I’m not even going to bother linking to this, since we probably all know the story.  Some students over in the UK refuses to take their Shakespeare exams because of the anti-Semitism in Merchant of Venice.  The thing is, the exam itself was on The Tempest, MoV wasn’t even part of the curriculum.  They were making a statement about the entirety of Shakespeare’s canon, not just the one play.  And, that these were some sort of national standings exams, so their failure to take them resulted in their school tumbling in the standings. Here’s my opinion. I think they’re stupid and they deserve to fail. Too strong? I’m not a fan, at all, of close-mindedness.  Let’s assume for the minute that you have actually read MoV and come to your own conclusions that Shakespeare is anti-Semitic, and this bothers you greatly.  You owe it to yourself, then, to learn more about the man’s work, to see if this is a theme that permeates his entire literary output, or if it is instead just a single character in a single play.  To simply say “I didn’t like this play therefore I refuse to read anything by him, regardless of the cost to myself or my school” is … misguided? At best. That doesn’t even bring up the question of whether MoV is actually anti-Semitic at all, and if so, whether that also means that Shakespeare was.  Some people dismiss it with a simple “those were the times, everybody was anti-Semitic back then.”  Personally I don’t think it’s that simple.  I think that Shakespeare was showing us anti-Semitism as a mirror up to ourselves and saying “Don’t you get how ugly you come off looking?  Are you missing the basic hypocrisy, here?”  He didn’t just draw a character and stick a big Jew sign on him, he gave us a very complex individual.  A father who lost a daughter, for one.  Shylock may come off as a bad guy, sure, but is that because of his own nature, or because that is the role that the rest of society forces him into? The play is supposed to be a comedy, so it’s a reasonable assumption that Shakespeare was not trying to hammer us over the head with his life lessons.  But I have to wonder, did people walk out of there thinking, “Well, you have to have a little sympathy for the Jew, don’t you?”  It goes back to a regular topic here on this blog about the timeliness of Shakespeare’s message, and whether his audiences just wanted a simple play where they could spot the good guy from the bad guy, or whether it was more complex than that.  It seems a very great irony in stories like this that we’ve become just as simple, haven’t we?  Only we’ve become the worse for it.  Dear god in heaven he portrayed a Jew in a negative light, therefore he must be anti-Semitic!  It can’t possibly be more complex than that!  Quick, compare him to Hitler!  (I’m not kidding, earlier today I read a blog post that compared this issue to what it would be like if Hitler wrote a nice romantic comedy in his youth.  NOT THE SAME THING!)

As I force my way through The Shakespeare Wars I come to the chapter on the original spelling argument.  It goes a little something like this — there were no rules of spelling in Shakespeare’s time, so modern editors have actually been losing a good portion of what Shakespeare meant when they ‘clean it up’.  When he spelled a word one way, he did it for a reason.  Want a simple example?  You know in Hamlet we were all taught that the line either goes “O that this too, too solid flesh” or “sullied flesh”?  And depending on which you picked, it means a different thing?  The original spelling argument suggests that Shakespeare would have spelled the word in such a way that it meant both, simultaneously.  Not only was he a genius with words, but he actually packed multiple meaning into each word. That might be oversimplified, and I’m sure the experts in the audience can correct me, but I wanted to introduce the topic for those not familiar. My first thought on the subject is that I want to go back in time and punch my ninth grade English teacher in the nose.  The same person who taught us that there were no spelling rules, and that Shakespeare’s name alone is recorded 36 different ways, went on to give us the solid/sullied lecture as if, in that case, it had to be one or the other and darnit we need to know which one in order to properly understand Shakespeare. But my second thought is – are we hoping for a bit too much, here? Remember that we have almost nothing in Shakespeare’s original hand.  There’s just no way to know for sure that a word is spelled a certain way because Shakespeare wanted to spell it that way, or because an editor did it, or because it is just coincidence.  It’s intriguing, sure – but I think it borders on religious argument, the kind with no meaningful way to advance beyond “I hope this is true, because it would be cool.” I’ll close up this post with a story.  Years ago, when I was in high school, a friend and I kept a sort of personal “quote of the day” file on the school computers (this being well before even local networks, and we kept it as a single file on a single computer).  During breaks we would take turns coming up with jokes and random silly phrases and then compare notes.  At one point he tapped me on the shoulder and showed me his latest – he’d typed in the alphabet.  “Odd,” I thought, thinking that I did not get the joke.  Then I read it again, and realized he’d left out the letter Q.  “I like it,” I told him. Years later, well after we’d graduated, we are hanging out in his basement with some other friends from school.  “Remember that list of sayings you guys used to have?” someone asked.  We’d printed it, you see, and it had circulated around the school.  Conversation then turned to remembering the various phrases.  So I told the story of how at first I though that Joe had typed in the alphabet, but how it was actually a commentary on the uselessness of the letter Q.  You don’t even realize it’s not there. Joe was in the room.  “I FORGOT THE Q?????” he asked.  Turns out it was just a typo, he really had meant to type the whole alphabet. “Oh, then, I guess my interpretation was wrong,” I said. “Actually, it shows that it was completely accurate,” Joe said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/7230683.stm If you’re wondering where you’ve heard the name Fletcher, he’s thought to have collaborated with Shakespeare on Cardenio, as well as Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen. The painting completes the National Portrait Gallery’s collection of writers that includes Shakespeare, Ben Johnson and John Donne.

Watching Season 2 of Slings & Arrows, the episode where they’re doing Macbeth and Romeo&Juliet basically simultaneously. Can I just say?  Every time somebody speaks a line of the dialogue, shivers go right up my spine.  Every single time.   And I wouldn’t have it any other way.   I can only imagine what you people who act and direct this stuff feel.   P.S. I did NOT love the final Macbeth they ended up with.  The stage combat was good, but most of the rest didn’t do it for me, what with all the build up.  Oh well.