Word: shylocking
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Shakespeare's great accomplishment in this play is the character of Shylock. Although Shylock appears in only five of the twenty scenes, he dominates the work easily. So full and complex is he that he cannot really be contained within the play. He bursts into a larger world of his own, so that we can almost say that the whole is less than the sum of its parts...
John Devlin plays Antonio, the eponymous merchant, with a good deal of snarling, and puts plenty of punch into his diatribe against Shylock's "Jewish heart." At the end of the show, when all the plots have been straightened out and all the pairs of lovers hooked up, Kahn keeps Antonio alone on the stage after all the others have exited, and the merchant slowly tears in two the letter in his hand. We are not to have our package tied up with a blue-ribbon...
...Aldredge is the talkative Gratiano. In the Trial Scene, when the tables are turned on Shylock, Gratiano indulges in not just the usual sarcasm; he positively relishes the chance to stamp on Shylock when he's down. Shakespeare contented himself with telling us that Shylock has oft been spat upon. Here, at Shylock's last exit, we actually see Gratiano (ironic name!) spit upon the Jew-- just as, in an earlier scene, we are treated to the spectacle of seeing his fellow Jew, Tubal spat...
...Shylock's daughter, who elopes with the Christian Lorenzo, gives the impression, as played by Maria Tucci, of treating her Jewish heritage very lightly. Before you know it, she appears wearing a crucifix, and crosses herself as to the manner born and of the manna shorn. Jack Ryland's Lorenzo, moreover, is hardly worth the trouble of eloping with...
Controversy still rages about Shylock. Is the play anti-Semitic? Was it intended to be? Can one remain unaffected by the knowledge of the systematic slaughter of five million Jews under Hitler? The title of the First Quarto of 1600 and the Second Quarto of 1619 runs, in part: "The most excellent Histories of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreame crueltie of Shylock the Iewe towards the sayd Merchant. . . ." The fact is that Shakespeare, and Elizabethan Londoners generally, could have had little if any first-hand knowledge of Jews, since Jews had been banished from England...