I forgot how much I hate almost every character in The Merchant of Venice. And yet it is such a good play, probably because all these awful people have the capacity to make me so angry.
It was this play, in part, that made me realize ... oh, I guess it's over thirty years now, just how brilliant and wonderful and masterful and magical that Shakespeare was. Modern interpretations, including the movie I watched last night, are much more in keeping with the way the play first hit me, but even then, these were not common interpretations. Shortly after I read the play for the first time, I saw a production on TV starring and directed by Laurence Olivier. I have a copy of it, and when I tried watching a couple of years ago, it was pretty much the standard anti-Semitic view, although even then, in the 70s, it was somewhat progressive.
This play has never been anti-Semitic to me, although it is certainly about a lot of anti-Semitic people. It always looked to me as if Shakespeare realized that all the characters that everyone else would see as noble -- most especially Portia, that hypocritical bitch -- were shallow and self-centered, and that the only characters with any depth at all were Shylock and Antonio. Antonio: don't get me started. There's practically nothing to him except his adoration of Bassanio, and oh wait, there's the spitting on Shylock part. So he's scum too, he's just tormented, homo-erotic, lovelorn scum.
The play is about the unending ability that human beings have to be cruel to other human beings, even if for no other reason than their own amusement, or to satisy their own egos, or their own needs to be accepted by mainstream society by trading their mother's engagement rings for monkeys. It is about the unbelievable hypocrisy that human beings will demonstrate in order to perpetuate their own sense of superiority and arrogance.
I always hated that f--ing Portia (she's so smug) and Bassanio deserves to be smacked in the head repeatedly. Antonio: get a clue. He's not gay, even though he kissed you on the mouth. (He wants your money, moron.) Jessica: whatever you get, you deserve it.
I liked the casting in this film; it was the part Jeremy Irons was born to play, and Al Pacino was good, if you like his interpretation. I had the great good luck to see Dustin Hoffman in The Merchant on Broadway about twelve years ago, and he was perfect. It could have been written for him.
Too much focus on the whole Jewishness of Shylock, though. Yes, yes, he was a Jewish moneylender, blah blah blah. They went after him because he was different; he could have been any kind of different. Too much detail about the Venice ghetto and such, which wasn't in the play. Why does everyone with a camera think that he can re-write Shakespeare?
YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO THAT. IT'S ALREADY GOOD. LEAVE IT ALONE.
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I'm watching The Golden Girls
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