Collaborative Spectacle: Designing The Merchant in the Ghetto

Karin Coonrod describes Compagnia de’ Colombari as an ‘international collective’ that ‘generates spectacle wherever we go’ – a collaboration of energy, creativity and theatricality nourished by different cultures, histories, traditions, disciplines and techniques. In this chapter we hear from three theatre makers whose collaborative work on The Merchant ‘in’ Venice shaped the ‘spectacle’ of this production. Designing its costumes (Stefano Nicolao), music (Frank London) and lighting (Peter Ksander), they established how this production looked and sounded and designed a world for the actors to inhabit.

The Merchant ‘in’ Venice and The Shylock Project: Fiction, History, and the Humanities

The 2016 production of The Merchant of Venice staged a comedy famous for its antisemitic expressions in a place of symbolic significance to Jews, whose tragic history has resulted from exactly such sentiments. How, then, do we reconcile the experience of fiction with the claims of history? Certain of the production’s values created the sense of an aesthetically self-contained artifact, yet the performance also took place against the looming, inescapable realism of the ghetto itself – a tension that can be felt, too, in activities related to the production. Illuminated here is the power of humanities public events to reinvigorate, through questioning, the life of the human community.

Shylock, Our Contemporary

Offering a personal reflection on the experience of seeing ‘seven Shylocks on a single day’ in Venice in the summer of 2016 this essay takes the form of an itinerary through three separate events related to the 500th anniversary of the establishment of the Ghetto of Venice. Footage of Laurence Olivier at the Doge’s Palace, the performance of the “Hath not a Jew Eyes?” speech in a “Mock Appeal: Shylock v. Antonio”, and the five Shylocks who appeared in Karin Coonrod’s production of The Merchant of Venice performed in the Ghetto, inspire a lively review and ironical companion piece to Sinclair’s posthumous anthology, Shylock Must Die.

The Actors Speak

The Merchant ‘in’ Venice brought together an international cast of actors. In this chapter six of them recall the experience of workshopping then rehearsing Shakespeare’s play for the site-specific production they brought to the Ghetto in 2016. They think about the pressures of place – speaking these lines in this location – and of history; the challenges of working in several languages and cutting the script to two hours’ running time; the existential trouble of doubling characters who look like opposites; the excitement of inhabiting their roles and reaching their audiences. They reveal the production from the experience of living inside it.

Trying Portia

Extraordinary in itself, the 2016 performance of The Merchant in the Venetian Ghetto produced an equally extraordinary collateral performance. Staged in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, a ‘Mock Appeal in the Matter of Shylock v. Antonio’ was heard by a bench presided over by Ruth Bader Ginsberg. A curious aspect of the Appeal was that Portia made an appellee. This essay investigates the decision to try Portia. What cultural, political, religious needs were served by bringing Portia into court? Thinking about Justice and Mercy, law, bonds, and love, this essay asks: when the verdict was pronounced, was antisemitism recuperated by misogyny?

‘Antonio, il Mercante della Nostra Storia’: Adapting The Merchant of Venice for Italian Children

This essay discusses the challenges of adapting Shakespeare’s play in narrative form for young readers. It cites the history of such adaptation, thinking about the ‘set of instructions’ authors have provided child readers to respond to the problematic elements of the play (usury, religious and personal prejudice, mercenary marriages, homosexual attraction, cuckoldry). It tracks Tosi’s experience of translating/adapting the play and examines the narrative and ideological choices she made in her illustrated version (2015). The power of this story for children, Tosi argues, lies in its potential to ask questions relevant to their lives today.

Playing the Angles: Finding Shylock and Gratiano

Written by one of the only members of Compagnia de Colombari who worked on Coonrod’s Merchant in all of its iterations, this chapter gives a jobbing actor’s account of the 2016 production from its pre-life to its afterlife. For Sorab Wadia, the most daunting challenge was to double Shylock, the dignified Venetian moneylender in the opening scene, with Gratiano, the spitting Jew-baiter of the rest of the play. He could not reconcile the two parts, but he found, in rehearsing and performing them, how they – and the play – needed each other. Being in this play, he thinks, is like finding yourself in a George Braque painting.

Shylock’s Mock Appeal

“What ceremony else?” asks Laertes in Hamlet. This essay raises the same question as regards the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and recounts Jacobson’s experience of The Merchant of Venice events in Venice that year. In particular, he reviews the “Mock Appeal in the Matter of Shylock versus Antonio” held in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, presided by Ruth Bader Ginsburg observing that “there was both absurdity and gravitas in having the infamous bond dissected by experts in the field”.

“Shylock is Dead”: Shakespeare In and Beyond the Ghetto

This essay relates the genesis of the project that led to the first performance of The Merchant of Venice in the Ghetto of Venice in 2016, the year of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the 500th anniversary of the foundation of the Ghetto, the site that provided the world with the concept of the ‘ghetto’. The essay puts the relationship between Shakespeare and the Ghetto in historical perspective, starting from W.D. Howells’s visit to the Ghetto in the 1860s, through the point of view of a young Jewish Italian admirer of Shakespeare before and during Fascism, to the post-War transformations of the Ghetto and the present day.