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Shylock - Author's notes Shylock, user's instructions
"To this I witness call the fools of time, which die for goodness, who have lived for crime."
William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice is one of William Shakespeare's most dense and fascinating texts, where we find – in a subtle spectrum which runs in tones from the tragic to the comic – the brilliant cohabitation of themes as diverse and crucial as: the sacralization of money and its degeneration and reification by its covert penetration into the realm of private feelings (something common to all the characters in the play); homosexuality, a theme linked to the character of Antonio and his special brand of spleen; the law, as something to be applied according to each situation but eternally subservient to money, the law as the validation of a system of norms inseparable from power, of which the law becomes the interpretation and the ritual. Themes which belong to all periods of time and which, in all periods of time, resonate in a special way. But the flame which burns at the heart of the play, that which constitutes its unmistakable charm, comes from its most elusive and, at the same time, most connotated character, Shylock the Jew. Elusive and connotated, this double description, like an oxymoron, weighs on Shylock and on the tradition which over his lengthy and successful passage on the stages of the world, has made of him a symbol of infamy and, simultaneously, a sacrificial victim, a proverbial manifestion of evil and the highest testimonial of human authority. Shylock: Rehearsing the Merchant of Venice begins in an non-identifiable place. It might be a slaughter-house or a theatre, one of those places which the contemporary spirit sublimates and transforms, staging Good where there once was Evil. A place where the Director must rehearse his Merchant of Venice, financed by a Merchant of our times, whose inmense fortune is of mysterious origins but is suspected of having been generated by criminal activities. The director's and the merchant's obsession are specular; the former wants to restore to Shylock the pound of flesh that was denied him five-hundred years ago, the later desires to acquire another special piece for his collection of pounds, by capturing the heart of an artist. One wishes to violate the limit which separates Art from Life, the other wishes to give the theatre a last chance to continue beeing, beyond its tricks and its miseries, the ultimate human talisman. In a feverish daze, which slowly takes the shape of a puzzle, the scenes imagined by the director alternate with musings on truth and falsehood, while a dying Shylock, watched over by a Cardinal, a dark clergyman and a nurse, keeps mumbling, in an obsessive refrain, the words of his famous soliloquy: "If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?" Is it an invention on the sense (or lack of sense) of the theatre? Is it a pastiche? Or, is it rather, a landscape where, against the light, it is possible to recognize the risks of the theatre today, those which put it at a crossroads: either to disappear into the inessential marginality which is now its fate, or to become again what it once was, a great country with no name belonging to all, a homeland of the soul, where what we continually evoke in the name of what is human would only be vague and shapeless if it didn't plumb the depths of the eternal game of credit and loans; that special ability man posseses of becoming the merchant of things which are not for sale, in the past and in the present, in the horrible times it is our lot to live in, yesterday in the Venetian territories or in Buchenwald, today in a time closed off to the the breath of all that is "other", a time which would seem to have definitely excluded the vastness of life from its horizons and with it, compassion and the pain of others. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? |
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