Frank Benson’s last performance at Stratford, on 16 May 1932, had symbolic as well as emotional significance. In a calculated move to catapult the Festival into the twentieth century, managing director W. Bridges-Adams had invited Russian-born Theodore Komisarjevsky to stage The Merchant as the first guest director at the new Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Komisarjevsky deliberately set out to overturn the pictorial realism, the attention to historical detail, the naturalistic acting, and the moral sententiousness that had characterised Merchants for more than fifty years. Komisarjevsky abhorred the way in which bourgeois theatre had sentimentalised Shylock, and he therefore strove to desentimentalise him. The phrase ‘false social motive’ is the key to Komisarjevsky’s dismissal of the Victorian conception of the play as a study in racial prejudice. Komisarjevsky staged The Merchant as a carnival of denial and found a receptive audience for it.

The Segue surveys major interpretative shifts in the performance of The Merchant of Venice from the 1930s through the second decade of the twenty-first century. It challenges the view of the play as a favourite propaganda tool of the Nazi regime, and contextualises attempts to place it in the service of fascist ideology. An overview of European productions from the rise of fascism through the Second World War reveals a prevalence of philo-Semitic and anti-Nazi readings. Under the different post-war totalitarian regimes, the play mostly disappeared from stage. Radical performances by directors like Peter Zadek, in the 1970s and 1980s, refocused the thinking around Shylock and brought economic clashes to the fore; in the 1990s, Peter Sellars shed light on the connections between economic and racial conflicts. After 1989, a rich panoply of approaches from Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia) grappled with the social and moral crises of the post-communist transition, while new histories of oppression informed productions and adaptations from the Netherlands, France, and Germany. The chapter traces early twenty-first-century processes of revising and fragmenting Shakespeare’s text, of challenging it directly, or appropriating it to speak to the intersecting stories of victimisation of Black and Brown people, Muslims, immigrants, women, queer people, etc. Such radical transformations have used The Merchant as a source for new narratives, not unlike Shakespeare’s treatment of his own sources.

The chapter explores Trevor Nunn’s 1999 Merchant of Venice, at the Royal National Theatre in London, a production positioned within the post-Holocaust performance tradition. Its action was set between the two World Wars, in the 1930s Weimar Republic, with Venice imagined as a Mittel-European place, teetering on the brink of the Holocaust. Scene and text transpositions created new situations and unexpected twists to character relationships. Casting was pointedly employed to give depth to racial and ethnic social interrelations. Key to Nunn’s interpretative approach was the palpable sense of a social milieu and his capacity to lay bare the instabilities and weaknesses of all characters, allowing for shifts of empathy. Bassanio was a decent character, which enabled a genuine emotional relationship with Portia. Portia’s biases and charm were also finely balanced. A darkly scintillating Shylock was a lonely adversary to Antonio who was erotically attracted to Bassanio. Scenes of Jewish domesticity alternated with rowdy public ones. Nunn offered a directorial view of Merchant, in a production responsive to the rich colours of the play, the challenges of class, race, and patriarchy. Along with anti-Semitism, it presented a web of societal hierarchies, and probed latent and overt xenophobia, racism, and patriarchal attitudes.

The spectre of Henry Irving hovered uncannily over the National Theatre’s 1970 production of The Merchant of Venice. Jonathan Miller, a theatrical iconoclast with an interest in social history far keener than Laurence Olivier’s, located the roots of modern prejudice not in theology, but in economic theory and power relations. For him, as for Irving, The Merchant should not pander to popular prejudices with comic stereotypes, but promote ‘a feeling of dignity and austerity’; it should eschew romantic artifice in order to ‘search for reality’. By updating the play to 1880, Olivier appropriated Shakespeare’s text to explore a society in which the economic and social tensions emergent in Elizabethan England had become more intricate and codified. In order to refashion the play as a realistic portrait of late Victorian society, Miller had to adjust Shakespeare’s text.

In performance, perhaps no play by Shakespeare has been subject to the pressures of history (or, in the words of Jonathan Miller, ‘held hostage to contemporary issues’) more forcibly than The Merchant of Venice. Particularly since Irving’s landmark production of 1879, treatment of Shylock has focused the attention of Western audiences on the question of whether the play is anti-Semitic. If Arnold Wesker, however indirectly, exposes Shakespeare’s text as both a product and a cause of anti-Semitism, others have more blatantly implicated The Merchant of Venice in the history of Jewish oppression by calling into question the purposes for which it has been performed. Furthermore, events of the past century have attached new meanings to events within the play and have compelled audiences to view The Merchant through the lens of Jewish history. Shakespeare knew that the proof of a play was in performance.

The chapter analyses Peter Zadek’s sustained engagement with The Merchant of Venice, focusing on three of his landmark performances, which challenged the facile philo-Semitic approach to the play, dominant in German productions after the Second World War. In Ulm (1961) and Bochum (1972), the avant-garde director enhanced the entertainment qualities of the play to attract young and working-class audiences, whom he confronted with a vision of Shylock as both a grotesque exaggeration and a vulnerable human being. Even as anti-Semitic stereotypes, reminiscent of Nazi appropriations of the Elizabethan comic villain, shocked theatre-goers, the larger aesthetic mixed grotesque representation with playful irony. The desired effect was to provoke the audience to adopt morally uncomfortable attitudes to the characters and conflicts, and then to compel them to reconsider them. In the influential 1988 production for the Vienna Burgtheater, such ludic provocativeness was replaced with a disciplined study of the corporate operators of the global financial marketplace. Polished and pragmatic, Shylock (performed by Gert Voss) was an indelible part of the world of financial power brokers. Moreover, his dignified exit suggested that he would be returning with the means and determination to win the next battle with his competitors. Revived by the famed Berliner Ensemble, televised, and produced for festival tours in Paris and Edinburgh, this global Merchant dramatised the more insidious manifestations of anti-Semitism, while subverting naturalised notions of a Jewish identity as victimhood.

If the test of a good production is that it brings new insight into a play and prompts audiences to return to the text, then Henry Irving’s Merchant was triumphant. Irving was the foremost actor-manager of the nineteenth century. This implies things about the organisation of his theatre that were instrumental in his production of The Merchant. The artistic hegemony inherent in the actor-manager system reflected the patriarchal structure of Victorian culture in general i.e., the submission of all members of a family to the will of the father. Primary focus, therefore, was on the talents of one individual, not on an entire company as in Shakespeare’s theatre: there were no ‘sharers’ at Irving’s Lyceum. This narrative reveals two things: first, the Victorians’ fascination with historical accuracy in their stage productions, and second, their attempt to bring a realistic awareness of cultural difference to the portrayal of ‘the other’.

Ten years after his production for the National Theatre, Jonathan Miller had the opportunity to produce The Merchant of Venice again, this time for the BBC as part of its ambitious plan to record all of Shakespeare’s plays. Citing the work of recent social historians, he set out to reconstruct the fundamental ‘Elizabethanism’ of the plays, creating for each one a sort of period verisimilitude that would demonstrate how Shakespeare engaged the social and political attitudes of his audience. Television thus helped Miller to fulfil his ambition of fashioning The Merchant as a naturalistic nineteenth-century drama suitable for Masterpiece Theatre. Miller had elected to sacrifice the public dimension of Shakespeare’s traditionally climactic scene in order to achieve the naturalism he thought television required. The theatrical fictions of the play worked against Miller’s use of the medium. A number of critics found director Jack Gold’s Merchant balanced, simple, direct, and inoffensive.

Bill Alexander’s production of The Merchant for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987, revived the following year in London, grappled with the play’s offensive subject matter more daringly than any production. Refusing either to rehabilitate Shylock as the play’s moral standard-bearer (as Miller had done in 1970) or to treat him from a safe historical distance as a comic ‘Elizabethan’ Jew (as Miller had done in 1980), Alexander courted controversy, seeming almost to invite accusations of racism. Alexander modulated the dynamics of audience response. In an interview for Drama Antony Sher, who played Shylock, noted with dismay that audiences spontaneously applauded this moment. Alexander’s Merchant calls the conception of bigotry into question: it assumes that, for all our good intentions, for all our rhetoric of tolerance, deeply ingrained and unacknowledged cultural stereotypes continue to shape our responses to racial, religious, and sexual otherness.