surprise guest as Sir Oliver Martext! (It will be the first time James and I have worked together since Cosmic Spelunker Theater.)

The Shakespeare Slam will begin at 3pm at Redline at 59 JFK Street in Harvard Square, Cambridge!

Here's a scene from last year's Shakespeare Slam. And yes, there I am amongst the crowd of Juliets:

Notes on Darko Tresnjak's "Merchant of Venice"

Last week I attended the a matinée performance of the touring production of The Merchant of Venice. The production, starring F. Murray Abraham as Shylock, was a revival of director Darko Tresnjak's 2007 mountings with Theatre for a New Audience and the Royal Shakespeare Company. I make no secret of my obsession with this play (in fact, I'm so obsessed that I'm writing "response play") and so there was little chance that I would have missed the performance, but in this case I attended as part of a group outing sponsored by Prism, an initiative of the New Center for Arts And Culture which was offering a post show talk led by Worcester Polytechnic Institute professor, Michelle Ephraim (whose Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage sounds fascinating.)

What follows is not a review of this particular production. Thomas Garvey at The Hub Review has already written one with which I largely agree, and Rick On Theatre recently reposted a review of the 2007 production. Rather, these thoughts are a response to both the performance and the post-show discussion.

Many argue that of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet is the greatest work of literature in the Western canon; I contend that while The Merchant of Venice may not be as fine a dramatic poem, it may very well be the most important; for the text is a disturbing portrait of European civilization; In many ways bridging the difference between medieval antisemitism based in theology and superstitions about Jews and the modern antisemitism that presents Jews as people, yet a dangerous people: it underlines that antisemitism is "the oldest hate" and intrinsic to Western civilization. By way of contrast: the literature of the Holocaust, while more horrific, allows Europeans a way of shifting the blame, pretending that horrors of antisemitism was solely the work of the Germans and a few collaborators, or just handful of extremists who had taken over a handful of governments. However, a text like The Merchant of Venice and its continued popularity over the centuries attests to the deep rootedness of antisemitism in European civilization.

This is not to say that Shakespeare is an anti-Semite, or that the play is anti-Semitic propaganda (though it has often been used that way); Shakespeare is too subtle, too prone to irony, and too curious about the sheer diversity of humanity to be so easily dismissed in that manner. However the play is the product of a culture that was anti-Semitic, and and is structured in such a way that it affirms the views of the anti-Semite: the irony only becomes visible to the anti-anti-Semite. This is precisely what makes the play disturbing to modern audiences: we want Shakespeare, the English language's greatest dramatist and poet, to be enlightened and liberal as we are, so we try to find the modern, post-Enlightenment liberal in the irony, but as much as we want the play to be an unambiguous condemnation of bigotry and affirmation of pluralism, the ironies simply will not allow it.

How does Tresnjak address these problems? Tresnjak, a naturalized American, is an ethnic Serb, born in the former Yugoslavia,
He is explicit that he reads The Merchant of Venice in light of his homeland's decent into savage tribalism:

Four years ago, when the first incarnation of this production took place, I thought a great deal about my childhood in Yugoslavia. For a long time, the relative economic prosperity had kept the social injustices and ethnic tensions under wraps. All that changed when the economy disintergrated. I remember my mother saying: "People are starting to turn on each other."

While some, such as Garvey, argue that the co-dependence of love and money is the central theme (see our friendly debate of a year ago for instance) while the more visceral theme of antisemitism is secondary; Tresnjak, like so many of us, responds more to the themes of antisemitism, and the co-mingling of tribe and money.

To this end, Tresnjak, sets his Merchant of Venice on Wall Street of "the near future": the Rialto is the trading floor; Portia is the sole heiress of an old money family. This setting does justice to the theme of love and money. So while Tresnjak makes clear that "the oldest hatred" still lurks in the religiously tolerant cosmopolitan America of lower Manhattan he glosses over the particularly Christian character of the antisemitism. Tresnjak's merchants and traders are nominal Christians who hate Shylock because he is a business rival; that he happens to be an Orthodox Jew just gives them an additional excuse to hate him more. In Shakespeare's Venice (which is a mirror to London of his era) these same characters hate Shylock not just because he is a Jew, but because it is their Christian duty to hate Jews.

This has long been my argument (sharpened, I admit by debate): The play affirms the victory of Christian theology over humanism. Shylock might love more sincerely than any character in the play: unlike either Bassanio or Gratiano he would never willingly give up his wife's engagement ring; in his first appearance, despite past experiences, he is willing to forgive all Antonio's past insults for a future in which both might be friends; he implicitly trusts his daughter, even if she sees him as humorless and oppressive. It is Shylock's heart that is most vulnerable to being broken. It is only when his daughter betrays him, his wife's ring is stolen and traded for a frivolity, his rivals arrange to rob his home under the pretense of a business dinner, does he truly lust for murder.

Though Shylock's "hath a Jew not eyes..." speech is so often seen as a statement of Shakespeare's humanism, it is also a preamble to Shylock's call for revenge, which affirms the Christian prejudice that Judaism is a religion of law without mercy while Christianity is the religion of mercy. So while Shylock loves more, and loves more sincerely, and is even willing to set aside old quarrels and love the gentile as a friend, he is unforgiven by the Christian God so long as he remains a Jew. Conversely, the Venetian and Belmontean characters may be insincere in their oaths, superficial in their love, and give their prejudices free rein, they are forgiven by nature of being Christian-- as such, Shylock's conversion, an unjust humiliation to a modern audience, was a happy ending for the Elizabethan audience ensuring the play kept true to the genre of comedy, much as with Duke Frederick's renunciation of his throne at the end of As You Like It.

In keeping with the theme of antisemitism, Tresnjak's casting of Jacob Ming-Trent as Launcelot Gobbo (he was played by Kenajuan Bentley in the 2007 production) is intriguing, as a black actor in the role (a courier in this 21st century setting) invokes the specter of anti-Semitic rhetoric in the African American community, however, it also necessitates the cutting of this exchange, a response to Launcelot's complaint that converting Jessica to Christianity raises the price of pork:

LORENZO: I shall answer that better to the commonwealth than you can the getting up of the Negro's belly. The moor is with child by you, Launcelot.

LAUNCELOT: It is much that the Moor should be more than reason; but if she be less than an honest woman, she is indeeed more than I took her for. (Act III, Scene 5, 27-32)

Professor Ephraim noted in the post-show talk that essentially Lorenzo is saying "while I can make a Jew a Christian like myself, you can't make your baby white like yourself." Consequently, Launcelot's speech about in which he says:

Here's a small trifle of wives! Alas, fifteen wives is nothing. Eleven widows and nine maids is a simple coming-in for one man. (Act II, Scene 2, 125-127)

Which is partly a parody of the Biblical patriarch Jacob that begins with Launcelot's deception of his blind father Old Gobbo earlier in the scene is also cut. (As a clown, I also make no secret of my affection for the Gobbi, father and son.) Though, to be fair, I've yet to see a production staged where Old Gobbo isn't cut.

The 21st century setting of Tresnjak's Merchant, also obscures another aspect of historical antisemitism: the invocation of the Devil. Repeatedly, Antonio, Launcelot, Solanio, routinely compare Shylock (and Jews in general) to the Devil, if not stating that Shylock and Jews are themselves the Devil or at least intimately involved with the Devil. In 21st century New York: this is merely an insult; but in England of the 1590s, the Devil would have been a real thing to much of Shakespeare's audience. While this belief was not official Church doctrine, Joshua Trachtenberg's The Devil and the Jews well documents the widespread folklore by which the medieval and early modern Christian imagination linked Judaism with Satanism (a theme that I've given much consideration.)

In short, Tresnjak Merchant does succeed to showing that antisemitism continues to exist, while at the same time glossing over those elements of the text that show how deeply rooted antisemitism is in Western civilization, leaving the genealogy of "the oldest hatred" obscure. Thus a dramaturgical puzzle: how can theatre be simultaneously a mirror up to today while also being an archeological dig into the history that made today possible?

Mark Twain and Censoring the "N-Word"

As many are already aware NewSouth, a Montgomery, Alabama based publisher, is releasing a new edition of Mark Tawin's Huckleberry Finn in which the "n-word" has been replaced with the less racially charged term, "slave." The NewSouth edition features an introduction by Auburn University professor, Alan Gribben:

Gribben became determined to offer an alternative for grade school classrooms and "general readers" that would allow them to appreciate and enjoy all the book has to offer. "For a single word to form a barrier, it seems such an unnecessary state of affairs," he said.

Gribben has no illusions about the new edition's potential for controversy. "I'm hoping that people will welcome this new option, but I suspect that textual purists will be horrified," he said. "Already, one professor told me that he is very disappointed that I was involved in this." Indeed, Twain scholar Thomas Wortham, at UCLA, compared Gribben to Thomas Bowdler (who published expurgated versions of Shakespeare for family reading), telling PW that "a book like Professor Gribben has imagined doesn't challenge children [and their teachers] to ask, ‘Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?' "

Is this really about the offensiveness of the "n-word" or is this about making white southerners less squeamish about their history? (I do not have an answer, but having grown up south of the Mason-Dixon Line, I am very familiar with the disingenuous claims some southerners make about the causes of the Civil War.)

The whole point of Twain's use of the "n-word" was to portray how racism corrupted every element of southern life: even the likable protagonist and narrator, Huck, who befriends a runaway slave, uses the word. It is integral to the novel. People should be horrified by the racism of 19th century America. Hiding its ugliness hides both how far America has come as a nation, as well as hiding the ugliness of those who wish to pull America back to its past.

How does this refusal to look squarely at the role the word had in America's racist history make sense in an era where the "n-word" is so prevalent in pop-culture?

I am not an African-American. I do not have a visceral relationship with the "n-word." My opposition to censoring it, however, is no mere exercise in academic libertarianism. I am a Jew, and I am very conscious that there there is a large body of works important works in literature, theology, philosophy, history, and drama in which some of the most libelous things are said about my people. Keeping these texts available, and teaching them in context is how we grasp just how deep-seated and widespread antisemitism really is in western civilization. For instance, no matter how often nice liberal do-gooders try to pretend that Shakespeare had liberal attitudes towards Jews, we need to confront just how many times his heroes compare Shylock to the Devil (which I have lampooned in my own Arlecchino Am Ravenous):

The devil [Shylock] can cite Scripture for his purpose,-
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
a goodly apple rotten at the heart."

(Merchant of VeniceAct I, Scene iii 93-97)

...I should stay with the Jew my master, who (God bless the mark) is a kind of devil; and to run away from the Jew I should be ruled by the fiend, who (saving your reverence) is the devil himself: certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnation...

(Act II, Scene ii 22-26)

Here comes another of the tribe,-- a third cannot be match'd, unless the devil himself turn Jew.

((Act III, Scene i 70-71)

Of course, this is not the complete listing of anti-Semitic slurs in The Merchant of Venice. I don't want these slurs censored. In fact, I want them taught in their full ugliness. This talk of the devil is not a mere figure of speech. In late 16th century, Christians were taught in folklore, popular literature, songs, and sermons to associate Jews with the devil, Judaism with Satan worship, and Jewish messianic hopes with the imminent coming of the Antichrist (see Joshua Trachtenberg's The Devil And the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism.) This was the audience to whom Shakespeare was catering.

To engage in further self-promotion, there's a passage in my own play, Total War in which two of the characters discuss this very whitewashing of history, and how it destroys the present context, and in this case, enable a fictitious Holocaust denier named Hadley:

JONAH: The standard western civilization textbook credits the Jews for monotheism, The Bible, rejecting Jesus, and being murdered by the Nazis nineteen centuries later.

ANDREA: But you’re sort of a minority in western civilization.

JONAH: What you call the Holocaust—the Shoah—is the culmination of that civilization, and yet every page that could have offered context has been torn out: leaving the genocide incomprehensible. Imagine each of Shakespeare’s plays with Acts II, III, and IV excised. Nineteen centuries ripped from the textbook. That Western civilization denies responsibility makes Hadley’s mission all the easier.

We should not pretend that Shakespeare's attitudes towards Jews were liberal, nor should we pretend that in the era that Mark Twain wrote about was a time where southern whites had liberal ideas about the skin-color of the people they enslaved. Twain understood the viciousness of the word and wanted to portray it and the society it represented. Wortham is correct to ask: ‘Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?' but how can we ask that reading a bowdlerized edition?

Henry V meets John Yoo for Fun and Torture

[N.B.Thomas Garvey's account of the same event is at The Hub Review.]

"What," you might ask me, "would bring you of all people to a Federalist Society function?" What if I told you that the function was co-sponsored by Commonwealth Shakespeare Company that it was a staged-reading of Henry V followed by a panel discussion entitled "Shakespeare's Henry V And The Law And War" featuring former White House Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General, John Yoo who is generally credited with authoring the memos that are now seen as laying the legal groundwork for the Bush administration's use of torture?

The Federalist Society is an association founded by conservative and libertarian lawyers and judges associated with the Reagan administration. Their rallying cry is "original intent" (or as Yoo would tellingly joke in the panel discussion, "Our original intent." A quick look at the list of participants made it very clear that the evening's agenda would likely be using Shakespeare's play to validate the Bush administration's wartime record.

Of course, when Commonwealth Shakespeare Company director Steven Maler last staged Henry V it was in 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The framing narration was set in the London tube during the Battle of Britain, when the underground doubled as a public bomb shelter for the people of London seeking refuge from German bombs and rocket attacks:

The narrator was a glamourous woman in green who tells the story of King Harry's victory in Agincourt to reassure a little boy who fled underground while still in his pajamas that Britain and its allies will ultimately emerge victorious over the Germans:

So given the time, when many Americans were still reeling from the September 11 attacks, and political consensus had not yet been rattled by the morass that emerged in Iraq, the allegory that director Steven Maler was presenting was clear: King Harry's multinational army (which is presented as including English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish) were standing in for the Allied forces who fought the Axis powers during World War II, who in turn, were standing in for the multinational North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces who were deploying against al-Qaeda and their Taliban supporters in Afghanistan. Never mind that Harry's claim on France was probably as dubious as Germany's claim on the Sudatenland, Silesia, Alsace-Lorraine, and other parts of Europe that were incorporated into Großdeutschland. That's the problem with allegories: they start to break down once one extends them too far.

It was probably the most brilliant piece of political propaganda I had seen on stage. That this is not a criticism: Henry V, like all of Shakespeare's histories, contain elements of propaganda. This was just the most effective use I had seen of those elements. Contrarily, Actors' Shakespeare Project more intimate 2008 production which had been staged after pubic dissatisfaction with the Iraq war was widespread, gave greater emphasis on the hard lives of the soldiers than on Henry's heroic status (though it was also the most effective performance of the courtship of Henry and Katherine I've seen-- but maybe that's just because Molly Schreiber rocks. Disclosure: I frequently usher for ASP.)

"How did you like the play, Mister Thal?" The text was dramatically cut to only a little more than an hour, but that was just as well as Thomas Garvey noted lawyers don't make very good actors. They were mostly adequate in the chorus but lacked the ability to present characters or hint at subtext, something most actors seem to be able to do even when reading cold. Former Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey was actually somewhat amusing as Princess Katherine (she had played the role before.) Senior Vice President of Raytheon and former Associate Attorney General (2001-2002) seemed to be cast as King Henry largely due to his physical resemblance to George W. Bush: As we will see, the George and Henry comparisons would never end, though they seemed pretty much limited to the idea of a ne'er-do-well son of a political dynasty ascending to power despite most observers' low expectations and then starting a war. Oh yes, did I mention the dubious causae belli? Actually, none of the panelists made any of explicit comparisons, they only encouraged me to free-associate.

In his remarks, Bernard Dobski of Assumption College noted that Henry rejected Christian just war theory in his formulation of his causae belli as well as in many of his wartime actions (though he left out that he received approval from the Church to make unprovoked war) and made some non-argument that Henry was upholding the dignity of the law even as he was acknowledging the "incompleteness" of the law. Dobski forgot that in the play, the Church appears to have abandoned just war theory as well.

Michael Avery, in his role as the panel's token left-winger, suggested that Shakespeare should write a play called George II about a monarch who claims the power of the unitary executive, that no treaty or domestic law puts limitations on a president's war powers while making hypothetical claims of weapons of mass destruction, with Colin Powell in the role of the hero. David Hare already wrote that play: it's called Stuff Happens. Avery then pointedly addressed John Yoo by noting that when one wars upon the Constitution one wars upon the country. This an added extraordinary level of irony to Andrew Card's earlier fantasia of George W. Bush thinking about his Presidential Oath of Office on September 11, 2001 after he told Bush that the country was under attack:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Republicans have problems with irony.

Yoo had apparently also never heard of David Hare and suggested a sequel entitled Obama I in which George II's successor loses all of his predecessor's gains (by contrast, Andrew Card would prove to be more charitable, applauding President Obama's intellect and ability to make decisions based on intelligence reports that, as president, he receives on a daily basis). Before I go into the details of John Yoo's arguments, let me note how disappointed I was with his performance. I had been expecting him to have a coherent legal theory, but instead he seemed to be relying the idea that we in the audience was not paying close attention, he also seemed not to have understood the play and generally had problems distinguishing between a 16th century dramatization of 15th century politics and 21st century political reality. Card had similar problems but, he's an apparatchik and not an academic.

Yoo rather anachronistically appeared to view Harry's seeking Church permission to wage war on France as George Bush's moral authority to wage war over and against any objections from the international community. Yoo seemed to miss that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely do not make any moral claims, but rather support Henry's belligerance out of their own political interests, and furthermore: the Church they represent was the equivalent of the international community. Yoo will continue to talk of morality above the law as justification for Henry and George's decisions to flaunt both jus ad bellum and jus in bello in the interest of political expediency. He expanded on this by pointing out the inability of the international community today embodied by the United Nations to represent a universal morality when many of the nations are dictatorships. Instead of insisting that the international community be held to higher standards Yoo took the sophistic position of moral nihilism. Despite Henry's threats to the citizens of Harfleur, Yoo continues to claim Henry fights on behalf of morality:

If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?
(III.iii 33-43)

Moral nihilism goes beyond the realm of simple amoralism in that it makes continual reference to the language of morality, i.e. Yoo's call for a morality that is above the amoral standards of the international community while endorsing the claim that no moral standard, not even the moral standards of the United States as embodied in U.S. laws, should bind the President and even argues on behalf of specific actions that arguably have no practical purpose: like torturing children. I would be tempted to call John Yoo the "Noam Chomsky of the right" in light of Chomsky's own morally nihilistic apologetics for genocide, terrorism, and genocide denial, except that Chomsky is really little more than a self-aggrandizing cult-leader, and John Yoo is a moral nihilist with political influence.

[Doug Cassel asked]"If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?"

"No treaty," replied John Yoo.

Of course, in the interests of the "civility" that the Federalist Society maintains for its panel discussions, the act of crushing children's testicles wasn't discussed, while the sadomasochistic techniques seen at Abu-Ghraib were only alluded to and waterboarding, whose use by the Spanish Inquisition was widely condemned by 16th century English writers (Shakespeare's contemporaries) as barbaric, was only mentioned in passing.

Card and Yoo were clearly focussed on a defense on the Bush administration's wartime record. Both of them using the September 11, 2001 attacks as the causae belli for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Insisting that the threat of terrorism had changed the rules. Thus Card engaged in apologetics for the "are you with us or against us" doctrine noting that the invasion of Iraq was necessitated by Iraq not being "with us." Of course, Card was rewriting history: Iraq had already caved in to international pressure and had permitted UN arms inspectors to return, the Coalition invasion of Iraq was done before the arms inspectors could finish their job and was without regard to what they had not discovered. Speaking of writing history, they also frequently evoked the war records of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as giving legitimacy to Bush policy. Note: Lincoln and Roosevelt were demonstrably, highly effective war-time presidents who also did perceive limits on even their most controversial exercises of power while neither case can be made for Bush. Defense attorney J.W. Caney Jr., who had played Fluellen, raised the point that the measure of a society's justice system is how it treats those whom the society despises,but ultimately, neither Bush administration veteran could make the case that either the particular acts of the administration: invasion without a justifiable causae belli, the use of torture, extraordinary rendition, or the theory of the unitary executive who is above and not bound by treaties, laws, or the Constitution he is sworn to defend was actually needed in order to defend democratic societies from either foreign nation states or terrorists. All they could say was that the world had changed after 9/11 and unreflectively enlist a misreading of a truncated version of Henry V to support their thesis.

Launcelot Gobbo, Old Gobbo and Les Gobbi, Part 2

After discovering that Jacques Callot had illustrated a series of sketches of a troupe of dwarf actors and musicians known as Les Gobbi I naturally wondered "what connection might exist between this troupe and the characters of Old Gobbo and Launcelot Gobbo from The Merchant of Venice?" Though the possible connection certainly supports directors and dramaturgs to making some unconventional casting decisions, I confess that my speculation was not vigorously supported by the evidence, as Callot clearly made the illustrations long after the publication of The Merchant of Venice and I had no evidence as to how long the troupe had existed or if an earlier version of the troupe could have been known in England.

However, the Victoria and Albert Museum has in its collection a set of porcelain figures based on Callot's illustrations of Les Gobbi, and their website stated that these "grotesque dwarf entertainers" performed at the Medici court.

I checked the index of Pierre Louis Duchartre's classic work on the history of the commedia dell'arte, The Italian Comedy and found no reference to Les Gobbi, though other troupes of the era are mentioned. Of course Duchartre has some bizarre discomfort with the more vulgar elements of the commedia dell'arte, and might have been tempted to disregard a troupe who could be described as "grotesque" no matter how popular, even if, as the illustrations indicate, at least some of them were masked actors.

John Russell Brown, in his introduction to the Arden edition of The Merchant of Venice also notes that:

John Florio's Italian dictionary, A World of Words (1598), gave "Gobbo, crook-backt. Also a kind of faulkon."

Though A World of Words was likely published after Shakespeare had composed and produced The Merchant of Venice there is some indication that even in England of the 1590s that "gobbo" was used as a term of derision for those with hunched or crooked backs, at least amongst those who had some passing familiarity with Italian. I know Shakespeare well enough to know that he did not shy away from vulgarity, or anything that our 21st century liberal ears would find too cruel to utter in polite society-- and certainly some of Callot's Gobbi are "crook-backt." Of course, there is also some possibility that Shakespeare and Florio were acquaintances and shared a fondness for insults.

Brown also offers the countering hypothesis that since the first quarto often renders "Gobbo" as "Iobbe" (spelling was not standardized back in 1600) that perhaps Shakespeare intended to provide an Italianized form of the Biblical Job. To me, this is doubtful, as the strongest Biblical allusion related to the Gobbi is that of Isaac and Jacob both in terms of Launcelot's tricking his blind father, as Jacob tricked his blind father, and Launcelot's prolific nature which is a somewhat comic parallel to Jacob's own fathering of the Twelve Tribes of Israel (and let us not forget the pun in the younger Gobbo's name: "Lance-a-lot.") If anything, the rendering as "Iobbe" should be taken less as a literary allusion than a hint for how the name should be pronounced on stage.

Knowing Shakespeare, and knowing that The Merchant of Venice was seen by his company and his audiences as a comedy, I'm more inclined to buy the idea that Shakespeare meant Launcelot Gobbo to be understood as "promiscuous crook-backed fellow" and not as some non-existent allusion to Job, the most tragic book in Jewish scripture.

Still, I have no evidence supporting the Callot connection, but given the utter silliness of Brown's Job hypothesis I am amazed I've not come across anyone else making a connection between Les Gobbi of Shakespeare and Callot.