The Merchant of Venice is not one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. It is a comedy, making sport of the kind of blood libel that has been used to excuse the sadistic cruelty and oppression with which jews have been wantonly scourged for millennia by non-jews.
Portia’s “he is little better than a beast” — said in jest about one of her suitors — inadvertently displays the other blood-libel, the greatest of them all: we project our worst vices onto our bloodied victims. We wrest even their name to baptize, disavow and excuse our own depravity toward them.
The play is a comedy, from beginning to end, juxtaposing Portia’s father’s strictures on her choice of mate with Shylock’s strictures on Antonio’s loan and Portia’s strictures on the ring she gives Lorenzo.
Like all comedies in the hands of a genius, this one has its deeper moments, notably Shylock’s “do we not bleed?” speech, but even that, in its vengeful pagan “eye for an eye” punchline, again projecting onto jews the failure of christians to practice what they preach (as forthcoming in Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech) is getting out of a stereotype exactly what you put into it. And of course the jew had to be cruel to his daughter and his servants in order to hone our hatred for when the latest variant of the blood libel is launched against the “beast.”
I usually deplore the obtrusion of a director’s minor talent onto a masterwork, but in this case the most moving moment of the play did not come from Shakespeare but from Jonathan Mumby’s closing, superimposing the wailing in Hebrew of Shylock’s christened daughter Jessica, over the triumphant latin liturgy as Shylock is led to his own forced desecration.
Yet even here, the shoe is on the wrong foot, for it is not the imposition of an unwanted creed that is the real tragedy of the jews but the sadistic cruelty and oppression with which they have been wantonly scourged for millennia by non-jews for clinging to their own.
The real villain of the piece (though not the one impugned by Shakespeare) is of course creed itself. The rest is just about human nature, and what the majority creed (or kind) is disposed to do with the minority creed (or kind).
