Shylock's Ghost imagine...

This programme contains some strong language.

You've got a Holocaust shelf here.

-Doesn't every Jew have a Holocaust shelf?

-Not one quite like this.

And Woody Allen above the Holocaust shelf.

It's hard to decide whether to have Woody Allen

above the Holocaust shelf or below the Holocaust shelf.

Yeah, you're right.

Do you take pride in - if I can call it that - your Jewish nose?

My dad had a wonderful nose and I always admired his nose,

and I was pleased that by the time I was a grown man, my nose could

rival my dad's.

I really did admire... I think a man should have a nose.

One could overdo it, I suppose, but...

The Man Booker Prize-winning novelist, Howard Jacobson, has spent

much of his career writing poignant

and funny novels about Jewishness and the trials of being an outsider.

For his latest novel, Jacobson has agreed to retell

the story of the most odious Jew that literature ever spawned.

The cruel and merciless Shylock,

from Shakespeare's most performed play, The Merchant Of Venice.

How is it that a villainous moneylender, who doggedly pursues

his pound of Venetian flesh, has come to represent

everything that people have long despised about Jews?

This is a quote from William Hazlitt in 1817.

"A decrepit old man bent with age and ugly with mental deformity,

"grinning with deadly malice.

"Sullen, morose, gloomy, inflexible, brooding over one idea,

"that of his revenge."

You can see why they chose me!

Shylock may have started out as a figure of fun for Elizabethans

to mock and jeer at, but for modern audiences he poses a real problem.

How can you redeem a monster who not only reflects anti-Jewish hatred

but, in recent history, may have been guilty of stoking it?

But let's remember, Shylock is Shakespeare's Jew.

I am a Jew!

Oh...!

Hath not a Jew eyes?

Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses,

passions?

What did people have to say when you said you were going to do this?

There was stuff on the internet, as you would expect. This is quite fun.

"Repulsive Jew author rewrites Shakespeare

"and makes Shylock the hero.

"This is like asking Shylock himself to rewrite Shakespeare."

"A vile Jew has decided that Shakespeare was not quite

"good enough and could do with being improved upon by his own

"degenerate hand."

So nothing has changed, has it, really?

-Not a lot has changed, no.

-No.

No.

"Despicable Jew rewrites Merchant Of Venice in Yiddish."

ALAN CHUCKLES

So what was Shakespeare's business with the Jews?

There weren't any in his day in England. At least, not officially.

But Jews had been banished on pain of death some 300 years earlier.

But something sparked his interest and compelled him to write about one.

He looked for his Jew amongst the prosperous traders and,

as Iago called them, the "super-subtle citizens of Venice".

-You can feel there are unspoken things.

-Yes.

The alleyways, the darknesses...

I mean, novels have been written, films have been made,

about how sinister things,

frightening things, happen to you in Venice.

You get lost in Venice. You might not find your way again in Venice.

It's such a narrative town. Every part of this city is telling a tale.

It was here in Venice

that Shakespeare found the kernel of his story.

In a fragment of prose tucked away in a 14th century Italian novella,

a rare copy of which is preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale

in a corner of St Mark's Square.

So...

This is our book.

The author is an Italian author of the 14th century,

Ser Giovanni Fiorentino.

-And the title is Il Pecorone.

-Which means?

-Is "a big lamb".

-A lamb?

-A sheep.

And here, on page 41, we can find a dialogue

between two merchants, a Jewish one and a Christian one.

And the Christian merchant is Ser Giannetto.

-Yeah.

-Ser Giannetto was the Christian merchant.

And the Jewish merchant described as Il Judaeo. The Jew.

-Just "The Jew".

-Just "The Jew".

And the Jewish merchant was creditor from the Christian one.

And here we can read...

HE READS IN ITALIAN

He didn't want money.

HE READS IN ITALIAN

-He just wanted a pound of his muscle, of his flesh.

-Flesh.

How Shakespeare got hold of Fiorentino's story

is still a mystery.

It wasn't published in English until long after Shakespeare's death,

and as far as we know he never came to Venice.

But this cunning acquisition gave Shakespeare the fuel to ignite

the engine of his play.

"The Merchant Of Venice. The plot.

"Bassanio turns to his old friend and mentor, Antonio, the merchant,

"for a loan to help finance his pursuit of a beautiful heiress.

"Nursing what appears to be an unrequited passion

"for Bassanio, Antonio is only too eager to help,

"but he is unable for the moment to raise the funds,

"so it's off to the unscrupulous moneylender, Shylock.

"The Jew."

So on the one hand, it's a rather benign and beautiful setting.

On the other hand, something is festering under

the surface from the very beginning.

You come to me and you say, "Shylock, we would have monies."

You say so.

You, that did void your rheum upon my beard

and foot me as you spurn a stranger cur over your threshold.

He spat. I mean, that's such an extraordinary thing, to be spat at.

And he reminds Antonio of that and Antonio says,

"Be careful or I'll spit at you again."

Shylock strikes a bargain - yes, to the money, on condition

that if Antonio fails to repay it within three months,

Shylock will take a pound of his "fair flesh

"from whatever part of your body it pleaseth me."

Howard is not the only one grappling with Shakespeare's divisive play.

Venice is currently engaged in an intense debate

about Shakespeare's notorious leading man.

OK, Shakespeare in The Merchant Of Venice is exploiting

one of the few true mass phenomena not only in society,

but for many, many centuries.

Anti-Semitism or, more accurately, anti-Judaism, easy, familiar...

Welcome to the Shylock Project.

Amongst a glittering lineup of Shakespearean scholars,

Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize winning author,

Stephen Greenblatt, is one of the biggest draws.

There are, as you know, many critics who see

the play as a play which is in itself anti-Semitic

and which in itself leads to and has led to anti-Semitism.

This idea of the Jew's loathsome being.

I don't want to say the play is not anti-Semitic.

The play is anti-Semitic, or anti-Jewish, let's put it that way.

It participates in it, it has contributed to it.

I don't refuse this at all. Nonetheless...

But "nonetheless" is everything one cares about in Shakespeare.

Right from the beginning Shylock is represented as having

a kind of inner life,

something you don't expect of a little Jew puppet on a string.

That's the weird Shakespearian twist in all of this.

The generosity that wrote the lines, "Hath not a Jew eyes?"

What need that in this play?

No-one needs that.

It comes from some strange place in Shakespeare, from the place

that ruined his play, as it were, that ruined his simple comedy.

And thank God it ruined it.

Venice in Shakespeare's day did provide a home for Jews.

This was an aspirational mercantile society that found itself

increasingly dependent on Jewish moneylenders to fuel its economy.

But there was a caveat.

Jews were forced to live on a small polluted island

on the edge of the city, il Ghetto Nuovo.

Jews had been working and operating in Venice for a long time.

In fact, long before the ghetto was established.

But the Jews were not allowed to live here on a permanent basis

and 1516 is when the republic decided that they would include

the Jews to use their economic skills.

At the same time, they were excluding them

by locking them in this square.

And the word "ghetto", where does it come from?

Well, actually, it comes from this very place - Ghetto was

the foundry where the republic of Venice made its canons.

No Jewish connotation whatsoever.

-Well, it has now, because "ghetto" is now...

-Yes, exactly.

This became the paradigmatic ghetto,

so the other ghettos took from this place because of its uniqueness.

The reason the Jews were allowed here and why the ghetto was established

-was clearly because Christians weren't allowed to lend money.

-Yeah.

According to an interpretation of the Bible,

you could not lend money for interest to your brothers.

So, the idea was that, precisely because they were not brothers,

-you could ask them to lend you money.

-Yes.

HE SINGS IN ITALIAN

Within this overcrowded ghetto, were Italian, Spanish, German

and Portuguese communities of Jews,

each building their own synagogue wherever space allowed,

adding extra floors, converting attics and practising

their rituals of Jewish life out of sight of Venice's Christians.

While only a small number still live here,

the ghetto remains a destination for Jews from all over the world.

It's 400 years since Shakespeare's death and 500 years

since the creation of the ghetto, which is why the city is taking the

bold step of staging The Merchant Of Venice here for the very first time.

Bringing The Merchant Of Venice to the ghetto is a sort

of exorcism.

You know, we're trying really to face the ghost of Shylock

that has been haunting this place for a long time.

So of course there are all sorts of implications.

I thought I was being foolhardy attempting a novel that's got

The Merchant Of Venice behind it.

But for you to do a production of it here in the ghetto,

do you not feel the weight of that?

-I do and I like it.

-THEY LAUGH

I like a good challenge.

Workshops have started in the main square.

For the role of the troublesome moneylender,

the director is trying out a range of actors,

testing the radical view that Shylock is everyman.

Or woman.

There is a portion of Shylock that we can all enter into,

and I feel that Shylock as the stranger,

the outsider, the marginalised one,

is also someone that we all - a woman, a gay man, any...

All of us have had moments every day where we feel like an outsider.

"I'm not a part of that."

Shall I bend low and in a bondsman's key with bated breath

and whispering humbleness say this,

fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last.

You spurned me such a day. Another time you called me dog.

And for these courtesies I lend you thus much monies?

-Your younger Shylock, Sorab?

-Yeah.

-I love him. Yeah. I love what he does.

-Yes.

A young man full of juice and wit and saucy and elegant and handsome.

And why not? Because the way it's so often done,

even when people are offering to do a modern Shylock, you get

-an old man, an old man rubbing his hands...

-Yes!

-..coming in like this...

-A little pathetic, yes.

There is no justification for that.

Go with me to a notary, seal me there your single bond and...

in a merry sport, if you repay me not on such a day,

in such a place, such sum or sums as are expressed in the condition,

let the forfeit be nominated for an equal pound of your fair flesh

to be cut off and taken in what part of your body pleaseth me.

The idea of him being able to engage Antonio in saucy banter...

-Yes.

-Because it is saucy banter, isn't it?

-Yes.

"I'm going to take a pound of flesh from whichever part of you

-"I choose it." It's salacious!

-Salacious is exactly it.

And then the pleasure and the kind of laugh, it's like,

"Oh, well, that will never happen."

HE CHUCKLES

It's presumably the universal burden of any Jew in Venice that

you'll be crapped on constantly.

I mean, that's the price of admission to the ghetto

and doing business in Venice. But Shylock, it's tormenting him.

Why should he loan 3,000 ducats to a person who's been spitting on him?

I mean, and railing on him

and trying to interrupt his business, and hates Jews

and has just been utterly nasty - why should he loan him anything?

What's in it for Shylock? The piece of paper.

He'll have a piece of paper, the bond he is obsessed with.

The piece of paper in which Antonio has pledged a pound of his flesh.

What's he going to do with it?

I think he's going to put it on his wall,

afterwards, in his house, when the 3,000 ducats are paid back,

and he's going to laugh every time he sees it.

So it is a merry bond. I mean, it's a very savagely merry bond.

I think it's fun.

-He's being sardonic about the very idea of merriment.

-Yeah.

Howard is setting his version of the Shylock story in the present day.

So what will he do with the Jew?

What will it take to make the vengeful Shylock and his absurd

proposal work as a credible and sympathetic character for our times?

What are you scribbling?

-My thoughts.

-Ah.

When you begin a thing like this,

the first thing you think is, I'll write an equivalent story.

Shylock will be a banker and we'll set it in Little Venice.

All these obvious ideas you have.

And then you think, no, that ain't going to work.

I come up with a hero called Simon Strulovitch, who is a modern man,

who doesn't have a dead wife, as Shylock does,

but has a very sick wife and is bringing up a daughter on his own.

To that degree it's like Shylock's story.

But I found I couldn't write that...

That story wouldn't work for me adequately without Shylock there.

And a sort of equivalent to Shylock was not good enough.

I needed Shylock there.

So it's almost a kind of, you know,

you could call it magic realist, except I don't like that...

-Shylock is there.

-Shylock is here. Shylock is just here.

Ask no questions, Shylock is here.

"A question then for Shylock, how merry was your bond?

"When you set the forfeit at an equal pound of Antonio's fair flesh

"to be cut off and taken from whatever part of his body it

"pleased you, on what intended you in the matter of anatomy?

"Did you mean salaciously, flirtatiously even,

"to designate Antonia's penis as the part it pleased you to take?

"Was that the pound of his fair flesh, weighing hyperbolically,

"you originally had your sights set on?

"Had his aim been Antonio's privy parts or Antonio's heart?

"What makes you so sure, Shylock wondered,

"that I knew what I intended?"

The Merchant Of Venice is one of Shakespeare's most popular works,

but it's also one of his problem plays.

The drama is by design a comedy, a bawdy romp,

partly set in the glitzy world of Portia's villa, Belmont.

It concerns the idle rich and their silly love games,

where fortunes and wives are won, if only you pick the right box.

-O hell!

-LAUGHTER

The problem, then, is Shylock.

This is not a world in which he fits.

While the rest of the play invites us

to laugh along with the slapstick jokes and daft riddles,

when Shylock appears, it's hard not to choke on that laughter.

It's a pretty unlovely world that Shakespeare paints in Venice.

I don't mean he's saying gentiles are unlovely.

THESE gentiles are unlovely.

They are ne'er-do-wells, they are playboys,

they indulge one another, they think about money all the time.

"I keep losing my money. I've fallen in love with this woman.

"But if you can lend me some money, I'll get over there and get her money..."

I mean, it's a shocking deal that's being done.

And then that's the other thing, the attitude towards the Jew.

He is just, to them, the Jew.

The word "the Jew" is used infinitely more times than Shylock.

It's quite rare they actually refer to him as Shylock.

So, all in all, in relation to one another,

they are indulgent and idle and grasping.

It's a world that lacks seriousness.

But then Shakespeare complicates things

and makes it harder to deride Shylock as a mere comic villain.

He gives Shylock a daughter.

And shows him capable of real love.

She will, of course, be his undoing.

Shylock is a widower

and so he's bringing up his daughter Jessica alone, which isn't easy,

for she is drawn to the temptations of the Venetian night.

Hear you me, Jessica.

Lock up my doors, and when you hear the drum

clamber not you up to the casements

to-to gaze on Christian fools with varnished faces.

Shylock, the father, pulling Jessica back,

making her come back into the house.

"Don't go out there, it's dangerous."

And he's right, it is dangerous.

Fulfilling her father's worst fears,

Jessica makes an assignation with Lorenzo,

yet another feckless Venetian playboy.

Mistress, look out at window, for all this,

there will come a Christian boy!

-A teenage daughter. You have a teenage daughter, don't you?

-I do.

What father wants danger for his daughter?

Well, whatever happens,

something went wrong between Shylock and Jessica.

That's all I can say.

-There's no mother.

-She's got no mother.

-She's got no mother.

Farewell,

and if my fortune be not crost

I have a father,

you, a daughter lost!

She runs off with Shylock's money

and with the ring which his wife, Leah, had given him.

Did she have to steal his money?

Did she have to steal the ring?

I'd say, did she have to run away with Lorenzo,

with one of those bums?

OK, you run away with those you know, but you don't have to steal.

So what should we make of Shylock's daughter?

Howard is pretty disapproving of the conniving Jessica.

He abhors Jessica, Howard.

He thinks she's absolutely appalling.

This sense also of betrayal,

yet there are people around, if you were the daughter -

let's put aside the Jews for a second -

imagine you had a Muslim father who was very, very orthodox,

very angry about stuff and you wanted to be part of the world,

why wouldn't you think,

"I want to get a life, I want to get out of here,

"I'm living in this other country - why can't I just be like them?"

Fine, do it, but there are rules.

If there's any daughter here thinking of leaving their fathers

or their family, there are rules. Don't steal.

Don't steal your mother's ring.

She breaks all human rules, not just Jewish rules.

She breaks all humane rules, Jessica.

My Jessica is much nicer.

Let me ask you, how many in this room

feels as strongly about Jessica as Howard does?

Who really, really dislikes Jessica?

Oh, just a couple.

And who can sympathise and understand Jessica's position?

-Bunch of sentimentalists!

-LAUGHTER

"So if we don't do Jewish things and we don't have Jewish friends

"and we don't eat Jewish foods

"and we don't celebrate Jewish festivals,

"why must I go out with Jewish boys?"

she asked him later.

"For the sake of continuity," he told her.

"What do you want me to continue?"

"The thing you were born to be."

"Jewish?"

HE RECITES IN HEBREW

How's that? 60 years.

-Ah, right.

-Or thereabouts.

-Some things you never forget.

-Yeah! THEY CHUCKLE

Real Jewish Venice was kind of in the background,

but the plot is entirely fictional.

Suddenly, because of Shakespeare,

everybody thinks of money lending here,

they don't think about the printing of the Talmud,

the literary salon that was here in the ghetto,

run by a woman, Sara Copia Sullam.

When Henry VIII had to divorce his wife,

he asked for advice from Venetian rabbis,

so there's a way in which the ghetto was closed,

but also disseminating Jewish culture all over the world.

-Where we can help, we help!

-Exactly!

And to understand how Shylock came about,

you'd go back at least to the year 1290,

when, as many of you know,

there was a general expulsion of the Jews from England under Edward I.

So there were no Jews, officially, at least, in Shakespeare's England,

but how then to explain the peculiar presence of Jews

and Jewish subjects in the public stage?

So did Shakespeare ever meet a Jew?

It seems unlikely,

although it's believed there may have been 200 or so Jews in England,

practising their religion in secret.

But the stock image of a red-haired, hook-nosed Jew

from the medieval mystery plays

was the one that Elizabethan theatres indulged.

Jews got blamed for poisoning Europe with the Black Plague, seducing nuns

and eating children, hoarding their blood to make their matzos.

If Shakespeare had never met a Jew,

how come he was so keen to write about one?

1594, the Queen's physician, Roderigo Lopez by name,

was accused of having taken a fantastic, an unreal sum,

50,000 ducats from the Spanish to poison the Queen.

Roderigo Lopez was a good Protestant, but he had -

how shall we say? - a dirty little secret.

His parents were Jewish.

Lopez, in his last words before he was about to be executed,

said that he loved the Queen, in fact,

as much as he hoped to see Jesus Christ

within this quarter of an hour.

-Whoa!

-And the crowd erupted in laughter.

Why does the crowd at this moment erupt in laughter?

Well, your guess is as good as mine,

but the overwhelming likelihood is that the crowd thought

it was watching a play by Christopher Marlowe,

namely The Jew Of Malta.

Marlowe wanted to have a deeply cynical play.

He came up with the fantastic idea

of having a kind of Jewish antihero -

ugly, wicked, poisons his own daughter,

kills as many people as he can, poisons wells,

constantly saying things like, "I have a burning love for you,"

then says as an aside, "I'm going to burn your house down."

So when he says, "I love the Queen

"as much as I hope to see Jesus Christ within a quarter of an hour,"

they heard some kind of Marlovian joke.

How interesting that The Jew Of Malta was so popular

that it could have entered the public imagination to this degree.

Probably not the only factor in what is going on in the crowd's response,

but I think the crowd is hearing this secret Jewish joke.

-Could be the first Jewish joke.

-Yeah!

You've discovered the first Jewish joke.

Poor Lopez probably wasn't thinking this at all, poor bastard.

Tell me about the execution. Was Shakespeare there?

I think there's a very strong presumption that Shakespeare

was an aficionado of executions and he's an expert in how to arouse,

manipulate, use crowd excitement and crowd laughter.

So why wouldn't he want to see these exercises in mass entertainment,

anxiety, hysteria, laughter, whatever we call it?

This is what he needs to work with.

He's in the business of understanding

how to tap into crowd phenomena of this kind.

And you may not be surprised to hear that one of the play's biggest fans

was this man.

Between 1933 and '39,

over 50 major productions of The Merchant Of Venice

were staged in Nazi Germany.

-ACTOR:

-Ihr scheltet mich abtrunnig,

einen Bluthund...

In the words of one critic

reviewing Werner Krauss's much-acclaimed performance,

"With a crash and a weird train of shadows,

"something revoltingly alien

"and startlingly repulsive crawled across the stage."

If they thought the message wasn't clear enough,

theatres would plant hecklers in the audience

to boo and curse Shylock when he appeared.

There were 2,000 Jews living in Venice when the Nazis arrived.

"The city of Venice remembers the Venetian Jews

"who were deported to the Nazi concentration camps

-"on December 5th 1943..."

-Yes.

-"..and August 17th 1944."

They took 200 Jews to Auschwitz

-and only eight came back to Venice.

-Yeah.

You worry sometimes that there's a proliferation of these things

and that then we become inured to it

and memory loses its power and we're just used to them,

but here, where it happened,

it's very effective.

I'm glad it's here, Alan.

Yeah.

I may have had my fill, we may both have had our fill

of looking at things like this,

but I'm glad this is here, this needs to be here.

Shakespeare created his Jew 400 years ago,

but Shylock turned out to be a lightning rod for anti-Jewish hatred

for any age who wanted him.

So how much blame should we lay at the door

of the long-dead writer for this?

Merchant Of Venice is a cold, disturbing, loveless play

and if it were by any other author than William Shakespeare,

it would not now be staged.

It's been a play that has done immense damage.

We pay a very high price for its good qualities.

How do we know it's done immense damage?

Well, it's been a common thing that Shylock has been held up

as an anti-Semitic archetype by unquestionable anti-Semites.

When Disraeli was Prime Minister,

his opponents used to shout, "Shylock!" at him

in the House of Commons, it was their favourite heckle,

and "Shylock" in that one word meant "greedy, pitiless and alien."

The reason that Shylock is such a powerful archetype

is not that the English are more anti-Semitic,

it's just that Shakespeare is a better writer than anybody else.

But that's so strange, isn't it?

To say the better the writer, the more dangerous the play.

Well, because a monster is made.

A monster isn't born.

Because we've seen him spat upon and insulted

and mistreated by the people who need his help...

..we can just understand

his malevolence,

which nonetheless is unjustifiable.

There's no way, taking Shylock in the round,

that he's other than a terrible, nasty man.

I think that sets off a fear in people

of somebody that they've wronged.

"How could we do this to a people and now not fear them?"

That's what makes it a powerful stereotype.

Couldn't we invert your argument and imagine Shakespeare saying,

"OK, we have no Jews here.

"You have an imaginary Jew. Let me give you a real Jew.

"Let me flesh out your imaginings

"and look how different it might be from what you imagine,

"because look how like you in so many ways the Jew is,"

could that not be what Shakespeare is up to?

Each aspect of Shylock's humanity,

each sympathetic quality he has is then tarnished in some way.

Yes, he has trouble bringing up his daughter,

yes, he cares about her

and he cares more about his ducats than about his daughter.

-We don't know that.

-Well...

-That's reported.

-Oh, urgh!

-That's what...

Shylock doesn't come on the stage

and say, "My ducats, oh, and by the way, my daughter."

That's reported and that's reported by people

-who we don't trust about anything.

-Fair point.

No, fair point and yet another example

of the endless ambiguity of these things,

but I think you would find it tough

to make a claim that Shylock is a sympathetic character,

even though almost every Shylock that I've ever seen

on stage or on screen has been played more sympathetically

than a bare reading of the text demands.

You can contextualise him,

you can humanise him. What you can't do is to make him a goodie.

Rolling!

Shylock.

'Hath not a Jew eyes?'

Hath not a Jew hands?

Organs?

Dimensions, senses, affections?

Passions?

'If you prick us, do we not bleed?'

If you tickle us, do we not laugh?

If you poison us, do we not die?

And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that!

If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?

Revenge.

If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be

by Christian example?

Why, revenge.

In recent years, many leading actors have taken the role of Shylock

and have tended to play him sympathetically.

Nothing less than a modern audience demands.

But there is one who went against the grain.

Good to see you. This is so nice of you to do this,

cos I know you're on tonight.

That's very kind.

Antony Sher played Shylock

as a provocative portrait of a nasty, Middle Eastern, unassimilated Jew.

I'm excited by Shylock and I root for him.

-Yeah.

-I don't know whether...

I didn't have the privilege of seeing yours,

but I wonder if I would have rooted for yours.

-Do you really root for him when he wants the pound of flesh?

-Yeah.

Let me tell you...

How now, Shylock? What news among the merchants?

-IN HEAVY ACCENT:

-You knew - none so well, none so well as you -

of my daughter's flight!

There was much consternation from some critics,

because they feel you made your Shylock too much of a monster.

I say my daughter is my flesh and my blood.

The sense I get - you played him as a kind of oily, hand-wringing Jew

of the sort that people who don't like Jews think Jews are.

I don't remember ringing my hands, but I certainly do remember

playing at subservience in that first scene

which maybe would have offended people,

but it seemed to me what the story is about.

He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million,

laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation!

'It needed to be from a position of'

a non-person talking to a person.

As you played him, as you read the play, he never becomes a person

from that non-person, he just becomes monstrous.

He becomes monstrous, but on the way,

you see into him in the way that only Shakespeare can.

"Hath not a Jew eyes?" That is an incredible speech.

"If you tickle us, do we not laugh?"

Isn't that amazing?

I mean, "tickle" - one doesn't imagine people in Shakespeare's time

going round tickling one another,

but, of course, it's human, it makes it so human.

I absolutely agree with you, but there are critics of the play who,

particularly those who think it's an anti-Semitic play,

that's that,

who particularly hate that speech

and within that speech, particularly hate that line...

-Oh, my...

-..because they feel that it could be a dog

that we're talking about. That is very much a speech

that is read wildly differently between people.

-But you are firmly on the side of that speech.

-Yes.

I think it is someone who hasn't been able to be a proper person

in this society saying, "I am a human being.

"Like you."

-It's there, isn't it? "To bait fish withal."

-Yeah.

So it starts off with, "Hath not a Jew eyes?

"Hath not a Jew hands, organs..."

So it is simply these things that make us human beings,

and then it's the detail,

"Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons.

"If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?"

There is a terrific rhythm, just of, again and again, me and you,

"And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

"If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

"If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge.

"If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be

"by Christian example? Why, revenge.

"The villainy you teach me,

"I will execute and it shall go hard,

"but I will better the instruction."

Brilliant!

Even "It shall go hard."

"It will be difficult for me to be as monstrous

-"as you have taught me."

-Oh, you read it like that?

I thought it was, "Shall go hard for you."

Oh, no, I think it's,

"And it's not going to be easy, but I will become this monster."

MUSIC: Train Song, by Vashti Bunyan

# Travelling north Travelling north to find you

# Train wheels beating The wind in my eyes

# Don't even know what I'll say when I find you

# Call out your name, love, don't be surprised... #

Biscuits?

For his own novel, Howard has removed the action from Venice

and taken it home to where he grew up in suburban Manchester.

Milk?

No, thank you.

Alderley Edge, that was the sort of nirvana, wasn't it, basically?

Yeah, that's south Manchester.

If you were a lawyer or a doctor,

you aspired to live in south Manchester.

And if you met a girl out in town who lived in south Manchester,

you got very excited, cos she was classy.

Jewish girls?

The ones I told my parents about were, yes.

Younger than me, younger than me, younger than me,

the same age as me,

younger than me, younger than me.

-Older than me. Alan!

-That's good!

"There are two men in this cemetery occupied in duties of the heart.

"They don't look up.

"He is Simon Strulovitch,

"a rich, furious, but easily hurt philanthropist

"with a passion for Shakespeare

"and a daughter going off the rails."

"The second person here, long before Strulovitch arrived,

"tenderly addressing the occupant of a grave

"whose headstone is worn to nothing

"is Shylock."

"Of course Shylock is here among the dead. When hasn't he been?"

It's bleak, isn't it?

Yeah.

There's always a feeling with Jewish cemeteries

that they are not relieved by beauty.

Almost as though there's a built-in austerity

around the Jewish idea of death.

But this is where you've chosen to open your novel,

in this cemetery.

There's a moment in The Merchant Of Venice,

it's just the briefest moment, when Shylock mentions that he had a wife.

And I thought, to see him, for him to be seen in a cemetery,

mourning his wife, grieving over his wife,

as though he's been grieving over her for ever

and will grieve for her for ever,

it seemed a perfect place to conceive of Shylock

as a figure of then and as a figure of now.

I always feel about Shylock that there's a lot he's not saying.

I can imagine that he's talking to someone, talking to Leah, why not?

It's surprisingly easy to imagine him having this conversation,

because there is so much not said in the play,

but you feel he must somewhere be saying,

cos he is so intelligent, he is so quick,

that the minute I started writing that,

-it just came.

-It fills in those gaps you may not know about.

I like that way of putting it - the gaps.

A wronged man, loving father, grieving widower -

Shylock may well have been all these things,

but the world remembers him as the enraged Jew,

swearing an unreasonable revenge in the Venetian court,

unswayed by Portia's notorious speech, "The quality of mercy."

The court scene, this famous, pivotal scene in the courtroom

where Shylock is there holding his knife, enjoying it.

And this is the toughest scene, because our feelings

from that moment shift about.

We have to deal with the fact

that Shylock has never been more intransigent

than he is here and the more people say, "Show mercy,"

the more he reminds them that they haven't ever shown mercy to him,

why should he show mercy to them?

His pound of flesh was part of the deal, it's a contract.

And he's right.

Shylock is deranged by Jessica's disappearance.

All Venice is laughing at him.

He's determined to meet Antonio in court.

He will have his bond.

The pound of flesh which I demand of him is dearly bought.

'tis mine

and I will have it!

Enter Portia, dressed as a male lawyer.

Do you confess the bond?

-I do.

-Then must the Jew be merciful?

Ha! Upon what compulsion must I? Tell me that!

The quality of mercy is not strained.

The quality of mercy is not strained, but Portia strains it.

She out-legals Shylock,

proving to the court that his designs on Antonio's heart

are tantamount to conspiracy to murder.

ANTONIO ROARS IN FEAR

Tarry a little!

There is something else.

This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood.

The words expressly are "a pound of flesh."

Take then thy bond.

Take though thy pound of flesh.

But in the cutting it if thou dost shed one drop

of Christian blood,

thy lands and goods are by the laws of Venice

-confiscate unto the state of Venice.

-Oh, upright judge!

He cannot have his pound of flesh without forfeiting his own life,

he must lose his fortune

and worst of all, he is to be converted -

the Jew become a Christian.

No!

No! No, please! No!

What was Shylock thinking?

Did he really believe he could take on the Venetian establishment

and win?

And my brother saw it, because my brother knows me,

I guess, as well as anybody.

I said, "What did you think, Ron?

"Did you think I was going to kill him?"

He said an interesting thing -

he said, "I don't know, I felt like you wanted...

"I felt like you wanted to cut him.

"I think you wanted some blood."

The trial of the modern Jew,

"The trial which never ends," wrote Philip Roth,

begins with the trial of Shylock.

In 2010, the lawyer Anthony Julius wrote a definitive history

of anti-Semitism in England, in which he looked at how much damage

Shakespeare caused with his indefensibly sadistic character.

If you look at the tradition

of what is called in another context the agelast,

the person who actually exists

in order to destroy joy in other people,

the person whose very presence

introduces a kind of chill in the room,

who wipes the smiles off other people's faces,

that's the kind of person that Shylock is.

He stands in that literary tradition.

He brings everyone down.

There is some truth about the joylessness of it,

but not the absence of wit

and mischief, which from the very beginning is there

in the "pound of flesh" proposition, isn't it?

"A pound of flesh from whichever part of your person

"it should please me to take."

Yes, you can't say that doesn't bring a smile to your face.

It's a lethal act.

It carries the certainty, or near certainty, of a protracted torture

-which ends in the death of the victim.

-Yes.

It's a kind of crucifixion.

We don't think he should do it.

No, not that we don't think he should do it,

we recognise what it resonates with

-as an ambition.

-But also, we never see him do it

and we will never properly know whether Shakespeare himself

holds back on that one, not just because of the legalistics.

Is there any possibility that he would have not done it?

Would he definitely have carried it out?

I think there's nothing in the logic of the play

that suggests that the threat was anything other than real.

The Shylock in my novel says, "I just don't know, I can't tell you.

-"The urge was on me to do it."

-I think it's a sentimentality.

I think that's where you depart from...

-Yours is a sentimentality on the other side.

-No, I don't think so.

I think I'm reading it in the grain of the play to recognise

-Shylock's murderousness.

-How murderous was Shylock?

If Shylock was so murderous, how come it was not referred to before?

If Shylock was so murderous, how come people didn't know,

"Don't go near him,"

and when he says, "I'll have a pound of your flesh,"

what history of murderousness in Shylock is there?

Yours is the speech to the jury -

"Members of the jury, look at this angelic man.

-"Is it possible..."

-You know I never said he was an angelic man.

"Could you imagine such a person lifting his hand...?"

Not for one moment would I call him an angelic man.

When Antonio accepts the deal,

does he think, "Oh, fine, I'm going to be fine,

-"I'm not going to be bust..."?

-I think he thinks three things.

First of all, I think he thinks, "In my homoerotic clinch,

"I can demonstrate my love for the very person whom otherwise

"I cannot express my love for,"

by saying, in effect, "I would die for you."

Secondly, he thinks, "I am in a position of such great power

"that no Jew can really threaten me,"

and thirdly, he thinks, "The likelihood of this happening

"is so remote because I am the kind of merchant that I am,"

that it's a safe bet.

But I don't think that he thinks...

.."I can rely on Shylock not to enforce in extremis."

Well, he doesn't have to go as far as that,

but you would think it might have been raised by him

-or his many friends...

-His lawyers?

Just leave lawyers out of it for a minute.

Are you sure anyone agrees with this kind of trade?

-Just pause and look at that phrase.

-In a world without lawyers...

How would you have represented him?

I would have told him not to do the deal.

Wouldn't have been a very good play, then, would it?

THEY CHUCKLE

Once the lawyers have finished with him,

Shylock is left broken, stripped of his dignity, his fortune.

There's no character in Shakespeare who comes in for such a debasement,

his humanity shredded.

It's a magnificent part. I think the play is the problem.

What is that problem?

Well, there are two main halves of the play,

the Portia half and the Shylock half.

Now, when Shakespeare wrote it, it was probably possible

for them to exist side by side.

After the Holocaust, it's not possible to do that,

because anti-Semitism, in Shakespeare's time,

it was perhaps just one of the nasty traits

in humanity.

We now know it can lead to Auschwitz,

so suddenly that side of the play has a weight to it

that completely overbalances the other side.

My whole experience of doing that play over two years

was sort of coming to the conclusion that it don't work any more.

What deepens this historical shadow

is the fact that the otherwise eloquent Shylock

not only loses the argument -

he's virtually struck dumb.

Halfway through the trial, Portia takes over

and Shakespeare doesn't give me anything to say

and that's the toughest part.

I always feel that if Shakespeare were still alive,

I'd be looking out in the orchestra seats during rehearsal saying,

"Come on, Willy, give me some lines."

What dost thou say?

I am content.

Shylock excuses himself from the court,

feeling unwell.

And that will be the last we ever see of him.

Shylock leaves at Act IV and is gone and the play has then got

nowhere to go and nothing to do for another act.

Shakespeare's stuck. It's one of the most spectacular problems -

he has to figure out how to write Act V

and he does it in unbelievably uncomfortable scenes

about castration, about jealousy and adultery,

about the relationship between men and women,

about what you do with a gay lover,

about how to control him and contain him.

You can see Shakespeare working fantastically hard

to try to solve a lot of problems, but as a piece of comedy...

I've seen the play innumerable times,

-I've never seen an Act V that works.

-I now leave.

Could Howard be right?

What's to stay for once Shylock has gone?

MAN SPEAKS LATIN

Credo.

PRIEST SPEAKS LATIN

The Globe production with Jonathan Pryce as Shylock

bravely added a scene at the end, enacting Shylock's conversion.

Shakespeare didn't write this scene.

It realises what he merely implied.

HE GASPS AND WHIMPERS

Seeing the Jew turn Christian is shocking.

Of course, Howard missed it.

PRIEST SPEAKS LATIN

-PRIEST:

-Amen.

Amen!

The punishment is not death, because after all,

it's a capital crime to threaten the life of a citizen of Venice.

He is shown the mercy that he himself denies.

He's forced to convert and work for his daughter...

That's not merciful, it's not merciful, it's a vile mercy.

But he chooses it.

-He chooses it.

-He chooses it instead of having his head cut off.

Why should a man want his head cut off?

Because that's what Shakespeare, again in the logic of the play,

respects, that's what we respect.

After all, if you look at the narratives

of Jewish martyrdom in the First, Second Crusades,

that is exactly how the Jews understood

the choice that was confronting them.

Yes, better to be, says Proverbs, a live dog than a dead lion,

except when you're required to convert

and then it is a sanctification of God's name to accept death

and even in the Jewish tradition,

which is a more complicated, nuanced tradition

than the Christian one, on this point of martyrdom,

there the two traditions agree and that's what's denied to Shylock.

Shylock has been thwarted, humiliated

and some would even say destroyed.

He is finished.

Our hearts hurt after what we've just seen

and there's nothing left now but rancid feelings.

For a writer bringing Shylock's story up to date,

it would be tempting to rethink the knottiest of the play's conundrums -

how to give the old Jew his revenge,

and his pound of a Christian's flesh -

but NOT with a deal that makes him guilty of conspiracy to murder.

Howard has come up with a neat solution.

It would not be murderous to cut off a pound of flesh,

if said flesh was your wayward daughter's

footballer boyfriend's foreskin.

When I was thinking of how I could do this,

I had what I thought was a blinding moment of inspiration.

I suddenly saw what it all meant.

That the pound of flesh is a play upon circumcision.

The cut in the heart means something else.

And Shakespeare understood how explosive on so many levels

that cut was.

That there is proper justification for this.

If there's one thing that I can speak with some authority,

that Elizabethans would've known watching this play,

it's St Paul's... Writing about circumcision,

for Paul, no struggle was greater than the struggle

about his former Jewish nature -

he had been Saul, now he's Paul.

So, as Saul he'd been circumcised.

And as Paul he still was!

He's looking down and he knows...

He's Paul and that's Saul!

So how do you...reconcile that?

You have to come up with a Christian way

that is an equivalent that supersedes this.

And Paul, being the brilliant man and Jew that he was, thought,

"OK, Jews can be circumcised in the flesh," as he puts it,

"but Christians are circumcised symbolically, in the heart."

Did Shakespeare really think of circumcision

as the circumcision of the flesh and heart as those two places?

Absolutely. Would everybody in the audience have thought of that?

-Absolutely.

-Absolutely?

-Absolutely.

So, by the time you get to Act IV,

where he's going to cut from the heart,

it's this wonderful moment

where Shylock's going to circumcise Antonio

in the place where Christians are symbolically circumcised.

"This is where you're symbolically circumcised?

"Let me do it for you."

"Happy to do it for you. It's gonna hurt a little bit."

HOWARD LAUGHS

You say, I think, that the ritual of the circumcision

and the fear of what seems to have grown out of

Gentile misunderstanding of circumcision,

which is that it's akin to castration -

in that the blood libel contains that idea, doesn't it?

When the Gentile's child was killed,

-ritualistically, castration may have happened.

-Yes.

Some people wrote at the time that Jewish men menstruated,

which is why they had to replace lost blood, and kill Christian kids.

Samuel Purkis, Shakespeare's contemporary,

called it "the Jewish crime",

where every year secretly the Jews would get together,

take a Christian child, and first circumcise him and then crucify him.

Now, why circumcise him first?

Why make him into a Jew if you are going to crucify him?

I've never gotten that part of it, but it is part of that fantasy.

So that the Jews take their castrating knife to Christians,

and it's part of the Jewish threat.

So I think the things that Shakespeare is reaching down into

in The Merchant Of Venice,

connects the dots of ritual murder,

of castration, of what Jews threatened to do to Christians,

of what distinguishes Christians from Jews.

Is there any legitimacy at all in talking about it

as an anti-Semitic play?

HE SIGHS

I think the play...

as staged 50 times in Nazi Germany, WAS a deeply anti-Semitic play.

I think, in different times, and in different places

it's Philo-Semitic.

I don't think the play in and of itself bears hatred,

but it becomes a vehicle.

For Jews who come to me and say, "This play should be banned,"

I always say, "Think of it as the canary in the coalmine.

"You'd be much worse off, even if it's an anti-Semitic production,

"because how do you know what they're really thinking about you

"until you watch how they stage this play?"

And that then is your answer to those who say,

"We would've been... The Jews would've been better off

"had this play never been written"?

-The Jews would NOT have been better off.

-The Jews are never better off!

The Jews are never better off - and you know what? -

this way you see it coming.

When Howard brings the 400-year-old Shylock back to life,

it would be fair to assume that his telling

will not be an anti-Semitic one.

Shylock will land right in the centre

of Portia's glittering playground,

Belmont, and this is where Shylock will go toe-to-toe

with those who have wronged him.

So, this is Belmont, then?

It's Cheshire, actually, but is...

We're in Cheshire. Yeah, I thought it would be fun

to come to Cheshire, to this area

known as roughly the Golden Triangle,

as a version of the world that

Portia lives in The Merchant Of Venice.

It's expensive, it is the place now

where Manchester United and Manchester City footballers

live with their wives. I thought it was a good equivalent.

In Shakespeare's play, Portia is Shylock's nemesis.

She seals his fate.

But at the end of Howard's tale, there is a twist.

Portia, alias Plurabelle,

meets her match.

You know, we all know that at the end of Act IV, Shylock goes.

But you were never happy about what happened next.

Shylock, as he appears in my novel,

complains as he would have reason to complain

that he has no Act V.

So I am going to give Shylock his Act V.

But the idea that Portia might have

a less than calm, less than temperate interest in him,

is something I play with.

"She had eyes only for Shylock.

"'God, I love this man,' she thought. 'I fucking love him.'

"'You are not what I thought you were,' she persisted.

"'And what did you think I was?'

"'I don't know, but I would never have imagined...'

"Whatever it was she would never have imagined,

"she couldn't for the moment find the words for it.

"Shylock helped her out - 'That a Jew could be so Christian?'

"She felt that he almost spat the words at her.

"'You saw a Jew and expected nothing of him but cruelty.'

"'I didn't SEE a Jew. I don't go around SEEING Jews.'

"'All right, you saw cruelty, and you gave it a Jewish face.'"

Shylock gets to right the wrongs at the end of your book.

He gets to, sort of, somehow, get the last word.

I don't think I am trying to score any victories.

I am certainly not trying to score any cheap victories.

If the Shylock in my novel is able to say some strong things,

they are no more than the things he has been saying already in the play.

I don't think I depart from the play at all, actually.

"Charity is a Jewish concept.

"So is mercy.

"You took them from us, that is all. You appropriated them.

"They were given freely, but still you had to steal them.

"It is a breathtaking insolence,

"an immemorial act of theft

"from which nothing but sorrow has ever flowed.

"There is blood on your insolence.

"She put a hand on her chest.

"'I feel you have laid a curse on me,' she said.

"'Well, now you know the sensation from the other end,' Shylock said.

"And this time Plurabelle could have sworn

"he did spit on her."

You've been travelling to Venice,

you've met all the great Shakespearean experts,

all the experts on the Merchant,

people who've explored this thing for years.

Has it changed your view, at all?

Yes. Yes.

What I've discovered is that I can't finish.

It has made me go back and rewrite some scenes.

It's not so much caused me to write some scenes out,

it's caused me to write some scenes in.

Shylock, he gets bigger

as I discover more and more different perceptions of him.

The sense of him and his potential gets bigger.

And also, that sense that he is a character for all time.

# Ebben, n'andro lontana... #

It made me realise I can't stop,

and it's almost arbitrary that I have stopped.

If there was any way in which one could write an open-ended novel -

that, you know, every week I add a little bit to -

I would do it.

ARIA CONTINUES

# La fra la neve bianca

# La fra le nubi d'or

# La dove la speranza

# La speranza

# Il rimpianto

# Il rimpianto, e il dolor! #