Victor Sasson
SHYLOCK OF VENICE, A VERSE PLAY IN THREE ACTS
Bloomington: iUniverse, Inc., 2012, ISBN-10: 9781475934809
Reviewed by Judith Roumani1
Around 2016, the Jewish world’s attention was focused on Venice, where Europe’s first ghetto, a virtual prison into which the Jewish inhabitants were locked up at night, was established in 1516. The model spread, and forty years later Jews fled the lands held by the pope because he was instituting ghettos. However much one tries to romanticize, ghettos were a terrible imposition on the already persecuted and reviled Jews of Italy. Some of them persisted for three hundred years. About a century after the establishment of the first ghetto, Shakespeare, who may never have met a Jew, created his complex character, Shylock.
Whether or not Shakespeare was personally an anti-Semite, or not, the play The Merchant of Venice embodies many anti-Semitic tropes, and yet to our modern ear rises above those to proclaim Shylock’s humanity. It is viewed less as the comedy it was than as a tragedy exemplifying miscarriage of justice. In connection with the recent commemorative events in Venice, Shakespeare’s play was performed in the central square of the ghetto. In addition, in 2017 I attended a mock retrial of Shylock at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the judge was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Shylock in that instance received absolution. I have also watched David Serero’s Sephardic musical version of a deeply tragic Shylock with whom we can sympathize. The words of the folksong, and its plaintive tune, mirror precisely the feelings toward Christians of an unjustly persecuted Jew.
“Non kero la vida/ Me l’amargates tu/ Tu madre kuando
te pario, I te kito al mundo/ Korason ella no te dio/ Para amar segundo”
(I don't want life/ You have embitttered it for me/Your mother when she gave birth to you and brought you into the world/She
did not give you a heart to love someone else.)
How many thousands of Jews, over the centuries, have been placed in these impossible situations in which they become the butts of non-Jewish hatred and venom? A wronged Shylock with whom the audience can empathize has today overtaken to a large extent the grotesque and evil Jew yearning for his vengeance and with an obsession with Christian blood that earlier centuries saw in Shakespeare.
This play is in the same vein as I witnessed at the 2017 event at the Library of Congress. Its language and meter quite successfully mimic Shakespeare’s, but with a simplified, modern touch. Victor Sasson introduces two new characters to Shakespeare’s playlist: a British savant and sleuth, Professor Victor Sasson, and his companion Mr. Watkins, who are summoned to Venice to help the Jewish community vindicate its beloved member Shylock. Readers, of course, will pick up on the references to Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Watson in both names and roles. The nineteenth century and the sixteenth century are fused. The parallel between the names Sherlock and Shylock reflects the British detective’s sympathy for the Venetian Jew and imply that the detective could even be Jewish. A new trial has been granted, with the duke himself as the judge, and Sherlock Holmes alias Professor Sasson as the defense lawyer. Again, Portia’s courtly world of Belmont is contrasted with the sordid, scrappy world of merchants, both Christians and Jews, and the conflicts that arise in the trading milieux of Venice. Professor Sasson is not naïve either; he persuades the British ambassador to Venice to press for the retrial, threatening economic consequences for the Venetians if the duke does not cooperate.
In this telling, with Professor Sasson representing Shylock, Belmont’s airs of moral superiority are punctured. The courtly language of Belmont, one year after the events of Shakespeare’s play, has given way to invective, cursing, and crude references to the part of the anatomy from which the pound of flesh might have been taken, the courtly love that reigned in Belmont to disgust and spite. The judge/barrister and his assistant are revealed to be imposters who merely wear the clothes of justice, and Portia’s much-admired speech about the quality of mercy not being strained is revealed as the opposite of high-minded Christian generosity of spirit. It turns out to be a hypocritical cover-up for vicious anti-Semitism. Professor Sasson convinces the judge (the duke) by obliging Portia and Nerissa to put on the robes he has brought, as Watkins paints a moustache on Portia, so that they are revealed to be the imposters of the earlier trial. The duke, as deus ex machina, who is shocked in the extreme by their perversion of justice, exonerates Shylock and restores his wealth and his reputation.
Belmont’s false values, dependent on beauty and wealth, are punctured and deflated. Shylock’ human dignity is restored. Portia, disgusted with Bassanio, is exposed as hypocritical, and a criminal. Professor Sasson cleverly declares that it was Portia who sliced off a pound of flesh from the legal corpus of Venice. Sundry citizens in the court shift their sympathies to Shylock to declare that Portia is a racist. Shylock declaims in the court scene:
“The quality of mercy has been soiled,
Stained and spoiled by this painted woman . . .
But as I myself daily ask God for his mercy
I ask this good court to give this lady/Of quality some quality mercy.”
The despised Jew Shylock begs the court to show mercy to the aristocratic yet criminal Portia, revealing his true nobility of spirit. News arrives that Antonio, Shylock’s tormentor, has committed suicide after losing all his merchandise on the high seas. Launcelot, Shylock’s faithless former servant, plays the clown in court; he is requested to pay child support to the Moorish girl who has born his child. Shylock refuses to take him back into his employment, but offers to pay the child support to the mother. Shylock, who had been forcibly converted, is allowed to return to Judaism. What is missing? Shylock’s daughter Jessica repudiates Lorenzo, her worthless Christian husband, and returns to the faith of her fathers, after she manages to retrieve her mother’s ring that she had sold for a monkey. The spirit of comedy has overcome tragedy.
I am not aware of any performance of this play, written both with sincerity and wish-fulfillment. It certainly merits performance as it reflects our modern revision of Elizabethan anti-Semitism, a revision for which Shakespeare, the playwright for the ages, while conforming to his own age’s expectations, himself provided the seeds.
1 Judith Roumani is the editor of Sephardic Horizons.