Shylock : a Performance History with Particular Reference to London And

University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. CHAPTER 1 SHYLOCK & PERFORMANCE Such are the controversies which potentially arise from any new production of The Merchant of Venice, that no director or actor can prepare for a fresh interpretation of the character of Shylock without an overshadowing awareness of the implications of getting it wrong. This study is an attempt to describe some of the many and various ways in which productions of The Merchant of Venice have either confronted or side-stepped the daunting theatrical challenge of presenting the most famous Jew in world literature in a play which, most especially in recent times, inescapably lives in the shadow of history. I intend in this performance history to allude to as wide a variety of Shylocks as seems relevant and this will mean paying attention to every production of the play in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, as well as every major production in London since the time of Irving. For reasons of practicality, I have confined my study to the United Kingdom1 and make few allusions to productions which did not originate in either Stratford or London. Three works dealing substantially with the stage history of Shylock already exist. Toby 2 Lelyveld‟s Shylock on the Stage traces the stage history as far as the late 1950s only and is selective in its approach; John Gross‟s Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend 3 is a popular and journalistic book, which understandably does not set out to analyse performance in the way intended by the present work; James C Bulman‟s 4 volume in the Shakespeare in Performance series is not exclusively about Shylock and 1 I have included one production which originated outside the United Kingdom: that of the Goodman Theater, Chicago, which performed in London in 1994 (see below, footnote 13, and pp 223-235). 2 Toby Lelyveld, Shylock on the Stage (Cleveland, 1960; Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1961). 3 John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (Chatto & Windus, 1992). 4 James C Bulman, Shakespeare in Performance: The Merchant of Venice (Manchester University Press, 1991). 1 looks in detail at only five productions. Nonetheless, Bulman‟s observations are remarkable for their detail and perception; and, to avoid merely replicating his work, it has been my aim to explore features of the productions concerned which he does not treat in depth. My opening chapters are an attempt to provide an overview of some of the early interpretations of Shylock and to begin to categorise the various theatrical means by which actors and directors have sought to present the character as a human being, worthy - to a greater or lesser degree - of audience sympathy (with an awareness that it is difficult in many productions to assume consensuality). I then move on to the twentieth century and examine key productions in detail. There are clearly limitations to the adoption of a chronological method: for example, there will almost certainly not be a clean linear progression in approaches to the rôle or in audience responses. To answer this, it has been my aim to establish in the early sections a number of strands which will be followed throughout - the growing awareness of and response to anti-Semitism being one of the more obvious examples - and to employ these as a means of ensuring coherence, in addition to such techniques as frequent cross-reference to earlier (and, in a few cases, later) productions. Before beginning to examine some of the Shylocks of the past, however, it is important to draw attention to four factors which have been influential in encouraging a history of increasingly sympathetic portrayal. The first is that, from Kean‟s coruscating performance onwards, Shylock has almost consistently been a „star‟ rôle, since it pre- eminently offers the actor the opportunity to display his full emotional range, from humour to bitterness, tyranny to pathos: 2 The star actors who, from the eighteenth century onwards have chosen to play the role, have not done so out of a sense of moral duty in order to combat anti-Semitism, but because their theatrical 5 instinct told them that the part, played seriously, not comically, offered them great possibilities. The resulting villain, moreover, seen in a complex and ambiguous social context, is always likely to elicit more audience sympathy than an unalloyedly wicked one. Secondly, the rôle has frequently tended to attract actors more usually associated with tragedy, who have, albeit sometimes involuntarily, brought to the rôle the sympathy normally attached to tragic figures. Related to that, and thirdly, is the fact that, uniquely among Shakespeare‟s villains, Shylock‟s argument is one that speaks with conviction and eloquence to the audience‟s sense of injustice. While condemning the extremity of his planned revenge, we are tempted to endorse the reaction of the woman who, having watched Kean‟s dignified and intelligent Jew collapse under the force of Christian 6 justice, remarked in Heine‟s hearing: „the poor man is wronged.‟ Fourthly, and quite simply, Shylock is a Jew. As will be shown, audiences at least as early as the 1770s were beginning to see Shylock‟s treatment as part of a wider picture of anti-Semitic7 prejudice, and by the 1830s were linking his defeat with the whole history of Jewish maltreatment and suffering. If the context of growing nineteenth century liberalism was enough to encourage Irving‟s sympathetic portrayal, how much greater are the influences upon actors and directors of the post-war generation who live and work in the shadow of the Nazi holocaust. 5 WH Auden, „Brothers and Others‟, The Dyer’s Hand and other essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), p. 223. 6 Cited in the introduction to The Merchant of Venice ed. M. M. Mahood (New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1987), p. 44. 7 Strictly speaking, the term „anti-Semitic‟ is an anachronism if applied to Dogget‟s Shylock, say, or Macklin‟s, since the phenomenon of despising Jews as a race (as distinct from despising them for their religion) did not appear until the nineteenth century. Hostility to Jews up to that time should, therefore, more correctly be termed „anti-Judaism‟. The more familiar term will be retained throughout this study, however, since the greater part of it is concerned with interpretations from Sir Henry Irving‟s onwards. Irving‟s first performance as Shylock was in 1879, the year in which the German Wilhelm Marr first coined the term „anti-Semitism‟. 3 CHAPTER 2 EARLY SHYLOCKS From prompt-books and contemporary audience reports, it is possible to see what actors such as Kean, Booth and Irving made of Shakespeare‟s Jew; but of the earliest interpretations we know nothing at all, not even the name of the actor who first played the character. There are three reasonably plausible candidates for the creator of the rôle of Shylock, the most widely supported of whom was for a long time Richard Burbage. As the most celebrated of the Chamberlain‟s Men, Burbage seems a likely choice, and for a while it looked as though the tradition that he had indeed played the part - and in a red wig - had been borne out by the discovery by the Victorian scholar, J Payne Collier, of a funeral elegy to the great actor in which his rôles, Shylock among them, were lovingly lauded in convincing doggerel.8 The fact that the manuscript in which the elegy appeared turned out to be a forgery does not, of course, invalidate the Burbage claim, but the volume in which Collier published his „find‟ contains an interesting piece of surrounding text which goes some way to suggesting why the Victorians in particular might have seen Burbage as the obvious first Shylock, and why they might have been led astray by their preconceptions of the rôle. Collier writes: To the list of characters in plays by Shakespeare sustained by Burbadge [sic] we still have to add Lear and Shylock, so that we may safely decide that he was the chosen representative of all, or 9 nearly all, the serious parts in the productions of our great dramatist [my italics]. 8 Heart-broken Philaster, and Amintas too, Are lost for ever; with the red-haired Jew, Which sought the bankrupt merchant‟s flesh, By woman-lawyer caught in his own mesh... „A Funeral Elegy on the Death of the Famous Actor, R Burbadge, who died on Saturday in Lent, the 13th of March, 1618‟; quoted in J. Payne Collier, Memoirs of the Principal Actors in the Plays of Shakespeare (London; printed for the Shakspeare Society 1846), p. 53. 9 Ibid., p. 22. 4 The significance lies in the categorising of Shylock as a „serious‟ part. Collier is writing at a time when the two great interpreters of Shylock to date had been Macklin and Kean, both of whom had played the part with utmost seriousness, as will be seen below, while the Shylock of William Charles Macready, revived at Drury Lane only five years before the publication of Collier‟s book, had been „abject, sordid, irritable, argumentative‟10.

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