Last Sunday, I took Katie to a production of The Merchant of Venice at the small, yet established (30+ years) and high-quality First Presbyterian Theater downtown. She had three friends in the production, plus…why not?

The production was simple and effective with the usual range of performance, with the standout being one Manny Silverman, who played Shylock – I would not swear to it, but he was definitely in his 70’s, hedging close to 80, I’d say, with…(put on "drama critic" hat, which just doesn’t fit) …a style and a presence that was natural, comfortable, deeply poetic and highly charged. Head and shoulders above the rest.

How to do Merchant in the modern age? This Guardian piece, occasioned by the 2004 film version starring Al Pacino as Shylock, maintains that the piece is irredeemable:

Start with the play. We may want it to be a handy, sixth-form-friendly text exposing the horrors of racism, but Shakespeare refuses to play along. As the great critic Harold Bloom has declared, "One would have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to recognise that Shakespeare’s grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-semitic work."

There is no getting away from it: Shylock is the villain, bent on disproportionate vengeance. Crucially, his villainy is not shown as a quirk of his own, individual personality, but is rooted overtly in his Jewishness.

Thus, he is shown as obsessed by money, a man who dreams of moneybags, whose very opening words are "three thousand ducats". When his daughter betrays him and flees with a Christian lover, it is her theft of his money which is said to trouble him as much as the loss of a child. "As the dog Jew did utter in the streets/’My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!’ "

Since the laws that barred Jews from almost all activity besides finance had led to the stereotype of the avaricious Jew, Shakespeare is dealing here not with a specific trait of Shylock the man but an anti-semitic caricature.

So it is with his demand for revenge, playing on the ancient notion of the Jews as a vengeful people ("An eye for an eye … "). The same is true of the very forfeit Shylock demands from Antonio. A Jew seeking Christian flesh is surely meant to stir memories of the perennial anti-semitic charge, known as the blood libel, that Jews use Christian blood for religious ritual. Above all, it evokes the accusation that fuelled two millennia of European anti-semitism – that the Jews killed Christ.

Radford can dress his film up as prettily as he likes – and the costumes, Rembrandt lighting and Venetian locations certainly ensure that his Merchant is lovely to look at. But he can’t dodge this hard, stubborn fact. Shylock’s villainy is depicted as a specifically Jewish villainy. "And by our holy Sabbath have I sworn/To have the due and forfeit of my bond." Macbeth’s murderousness is not a Scottish trait, nor is Hamlet’s indecision a Danish one. But Shylock’s wickedness is Jewish.

Doubtless, like the play’s other defenders, Radford would cite the bad behaviour of the Christian characters and Shylock’s legendary, humanising "Hath not a Jew eyes … " speech. But these defences don’t really work. If Antonio, Bassanio and the rest act badly, the play’s assumption is that they have failed fully to honour their fine and noble faith, Christianity. They are being bad Christians. When Shylock acts badly, Shakespeare suggests he is fully in accordance with Jewish tradition. Shylock plots Antonio’s downfall with his friend Tubal, promising to continue their dark talk "at our synagogue".

R. V. Young, in this 2004 piece from First Things, looks at both Shylock and Othello in context as well as in contemporary criticism:

Hence the trial scene in Act IV, which so unsettles modern audiences, manifests not the failure of Shakespeare’s art, but rather its triumph. In fact, the success is a direct result of the tremendous tension it generates in readers and theatergoers. While it is a mistake to attempt to save the play’s gaiety and romance by turning its turbid religious conflict into an abstract allegory in which the feelings and experiences of the individual characters do not count for much, an equal error is made by critics who diminish or dismiss the importance of religion for the Christian characters. The trial scene is constructed from a Christian perspective, which highlights the Pauline dichotomy of Old Testament legalism opposed to the New Testament gospel of grace. Before Portia, disguised as Balthasar, enters the scene the issue is framed in an exchange between the Duke and Shylock. “How shalt thou hope for mercy,” asks the former, “rend’ring none?” To which the Jew replies, “What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?” Shylock is persistent in his demand that the legal contract be carried out exactly as it is written, confident in the justice of his cause: “My deeds upon my head! I crave the law, / The penalty and forfeit of my bond.”

Having uttered one of the most moving speeches in all of Shakespeare’s plays, he is deaf to another, Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech, which closes with a reminder of universal human fallibility: “Therefore, Jew, / Though justice be thy plea, consider this, / That in the course of justice, none of us / Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, / And that same prayer doth teach us all to render / The deeds of mercy.” Some critics are skeptical about the sincerity (or at least the depth) of Portia’s Christianity, because they see little that is specifically Christian in her plea to Shylock-clemency was, of course, an important Stoic theme. But in fact the prayer that “doth teach us all to render / The deeds of mercy” is the “Our Father,” and the notion that we cannot be saved by our own justice is the heart of the gospel, especially as preached by St. Paul. The opposition between the covenants of law and grace, which comes to the fore in the trial scene, is central to the play as whole, and there is no reason to presume that this understanding of moral and spiritual reality is not integral to the minds of Shakespeare’s Venetian Christians.

Even so, these are not fervent or exemplary Christians. Fervent, exemplary Christians are called saints, and their number is regrettably small. As is so often the case in Shakespeare, the irony is doubled: Shylock gives utterance to an impassioned plea for the common humanity in all men even as he is hardening his heart to exact a terrible vengeance; Portia eloquently extols the virtue of mercy in the hearts of kings and seems promptly to forget her own speech when she comes to exercise power herself. The Duke, Bassanio, and Antonio-once the threat is past-are all willing to allow a chagrined Shylock to walk away with his money; it is the iron-willed Portia who demands that he be held to the strict letter of the law, just as he himself has insisted. The end of the play would be much more comfortable for us if we could treat the Portia of the trial scene as an allegory of the Divine Judge who forces Shylock (the allegorical sinner) to relinquish all his wealth with the conditional restoration of a part of it upon his baptism-that is, he must throw down everything he has and follow Christ. But this will not work because we already know Portia as the high-spirited, self-possessed mistress of Belmont and also as a tender, longing young bride. She has no business playing God.

Here again is Shakespeare’s critical spirit at work: Portia provides a fine account of mankind’s universal need for the grace of forgiveness but then fails to be gracious and forgiving herself. Even she, “a Daniel come to judgment,” is fallible and in need of forgiveness. If we miss the point, Shakespeare underscores it with a further irony. The character who immediately begins jeering at Shylock when Portia turns the tables on him, the character who offers Shylock only “A halter gratis-nothing else for God’s sake” (emphasis added), is named Gratiano, which of course suggests grazia, the Italian word for “grace.” The character contradicts the name, and this is the man who most avidly seconds Portia in her complete humiliation of Shylock, though the others join in readily enough. The Christian principle of gracious forgiveness is, then, a good one, but it is extremely difficult for Christians themselves to observe it. Shylock is prevented from cutting away a pound of Antonio’s flesh from very near his heart, but in a sense the Christians cut Shylock’s heart out of his body without shedding a drop of his blood. And they do so with clear-if blinded-consciences. In thus dramatizing the doctrine of grace by showing how those who profess it often fail to fulfill it, Shakespeare highlights a distinctive and specifically Christian element of Western Civilization: its inability to live up to its own finest insights, which are always too exalted to be grasped by mortal men and women.

The devastated Shylock slinking off the stage casts a shadow over the comedy and romance of The Merchant of Venice, but we cannot suppose this effect to be inadvertent on Shakespeare’s part, because he does the same thing in other plays.

I am not a student of Shakespeare, and have no expertise in general or in this play in particular, but Young’s assesment struck me as on target, in that there is just no easy way to get out of this play. Point A, confidently made, is quickly nuanced or even outright contradicted by Point B, and so it goes.

As I watched and absorbed, hearing the word "Jew" bouncing of the walls as an epithet, my uneducated perception of what was going on was a reflection of the bind in which Medieval Europe puts Shylock and his "tribe"  – the objects of revilement for doing the jobs to which society itself had restricted them. I am undoubtedly looking at it from 21st century eyes, but in the matter of staging – which in this production ended with the happy lovers celebrating under the sad, resigned gaze of Shylock looking on from the setpiece that was his home’s balcony – I couldn’t help but think of the sin – the many kinds of sin the Original Sin – that haunts our earthly happiness, and in a way, makes much of what we call "happiness" even possible.