How do we treat the outsider? It is the timeless, humane question asked by Shakespeare in the Merchant of Venice, the most popular play on the London stage in 1596. Audiences of 3,000 flocked to see it. Along with Romeo and Juliet of the previous year, it set Shakespeare on the road to wealth and property.
By all contemporary accounts audiences cheered and clapped at the end, when the full cast performed a merry jig with musical accompaniment – the traditional finale of romantic comedy.
The full cast that is, without the forgotten outcast, Shylock, who had been publicly humiliated, stripped of his fortune, lost his daughter, his home, his business, his religion and his dignity in one of the greatest courtroom scenes in theatre.
How we treat the outsider is an important question in our global world of migration. It questions our humanitarian principles and demands the better part of our natures. This makes the Merchant one of the most relevant of Shakespeare’s plays for this generation.
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Shylock is the ultimate outsider. He has been publicly insulted, spat upon, laughed at in the street; degraded for his traditional dress and belittled for earning his living. He is one of several outsiders in this story of sophisticated, bejewelled, glamorously dressed, rich, beautiful people in cosmopolitan Venice; at that moment, the most famous, richest city in Europe. By contrast with its international commerce and banking, and its fabulous stone and marble palaces, London with its wooden buildings was a medieval town.
So how does this city of privileged, elegant, impeccably mannered citizens treat the outsider who lives in their midst or comes to visit – be he a Moroccan prince, a Spanish duke, a middle-aged Jew or the Jew’s love- starved, naive and maybe gullible daughter?
Jessica, perhaps duped by the gold grabbing, man-about-town, charming Lorenzo is a forgotten outsider; but she is ignored, and barely tolerated by the Belmont Golden circle. Ultimately, she may find that she has betrayed her father to her cost.
This story of a merchant and his friends, a moneylender and his daughter, visiting royalty, social climbing young men, and home-grown hangers – on, demonstrates different degrees of intolerance; some seemingly harmless; others vindictive; all self-preserving; and all callously oblivious of those who exist outside the golden circle.
Men who come from England, Scotland and Germany are made fun of in a lighthearted scene between Portia and her maid. Their clothes are odd or unfashionable; their movements are awkward; they drink too much beer and wine; or they talk too much about their horses.
But the tone takes a vicious turn when the dignified, vastly wealthy Prince of Morocco arrives in all his majestic splendour. Knowing the prejudice he faces in this city, his first words are: “Mislike me not for my complexion.”
Shylock’s show-stopping speech, ‘Hath not a Jew eyes? ... If you poison us, do we not die?’ is one of literature’s greatest cries against prejudice, religious hatred and injustice
Morocco was well known to Shakespeare’s audience. Queen Elizabeth the First sent ambassadors there and bought its gunpowder and spices; but Portia sees only a man of colour and dismisses him with the shocking words: “Let all of his complexion choose me so.”
Shylock’s show-stopping speech, “Hath not a Jew eyes? ... If you poison us, do we not die?” is one of literature’s greatest cries against prejudice, religious hatred and injustice. Ultimately it is about the desire for revenge when sorrow turns to anger; when oppression becomes so unbearable that the repressed man is willing to watch his oppressor die: “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
Ironically, the greatest harm is done to Shylock in a court of law. Briefly he thinks he holds all the cards but this moment exposes how the brute force of power can oppress a minority. The sentence passed on him exposes special legal powers in the form of vindictive Venetian laws aimed at “aliens”. No outsider ever felt as isolated as a baffled Shylock staring at a triumphant Portia, asking: “Is that the law?”
Modern directors have set the play in many places, for example, in a Las Vegas Casino, with Portia as the lottery prize. In fact it sits comfortably in any wealthy, multicultural city where high-stakes business deals are done. If set in New York, Portia would live in a Manhattan penthouse while Antonio does deals on Wall Street. The setting could be Sydney, Dubai, Singapore, London, Moscow, Shanghai, or any city where wealthy people live bling-filled lives and do high-stakes trading.
The story might happen wherever different cultures and principles collide. It ends in misery for the outsider and leaves us with the question we started with. How do we treat the outsider?
Like most of Shakespeare’s plays, it asks: who has the power and how do they use or abuse it? Who calls the shots, who wins, who loses and who finds no place at all and becomes the forgotten outcast?
Shakespeare’s genius lay not only in his capacity to allow an outsider such as Shylock to dramatically express his innermost feelings, but also in showing the dilemmas faced by society when cruelty begets cruelty and the fittest survive to celebrate victory.
Pauline Kelly is a teacher trainer and author with Gill Education. Her edition of The Merchant of Venice was published earlier this month by Gill Education
