Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us about Our Past and Future by James Shapiro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m With The Jew


This book is about the timelessness, as well as the timeliness, of Shakespeare. That his work continues to attract readers and watchers, particularly outside his native England, is somewhat a mystery. His language is archaic; his plots complex; his characters morally ambiguous; and his historical settings unfamiliar. But perhaps it is precisely these characteristics which make his work archetypal - familiar enough to recognise, but also alien enough to demand attention and constant interpretation.

While reading Shapiro’s thoughts on the reception of Shakespeare by various audiences, I recalled taking my 12 year old grandson and his 8 year old sister to a production of The Merchant of Venice in Stratford-upon-Avon. We were seated close to the side of the stage in the semi-circular theatre, so the children got full exposure to the technique of the actors as well as the dialogue. At the intermission I asked the lad about his impression. Without hesitation he said, “I’m with the Jew.” His sister was less opinionated but nevertheless had a clear conclusion based on the rapid pace of the play: “Shakespeare sure has a lot of words,” she said.

I was impressed equally by both responses. The play, of course, is about what constitutes the proper criterion of moral judgment. It is not really possible to be not ‘with’ Shylock in light of the scam being carried out at his expense. To my grandson this was obvious suggesting a deterioration of the force of the mythical denotation ‘Jew’ for his generation. Yet his sister also had an important point: the performance was quick, not just in terms of the speed of delivery of the lines but in the rapid layering of moral discourse. It is difficult to keep up with Shakespeare’s subtlety as well as the actors’ highly nuanced interpretations, even for seasoned theatre-goers.

Shapiro is right to compare Shakespeare to the Bible. But the reason is not just the similarity of the Elizabethan English. It is rather, I think, Shakespeare’s equivalently capacious interpretability. There are, I am sure, Shakespearean fundamentalists who, like their biblical counterparts, believe they have the definitive assessment of Hamlet’s character or the ethical flaws of Lady Macbeth or for that matter the appropriate staging of any of the man’s plays. But the fact is that Shakespeare, like the Bible, provokes new, often contrary, interpretations of his work continuously. If there is a bottom to this interpretation, no one’s approached it yet - just as my grandchildren demonstrated yet again.

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