Not a Submission: Need some Last-Second Feedback

I'm finished with the first draft of my paper, including a new, much better thesis. I'm gonna come back to it in a little bit--but I'm concerned about my conclusion. I just want to make sure that it doesn't come across as racist, etc. If you could please read it and post a comment, I'd be much obliged.




Like I said, this is my conclusion. I have just spend the past several pages talking about how Shylock has been forced into a single role--he can only act as a comment on or a reflection of the Holocaust.

 These few examples demonstrate just how deeply the Holocaust has affected our perception of The Merchant of Venice, and how it has changed the way we perform it. The play was once staged as a comedy, unburdened with issues of race, religion, and prejudice, but, even in productions in which Shylock is not explicitly a Jew, we still struggle with these problems. In a 2008 production at the Landestheater Tübingen in southern Germany, for example, Shylock and his daughter were Muslim, which raised questions about “immigration [and] cultural integration of Turkish migrants” (“Remember Me” 298). This tendency is not limited to Germany alone, either—a 2012 children’s production of Merchant at Brigham Young University in Utah removed the religious aspect entirely, instead using audience-generated replacements like “jock[s] vs. nerds” (Chase) In this case, the play was used to talk about “bullying”—the childhood version of the grown up issues of race and racism that directors the world over still struggle with (Chase).

Though the lesson about racism is a valuable one, it is still a limiting interpretation of the play. Though we might not want to return to the days where Shylock was a crude stereotype, many other interpretations are closed for us. Directors still feel constrained by the Holocaust, and cannot stage it as anything other than a play about prejudice. We cannot, for example, stage the play as a comedy, for Shylock’s suffering at the hands of uncaring Christians would, necessarily, be the butt of the joke; we cannot stage it as a tragedy about greed, for it would reinforce the stereotype of the Jewish moneylender. Indeed, we find ourselves very limited by our shared history, often to our own loss: in 2003 German critic Wilhelm Hortmann reminisced of the time when "a Jewish director could produce The Merchant as a colorful fairy tale," in reference to famous Weimar productions of the play by Jewish director Max Reinhardt ("Post-war Germany" 66).

This phenomenon is not limited to Merchant, either. Since the civil rights movement, Othello can only be a play about race and racism; in the wake of feminism, The Taming of the Shrew cannot be showed without saving its heroine from her “taming” in some way. We see this manifest in more subtle ways, as well: Romeo and Juliet, despite its somewhat dark plot, is widely perceived as a romantic story, and is nearly always staged as such. This portrayal shortcuts the tragic aspects of the play, making it difficult for us to draw the lesson from it that Shakespeare undoubtedly intended. Further, Titus Andronicus is hardly staged at all, due to concerns with its violent and disturbing content.

Times change, and, undoubtedly, there may eventually come a time when the Germans may be able to, once again, stage The Merchant of Venice as “a colorful fairy tale.” But that time is not now, and may never actually happen. The way that Nazi-era and postwar directors staged the play, they forced Shylock to play a role that, perhaps, he never wanted: that of a representative for his whole people, victim and witness to Nazi hatred and the Holocaust. He is not alone: Too often, ideologies, events, beliefs and practices constrain Shakespeare to a handful of roles. Doing so hurts us all in the long run: we come to see, for example, The Merchant of Venice as only a play about the Holocaust, to the exclusion of all the other wonderful, valuable messages we can draw from it. We must be cautious in how we read, interpret, and stage Shakespeare; otherwise, we  may risk forcing another play into a position of commenting on only a single issue, and only able to show one facet of the complex, beautiful playwright that is Shakespeare.

I'm most concerned about paragraph four, where I talk about how major movements have changed Shakespeare. Does this come across as racist or sexist (e.g., "since 'Black Power,' we can't put Othello in blackface")?

Thanks everyone. Good luck on your papers!