The Merchant of Venice on the Renaissance stage

Jennifer Woytach ‘07

            To understand individual performances of Shakespeare’s plays, one must understand Shakespeare first and then the selected play.

            William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, was an actor and a playwright. His work was intended for the stage. Over the course of his career, he wrote thirty-seven plays on topics he himself had known and seen as an actor. William Poel stated that “Shakespeare and his companions were inspired by the prolific energies of their day. Their material was their own and their neighbours’ experiences, and their plays were shaped to suit the theatre of the day and no other” (5).

            Poel’s statement can be easily identified as true, as during Shakespeare’s time, there were social issues concerning money lending, trading practices, class discrimination, and persecution. The Merchant of Venice, supposedly written between 1596-1598, is a comedy. The social issues previously mentioned are all what make The Merchant of Venice stand out more than some of Shakespeare’s other work.

             The total volume of Shakespeare’s work is immense. His collection of plays is noted for their lack of formal stage directions, aside from suggesting action in the actors’ lines.  Urkowitz points out: “Very soon you start to notice just how much attention Shakespeare pays to the mechanics of gesture and the subtle stylistics of moving actors around and on and off the relatively empty platform stages of the English Renaissance” (43).

             The Merchant of Venice has examples of Shakespeare’s spoken staging. When Portia is searching for a husband to unlock the chosen casket, there are numerous lines that indicate the course of the staging direction.

Morocco uses an obvious “Thus losers part” before he exits and Portia herself uses “Draw the curtains, go” in II.vii. Aragon says, “Give me a key for this, and instantly unlock my futures here,” as he opens the silver casket in II.ix. Though apparent examples of Shakespeare’s technique, it is still noteworthy that he depends on the actors lines alone for stage direction.

            The setting for Shakespeare’s stage must also be taken into consideration when evaluating Renaissance performances. “Shakespeare’s theater was unlike our own. Audiences stood or sat very close to a bare, thrust stage, and such intimacy fostered a participatory pact between actors and audience in which actors relied on the audience to piece out a performance’s imperfections with their thoughts” (Bulman 6).

            Styan provides the “irreducible ingredients of the Elizabethan theatre.” An enclosing auditorium, a platform (as deep as it is wide), two upstage entrances on platform, and at least one balcony are what Elizabethan theatres consisted of (12).

            Theatres during the Renaissance were, as Bulman and Styan noted, very large and open, with the audience very close to the stage. During this period Shakespeare, as did other directors, used little or no scenery and/or props. The audience truly had to pay attention to and depend on the actors in order to follow the plot.

David also makes an observation about the theatre. “The physical conformation of the Elizabethan stage happened to provide the three conditions, the flexibility, the lack of obstruction to continuity of performance, the intimacy between actor and audience, that are essential to the presentation of Elizabethan drama” (229).

It is also suggested that Shakespeare was not simply just following en suite of how plays should be directed. Styan also proposes: “Shakespeare’s theater practice, the handling of actors and audience, each exploration of the stage’s possibilities, suggests that he was fighting to free himself from conventional restrictions, with each new play his drama is enlarged: the actor is forced to review his craft, the spectator forced to a new response, the possibilities of the stage are flexed” (8).

If The Merchant of Venice was Shakespeare’s way to move away from what was conventional during this period, it seemed to work for him. Still renowned for the written portion of the play, the performance history has spanned the last 400 years. Researching Renaissance performance and being overwhelmed with text not only suggesting a comparison with modern stage performances, but also film versions, was surprising. Going from reading the text and seeing a modern reproduction, to learning about the Renaissance period itself and how dramatic plays were performed, and focusing exclusively on The Merchant of Venice gives one an appreciation for the amount of research previously done on all aspects of Shakespeare and his work.

               Today’s audience suffers another loss in modern performances of The Merchant of Venice, and any other Shakespeare work. The distance of today’s audience and the closeness that a Renaissance audience had to the stage contrasts greatly. As previously noted, a Renaissance audience was seated very close to the stage and performance. Styan noted: “The pressure which intimacy puts upon an audience is a special factor in itself. The spectator is compelled to pay a closer attention to what is said and done on the stage” (15).

An audience in this period would have been more attentive and more appreciative of the actors’ work as well as Shakespeare’s text. “But he used the resources of a sophisticated theater to express, in his idyllic comedies and in his clowns’ ironic misrule, the experience of moving to humorous understanding through saturnalian release” (Barber 3-4).

“In such productions, The Merchant becomes a fairy tale wherein characters are types, action is allegorical, and Belmont proves as theatrically credible as Venice,” Bulman said (3).

               Barber offered: “The play’s large structure is developed from traditions which are properly theatrical; it is not a theatrical adaptation of a social ritual” (166). Is Barber’s commentary accurate? Is The Merchant of Venice simply a theatrical performance made to entertain those during the Renaissance? Or is the “large structure” really larger? Is this a commentary on Shakespeare’s feeling on Jews or is he speaking on behalf of English society?

I disagree with Barber’s argument that The Merchant of Venice was not based on common European practices and social customs and made solely for entertainment purposes with no truth implied. This play has been widely performed since being written over 400 years ago. Even though Shakespeare’s plays were written for the stage and were best performed in their years surrounding their conception, there are still modern adaptations of The Merchant of Venice, as well as his other works. Stage performance, classic film versions, and even films that use the basic story line and modernize the setting can be found today. Though these modern adaptations are widespread, they do not do the social references justice.

Bulman notes: “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’ (New York Times, 22 February 1981) – more forcibly than The Merchant of Venice” (143). Though The Merchant of Venice is still read and performed (both on stage and film) today, it will always lack one thing: a timely setting. In the time that the play was written, society had a different set of values. During the Renaissance, people would have more closely felt the pains of Shylock during his persecution and how he was constantly stereotyped as a Jew and moneylender. It would have been easier to understand his anger toward Jessica for her betrayal of their religion when marrying the Christian Lorenzo. It’s implicit that Portia would marry whom her father wanted, though he was dead, not only to keep his honor and his money, but because that was a common social practice and a standard of society.

Bulman’s overall conclusion is equivalent to my own: “The Merchant is a play whose potential to be various things at once – allegory and folk tale, romantic comedy and problem play – may have been realizable only on the Elizabethan stage” (6). Seeing the play in its historical context and setting and the open air stage during the Renaissance brought out the meanings within the work. It’s not a question of whether the actual stage performances of The Merchant of Venice are better during the Renaissance as compared to other periods in history or recent times, but the fact that the play itself has numerous characters of different occupations, interests, religions, and the emphasis on their professional and social practices is such a crucial part of the play, it is hard for someone today to try and fully understand, and appreciate, what Shakespeare’s play really meant.

Works Cited

Albright, Victor. The Shakespearian Stage. New York: Columbia University Press, 1926.

Barber, C.L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom. Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1959.

Bulman, James C.. Shakespeare in Performance: The Merchant of Venice. Manchester: University Press, 1991.

David, Richard. Shakespeare in the Theatre. Cambridge: University Press, 1978.

Poel, William. Shakespeare in the Theatre. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1913

Shakespeare, William. “The Merchant of Venice.” The Necessary Shakespeare. Ed. Bevington, David. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005. 74-112.

Styan, J.L., Shakespeare’s Stagecraft. Cambridge: University Press, 1967  

Urkowitz, Steven. “‘I am not made of stone’: Theatrical Revision of Gesture in Shakespeare’s Plays.” The Critical Complex: Shakespeare in the Theater. Ed. Orgel, Stephen, and Keilen Sean. New York: Garland, 1999. 43-57.