University of Groningen "I am not Shakespeare's Shylock" Heijes, Coen Published in: Shakespeare Bulletin DOI: 10.1353/shb.2016.0056 IMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite from it. Please check the document version below. Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Publication date: 2016 Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database Citation for published version (APA): Heijes, C. (2016). "I am not Shakespeare's Shylock": The Merchant of Venice on the Dutch stage. Shakespeare Bulletin, 34(4), 645-679. https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2016.0056 Copyright Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). 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Download date: 01-10-2021 “I am not Shakespeare’s Shylock”: The Merchant of Venice on the Dutch stage Coen Heijes Shakespeare Bulletin, Volume 34, Number 4, Winter 2016, pp. 645-679 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2016.0056 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/643813 Access provided by The University of Groningen (9 Jan 2018 13:12 GMT) “I am not Shakespeare’s Shylock”: The Merchant of Venice on the Dutch stage COEN HEIJES University of Groningen Introduction “I am not Shakespeare’s Shylock, [ . ] I show you mercy now” (Oel, De Arabier 62). These lines were spoken near the end of a 2007 produc- tion of The Merchant of Venice on the Dutch stage.1 They concluded a moment in the production where the characters unanimously condemned Shakespeare for creating a Shylock, who supposedly was such a conve- nient vehicle for anti-Semitism. This 2007 production is almost indicative of the stage history of The Merchant of Venice in the Netherlands after World War Two, which tends to take a cautious approach to the play, which tries to avoid any anti-Semitic elements in the play, and present a generally dignified and noble Shylock. Strangely, no research to date has been done on the production and reception of The Merchant of Venice on the Dutch stage after World War Two. This essay fills that gap in scholarship. The stage history of Merchant after World War Two has been most thoroughly investigated in Germany, where it reflected Germany’s guilt and shame. Many researchers demonstrated how Merchant played a role in, illustrated, or commented on the way Germany has faced its past and how these productions initiated debates on fascism, anti-Semitism, the Shoah, and Germany’s complicity.2 Initially, productions of Merchant were dominated by noble, dignified Shylocks, the victims of a callous and hostile environment. The famous Merchants with the actor Ernst Deutsch playing Shylock in 1957 and 1963 showed Shylock to be the play’s only honorable character.3 Any hints of anti-Semitism were unacceptable and, in a period of trying to set things right—the Wiedergutmachungspolitik Shakespeare Bulletin 34.4: 645–678 © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press. 646 COEN HEIJES of the Adenauer era (1949–63)—these productions were possibly more concerned with “playing away” the Shoah than with “working through the past” (Ackermann 367–69; Hortmann, Shakespeare 421–23; Schülting “Remember” 293). After this period of transition, the Jewishness in the play gradually became the central core to which directors reacted and which they used to help make sense of—and atone for—the German past and the horrors of the Shoah in a mixture of guilt and shame (Hortmann, Shakespeare 254–56, 262, 421–23; Leiter 436–37; Schülting, “Remember” 294–96). They were directors with Jewish roots who broke the taboo on the “expia- tion” Shylocks and set out to deconstruct the taboos on Germany’s past. Otto Schenk’s 1968 Merchant movie turned Venice into an allegory of Nazi Germany, and Shylock was used in a confrontation of the audience with their own recent anti-Semitic history (Schülting, “I Am” 67–69). A few years later, Jewish director Peter Zadek’s Shylock (1972) was treacher- ous, malignant and embodied the worst stereotypes about Jews, causing a huge controversy, with Zadek arguing that he wanted to break down the horrors of the past (Hortman 257–59). This kind of soul-searching has become less pronounced since the 1980s, although productions invari- ably took a stand on what was considered the central question of the play (see Hortmann, Shakespeare 254–62, 421–23; Schülting, “I Am” 68–71; Schülting, “Remember” 294–300). Prominent examples were the 1985 East German production by Thomas Langhoff and the 1995 produc- tion by director Hanan Snir. Langhoff set his production in the festive, but decadent, capitalist atmosphere of Venice. His Shylock was played by Fred Düren, a Jewish Holocaust survivor himself, who appeared as a strong-willed, self-disciplined, and noble figure in a hostile environment reminiscent of the 1930s Germany. In the trial scene, Düren, dressed as a concentration camp inmate, was confronted with the very fascist mentality that originated from the capitalist society which bore the po- tential of the Shoah (Drakakis 135–37; Hortmann 421–23). In 1995, director Snir set the entire production in a concentration camp in which the Jewish prisoners were first made to perform the play to entertain their German guards, and were then slaughtered on stage. The use of Mer- chant as a “moral cudgel” (Walter 298–9) remained strong and in 2003 Hortmann expressed his yearning for the “good, old times when Merchant could be staged by a Jewish director as a wonderful fairy-tale” without the ever-present obligation to remember the Shoah” (“Wo” 217). Since 2000, Germany has seen an increasing number of Merchants which did expand the terrain and move the focus away from German anti-Semitism “I AM NOT SHAKESPEARE’S SHYLOCK” 647 and Shylock’s Jewishness in favor of more general, contemporary debates such as migration, terrorism, multi-ethnic society, or globalized banking (Schülting, “Remember”). However, productions of Merchant in Germany remain dominated by the legacy of the Shoah: a 2009 Merchant by direc- tor Armin Petras in Berlin, which played down the anti-Semitic themes in the play, was criticized for its failure to engage with German history and the Shoah (Sokolowski; Wildermann). Although German produc- tions of Merchant have come a long way over the past sixty years, their production and reception is invariably overshadowed by the country’s history. Unlike Germany—where Schülting heads a research project at the University of Berlin entitled “Shylock in Germany: The Reception of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice after 1945”—there has been no comprehensive study of Merchant and Shylock in the United Kingdom in relation to the cultural and historical context after the Shoah. How- ever, a cursory review of the numerous studies and introductions writ- ten on Merchant make it apparent that UK productions show a great versatility in their Merchants. Oddly enough, productions at first hardly reacted to the Shoah. John O’Connor uses an interesting metaphor: “[ . ] the British theatre’s response to Hitler’s persecution of the Jews is like that of Conan Doyle’s dog that did not bark in the night. [For] mainstream theatre it was as though nothing had happened” (398). The 1948 opening production of the Stratford-upon-Avon season featured the Australian dancer-actor Robert Helpmann as a Shylock whose man- nerisms and intonation reflected the anti-Semitic stereotypes in the 1948 movie Oliver Twist by director David Lean (Edelman 55). Productions in 1953, with Michael Redgrave playing Shylock, and 1956, with Em- lyn Williams, continued this tradition of a seedy, leering and repulsive Shylock (Gilbert 27–28). From the 1960s, productions in the UK took a variety of approaches to Merchant. In his review of British post–Holocaust Merchants, Gross pointed out that while the play could never be the same again after the Shoah, British productions tended to pay less direct at- tention to the Shoah itself than German productions (324–52). Instead, there was a tendency to focus more on underscoring the prejudices of the Christian Venetians in making the play more acceptable to postwar sensibilities. Although memories of the Shoah are present in productions, British theater has produced many different Shylocks, with a multiplic- ity of interpretative possibilities. Shylock has been portrayed both as a sympathetic character, understandably driven by a hostile environment to demand revenge, but has also been staged as a manipulative—or even as 648 COEN HEIJES a villainous—vicious character. He has been staged as utterly, stereotypi- cally Jewish, but also as a modern banker or a prototype of “the Other” with hardly any reference to his Jewishness.4 The 2011 RSC Merchant, starring—for the fifth time in his career—Patrick Stewart as Shylock, perhaps best illustrated this diversity: reviews of the production used around fifty different—and often contrasting—adjectives to describe his Shylock.