![]() ![]() Running time: 2 hours and 15 minutes including an intermission One of the cleverest moments in “The Shylock and the Shakespeareans,” and the most eye-opening, occurs when Shakespeare’s actual words – the passage so praised as evidence of his humanity – through a simple gesture lets us hear them anew as evidence of his antisemitism. “I was thinking starvation,” Nerissa says. ![]() “Like this husband hunt,” Portia replies. “I suppose being a servant can be hard, sometimes.” As in Shakespeare’s original, Nerissa is still Portia’s loyal servant, but she makes so many wisecracks about her lowly station in life compared to the privileged Portia that her normally oblivious mistress finally concedes There are even stronger references to social class. Incidentally, the reason why Antonio agrees to guarantee Bassanio’s loan, as everybody understands except apparently Antonio himself, is because of his sexual attraction to Bassanio. This is a brilliant moment, because it shows us how Shakespeare’s plot device of the Jew asking for a pound of flesh is directly connected to the age-old antisemitic libel that Jews ate Christian flesh. It’s the two Christians, in other words, who propose the infamous pound of flesh as collateral, not Jacob who demands it. From wherever you like.īassanio: Sorry…Antonio said…I thought maybe he was wrong…Īntonio: Not his flesh! Mine. He asks this after the following exchange:īassiano: If you are not paid, you can take a bite out of my Christian flesh. He is an upright Venetian who resents the way his community is libeled, so much so that when Bassiano asks to buy a diamond necklace from him on credit, with a guarantee of payment by his friend the merchant Antonio (Eric Oleson), Jacob finally and reluctantly agrees to do so, without charging him interest, but only if Antonio agrees to “go to the Shakespeareans and tell them that we do not eat Christians.” The character called Shylock in the original is here called Jacob (portrayed by standout Jeremy Kareken.) The Christians call him a shylock as an antisemitic slur. The play is at its strongest in the way it shifts to a Jewish perspective. Eric Olson as Antonio, Jeremy Karen as Jacob, Chapman Hyatt as Bassiano. ![]() ![]() The result is intelligent, thought-provoking, sprawling with some light moments, some light-bulb moments, and some really dark moments. But there are many changes within the outline, and they attempt to do many things – shift the story to a Jewish perspective create a broad farce, make pointed references to issues of race, gender and social class provide contemporary resonance make mischief. Given how outlandish the invention of a racist and antisemitic Venetian mob named after the Bard, it’s surprising how relatively faithful much of “The Shylock and the Shakespeareans” is to “The Merchant of Venice.” The new play includes most of Shakespeare’s characters and the outline of the original’s plot and its various subplots. “You don’t see them in England, anymore, they kicked them out years ago.” “Time to kick them all out,” one Shakespearean says to another. They have scrawled on the wall of the New Ohio Theater “The Jews Will Not Replase Us.” They actively harass Jews on the street and torch their homes. Shakespeare, a character in this rewrite, is not only a bigot he’s inspired a white supremacist gang who call themselves the Shakespeareans. Is “The Merchant of Venice” antisemitic? Was Shakespeare? “The Shylock and the Shakespeareans,” playwright and director Edward Einhorn’s retelling of the Bard’s long-controversial play, shuts down ambiguity or debate. ![]()
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