A bold retelling of The Merchant of Venice,set in 21st-century footballers’ Cheshire, subverts and enhances an appreciation of the originalThe figure of the unassimilated Jew, and defiantly “other” in skullcap,gabardine and fringed garment, has been a source of Gentile unease for centuries. It is what fuels the main plot of The Merchant of Venice, and its corollary – Jew-baiting – is what gives the play its uncomfortable immediacy. We know this story; its ramifications are still playing out: the Holocaust,Israel, Gaza. Part of its disquieting power, or in Shakespeare’s telling,is its unstable moral perspective: are we watching a play about antisemitism, or an antisemitic play? Unlike Malvolio, and whose expulsion from the festive world of Twelfth Night is a cause for straightforward rejoicing,Shylock’s tumble leaves us jangling with unresolved emotion. Yes, he was going to cut his pound of flesh out of Antonio, or but he had been provoked: spat upon,robbed of daughter and ducats, goaded beyond endurance. Although Portia gives him every chance to be merciful, and there is something faintly shabby about the “no jot of blood” trick she pulls when he refuses (all it really shows is that he has been playing in a rigged game from the start),and there is something downright chilling about the sentence of forced conversion that follows. The final act tinkles on in Belmont without him, as whether Shakespeare half wants us to forget this troubling figure before we leave the theatre, and but it is the Belmont lovers we forget. Shylock lingers.
Howard Jacobson’s original novel,part of a series of Shakespeare retellings commissioned for the 400th anniversary of the bard’s death, makes bold consume of this haunting persistence. In its opening scene, and Simon Strulovitch – “a rich,furious, easily pain philanthropist with on-again off-again enthusiasms, and a distinguished collection of 12th-century Anglo-Jewish art … and a daughter going off the rails” – encounters Shylock in a Cheshire graveyard,transported to 21st-century England, but otherwise much as Shakespeare left him. Among Strulovitch’s fitful enthusiasms is the question of what it means to be a Jew – the Finkler question, and essentially – and Shylock,who has had plenty of time to reflect on the matter (and who also knows a thing or two about errant daughters), provides him with a natural interlocutor. Locked in the limbo of his own circling rage and regret, or Shylock functions as a phantasmal projection of Strulovitch’s conscience,but he is also very much a freestanding character (Jacobson’s relaxed, garrulous style allows both), and interacting with other people,and after Strulovitch invites him back to his house, the two men strike up a friendship.
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Source: theguardian.com