The Merchant of Venice - Shakespeare's Globe

The Merchant of Venice is an uncomfortable play, dealing as it does with racism, religious enmity and revenge.

It would undoubtedly have had different resonances in Shakespeare’s time from the resonances it has for audiences now. But I can’t imagine it would have been any less uncomfortable back then. Almost every character in this play does or says something questionable, and they are each called out on it by another character. The uncomfortableness is right there in the text.

The conflicts enacted and the complexities of these conflicts are not shied away from in the play. And the Globe’s production of The Merchant of Venice (which I saw Saturday 6^th June 2015) really drew this out.

The ending was particularly powerful – with Jessica’s Jewish identity reasserting itself as her father was forced to convert to Christianity – but the lighter moments also explored the same theme. When Launcelot Gobbo got two audience members up on stage to play his conscience and a fiend, it was hilarious. The guy playing the fiend got three rounds of applause all to himself. But it also signified the confusion over what’s ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the play. Gobbo got the audience shouting out for one side or another, all in fun, until all that could be heard was a great muddled din.

It’s interesting, watching The Merchant of Venice from the position of someone in a multicultural, increasingly secular society, where it is not assumed that the majority of the audience is Christian. The audience at the Globe is not expected to automatically identify with the Christians in the play. But what we do see – particularly in this production – is one culture asserting its dominance over others in troubling ways.

In the Globe’s production, this is not just about race and religion. Antonio’s love for Bassanio is also used to show how homosexuality is suppressed. And the female characters, of course, are quite clearly shown to be trapped in a man’s world.

For once, I didn’t mind that there was no jig at the end here. It would have seemed inappropriate after those troubling final scenes. As it was, we left the theatre still feeling troubled and uncomfortable. The world has not resolved these problems yet.