The Merchant of Venice – aftermath, part one

My last posts had an unexpected aftermath as my friend read them and commented on them by e-mail, and, of course, I answered, and it went on … I’ll transfer the e-mail exchange to my blog because it is the best exchange about Shakespeare I ever had in writing, and I think that it contains a lot of issues for further discussion in this blog.

Hello Claudia,

This weekend I actually resumed the renovation work in my bathroom, washed my windows, finished the blog about the “Merchant of Venice” AND read “Julius Caesar”. My synopsis - after my favourite cleverspook from the tenth series (“Bad people want to kill us”):

“Idiots stabbed Caesar and then themselves.”

Of course there is always SOMETHING to enjoy in Shakespeare, in this case the speech Marc Anthony makes to stir up the people of Rome to revolt. This one became famous for a reason: “… but Brutus is an honorable man …”

As I saw that somebody read my first posts on the “Merchant of Venice”, and that somebody can only be you: regrettably, these are just the “run up”. What we talked about when we met last week is in the fourth post which I posted right now.

Cheers

Barbara

Hi

So, I read your posts, and even though I don’t know the play, as usual, I have my own opinion  ;-)

The problem with the play is of course, from our perspective, the Jew Shylock, who didn’t pose a problem at the time because it was agreed anyway that he is evil, and the enforced baptism at the end was seen as a blessing. I ask myself (without having read it) if we are going in a totally wrong direction if we are looking at the play from a contemporary “humanitarian” perspective. When all is done there is just a father who stands in the way of true love and who wants to kill somebody for revenge and is looking for legal justification of this atrocity. Somebody who just CAN’T do the right thing and persists in his bad ways though he ought to know better. Maybe the play could be performed without showing Shylock as a Jew (of course the text always mentions his religion, but – you know what I mean? Show Shylock mainly as a bad father and evil person). It might be clearer then that it is about relationships (Antonio - Bassanio, Bassanio - Portia, fathers – daughters) and not about a Jew. The title makes it clear, in my opinion: the play isn’t about Shylock – as we tend to think now, after the Holocaust.

(I have to insert a footnote here already, though I didn’t want to do this, but I have to preserve my reaction to this for further use. The first time I read this I didn’t realize what a perfect synopsis of the Shylock storyline it contains – from a historic perspective and FROM A COMEDY ANGLE. And I had some kind of “flash” right now about how important it is to look at the play from this angle FIRST – which I didn’t. As usual, it was somewhere in the back of my head, but I just skipped it where I should have looked longer. This I did now, and it made me suddenly see clearly why I always come to love a Shakespeare comedy, having hated it at first.

And there is a second issue, even more general, which is about KNOWING a Shakespeare play WITHOUT READING IT.)

And one other thing: I don’t like your criticism of Kenneth at all  ;-)) Though I haven’t seen the film for a long time it will always be my favourite film. In this case it isn’t so much about the content as about the auditive aestetics (is this a word?). For me text and music are inseparable, I can’t quote the text without hearing the music at the same time. It is just my favourite opera!

And you don’t like Jeremy Irons? Just that voice …

Cheers

Claudia

Hi

Now work got the better of me – the interface being “down” in the morning, I couldn’t work properly anyway, but here is a lot to discuss. Maybe I’ll write a post as an answer to it, I would like that, but this will take weeks, things continuing as crazy as they are now.

At the moment I can’t deal with this complexity anyway, but I reckon that I can make some kind of answer tomorrow in the morning. The only thing I can agree upon without thinking: the soundtrack of “Henry V” really is great!

Bye

Barbara

Good morning,

Still my many (work and life) projects are overtaking me, and it appears as if there is a new one added every day. (Mobile phone, bike not working, eighteenth birthday … everything has to be taken care of. And there would be just enough at work already.)

I liked the “favourite opera”! I described in my post how I felt about the film when I first saw it, and I think, if people react to a text like this, in any case there is a great text. I had no intention to deny this. And at the time, I think, it was really something special. There wasn’t anything great “by” Shakespeare on TV or in the cinema but for Kenneth Branagh. For years I have been thinking about finally watching an opera (I could do it in the cinema!) but I never did it, probably because I know that it is not my thing. And I think that it is one of the greatest things about Shakespeare that so many people still love his plays for totally different reasons. I think I came very close to my own reasons in these last posts. What the RSC does – even if it is not good! – moves me much more – rationally AND emotionally – than what Kenneth Branagh does.

And Jeremy Irons just strikes me as kind of “empty” every time I see him, but I never like to say something like this about an actor as, obviously, he doesn’t have this effect on other people. Yesterday I saw “The Death of Stalin” – for the second time WITH subtitles because when I saw it at the Cinema without subtitles I didn’t really understand anything and couldn’t even really enjoy Simon Russell Beale. He played a very disagreeable character – the head of Secret Services, Beria – but I left the cinema filled with pure joy because of his beautiful acting. I think I finally noticed that he is the second actor, besides Richard Armitage, who has unlimited credit with me. And in both cases I know exactly how this came to pass. They both did something which I will always be deeply grateful for. (If there actually is something I don’t like about their acting I can always think of an excuse.) And this personal angle is certainly there in your relationship with Kenneth Branagh as an actor.

Have a nice day!

Barbara

Good morning Barbara,

You are right, nowadays I don’t see Kenneth as a director who can give me new insights in a Shakespeare play or can induce me to think about it. He is rather one to seek the “comfort zone”, though he sometimes takes risks, for example “As You Like It” in Japan at the beginning of the 20^th century, or “Romeo and Juliet” in Italy. None of these decisions, in my opinion, contributes to a better understanding of the play.

Nonetheless he will always be the one who changed my life with “Henry V” and “Much Ado …” – my love of Shakespeare couldn’t have developed without him, who initiated a wave of Shakespeare films in the wake of “Henry V”. The moment I saw this film for the first time was one of the top ten moments of my life!

(Here is also something important I realized right now. Though I was certainly impressed by “Henry V” in the cinema, or Patrick Stewart as Claudius on TV, my love of Shakespeare initially developed READING his plays, not seeing them, not even in the theatre. It didn’t seem that important at the time, apparently, because I never went to London just to see Shakespeare played, even when it was still something I could afford. And there results a difference, I think, in how we are reading them now, as to WHAT we are reading and as to what we like – though we often have the same opinion about a performance, or even, obviously, about the contribution of Kenneth Branagh to the Shakespeare universe …)

Jeremy Irons I know from “Brideshead Revisited” which was produced in the 80^th. So he was still young then. In fact, I don’t even know any films with him, I just heard his voice once and that did it. I couldn’t make it this year, but I would have loved to go to London and see him in “A Long Day’s Journey into the Night”! But you can’t have everything …

Another e-mail about “The Merchant of Venice” will follow.

Cheers

Claudia

(There is a part of the exchange missing. Nothing vital, I think. I remember that I repeated my opinion that there wasn’t anything cool “by” Shakespeare at the time apart from what Kenneth Branagh produced and remarked that I am still pissed off that “In the Bleak Midwinter” isn’t available on DVD – (which was one of my top ten cinema moments at the time, though I cannot recall why.) But I might have commented more enthusiastically on top ten Shakespeare moments from where I am standing now – because at least what Simon Russell Beale did to deserve unlimited credit was all about Shakespeare. I didn’t really realize it before “The Tempest”, but there had already been the “Not mad!” moment in his “Lear” and, before that, his Falstaff in “The Hollow Crown”. And, thinking about the “unlimited credit”, I realized that there is another actor who “won” it by playing Richard III the way I would have played him if I could: Ralph Fiennes. I realized it when I saw him as Voldemort after that, and I am especially pleased because he was an actor I never liked, even though I had had proof of how good he is. The thing about the unlimited credit is that there has to be something very personal as an initiation – like with Richard Armitage, when I realized that he understood the dwarves EXACTLY AS I DID, or when Simon Russell Beale proved to me that these “moments” or characters in Shakespeare can be played the way I IMAGINE THEM – that you can cut through the “surface” like this and strike “at the heart”. And Richard III is still the most important character for me in “Shakespeare”, probably because there is the greatest “concentration” of what I love most about Shakespeare, especially his deep understanding of the “evil mind”, and the “bad” humour and wicked irony, everything stripped to the bone until “the truth” is laid bare. And then, when this has happened and I have been moved in this way, I always expect them to do it again. And only when I have proof that they can, apparently, they get unlimited credit. I realized how this works thinking about how skeptical I was about the “Red Dragon” (even after “The Crucible”!) and, recently, seeing Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort and Simon Russell Beale as Beria. These three have definitely passed the test. I KNOW now that they will always “do it” when they get the chance to be the actor they want to be. I am sure that there are many actors who COULD make it (I think I have a list!), but if they ever will obviously depends on “getting through” to me in the way I described.)

I realize that this will again be too long for one post, so: to be continued …