(Warning — long posting/review)

I managed to catch the new Michael Radford/Al Pacino “Merchant of Venice” film on Monday, and I found a lot to like about this production. The text of the play is sensitively edited and converted into an acceptable screenplay. Much of the text that is necessarily sort of declamatory on stage is rendered “naturalistically” (that is, as naturalistically as possible) for cinema, and that’s okay by me.

I have lots of reservations about Pacino’s Shylock — I found myself wishing he had done the part with his characteristic Urban American/Italian-American voice, which would have been less of a distraction. Besides, this play *is* set in an Italian city, after all. Also, I’m skeptical of efforts to make Shylock’s accent “authentic” when he is, after all, speaking English verse with (or against) a bunch of other actors who are speaking the same verse with English accents. (Even Shakespeare’s English wouldn’t sound too terribly English to us — what we know of 16th-century English phonetics is that the language sounded a bit more like Dutch back then.)

I’m reminded of the TV miniseries “Playing Shakespeare,” which is now 20 years old. In one episode, Patrick Stewart read Shylock’s lines with his regular English-accented voice (now a frequent voice-over on car commercials as well as being identified forever with “Star Trek”), while David Suchet gave a very Yiddish/Hebraic cast to the text. I prefer Stewart’s reading — it’s clearer, and the sense of the lines emerges more easily.

I must say I liked Lynn Collins’s Portia rather better than I thought I would. (She’s a Texas native, says IMDb!) I’m not sure how much of a feminist icon I would make Portia, though, since the movie reminds me how much of the play she spends in thrall to her dead father’s wishes (she’d marry the wrong man if he picked the right casket), and she caps this subplot with a pledge to make her new husband, Bassanio, be her lord and king. I note also that Belmont seems to have better spirit-gum technology than Venice does — Portia’s beard is more convincing than Jeremy Irons’s shag-carpet moustache, at least in the courtroom scene.

Still, in spite of my reservations, I found myself liking this adaptation of “Merchant” better than I thought I would. Which gives rise to the question of whether “Merchant” is inherently an anti-Semitic play. I think the answer here, in contrast with some other critics, has to be no. Now, before anyone rains down contradictions on me, let me explain. I do think Shakespeare and his audience had immense fear, ignorance, and prejudice about Jews. That’s indisputable. I also think the play was taken by its original audience as anti-Semitic, and almost certainly was played that way during the first couple of centuries of its performance. That’s indisputable too.

The problem is that Shakespeare builds stories and characters that are more complex than sociological reductivism would allow — that’s why “The Merchant of Venice” still finds audiences in the shadow of the Holocaust. Even most of the obvious anti-Semitism is removed from the character itself and displaced onto obvious bigots. When we see Shylock bewail the loss of his daughter and his money, it’s clear that the betrayal is more personal than financial — what pains him most is that the ring his daughter stole was a remembrance of his wife, Leah, and that loss stings more when he hears that it was traded away for a monkey. (Radford makes a point of demonstrating that this rumor is false, although the play does not do so; Radford’s interpolation is more consistent with the character of Jessica as we see her, though.) We’re told only by an unreliable narrator that Shylock is bewailing the loss of his ducats just as much as the loss of his daughter, but Shakespeare does not *show* us anything so simple.

Radford’s additions include introductory text that tells us something about the Ghetto of Venice, and he actually shows Antonio spitting on Shylock in the marketplace — which might seem to be a 21st-century attempt to make Shylock’s plight more sympathetic, except that this incident is rooted in the very text itself (Shylock recounts it later in Antonio’s presence, and the merchant doesn’t challenge it.)

The play also shows us that Shylock can’t be driven by avarice, or at least not in any simple way — Shylock’s first overture is to offer the loan without interest to Antonio, if only Antonio will agree to be a friend to Shylock. Antonio spurns this offer. That too is in the text.

It is hard for me to imagine how a play set in the period of the Ghetto of Venice could be anything other than colored with the anti-Semitism of that culture. I think Shakespeare cannot be faulted for this. What Shakespeare does instead is give us a range of characters from Shylock on down, all of whom are recognizably human, fully human, and ultimately impossible to dismiss. (And don’t forget that there is no racist core for this anti-Semitism — otherwise, Lorenzo could not marry Jessica and would not even want to.) Since anti-Semitism is, at its heart, a philosophy aimed at dismissing the humanity of Jews, I think the play is not inherently anti-Semitic.

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