Group of Jewish Students Boycott Shakespeare Exam

A group of British students have refused to sit for an exam on Romeo and Juliet because of the anti-Semitism that Shakespeare displays in Merchant of Venice. Not a late April Fool's Day Joke. Story here. Some secularist commentary here. Not mentioned: what the girls think of My Name Is Rachel Corrie.

All snark aside, this is obviously one of the dangerous endgames we get into when a work (or artist's) politics are the only grounds used for evaluating their work, and the only scale of merit is whether or not we agree with them. Ultimately, it's just another way of limiting our exposure to things that contradict our world view. It's like the right wing talk radio Echo Chamber writ large, and it is dangerous (as all ignorance is dangerous).

I personally find Merchant of Venice to be a well written and deeply anti-Semitic play. I have found pretty much every revisionist reading of it unconvincing. The idea that Shakespeare is giving his audience an anti-Semitic play while also secretly humanizing the stereotype of the avaricious Jew doesn't gel with a reading of the text. That Shylock is humanized does not make the character of Shylock less offensive, it just makes Shakespeare a better writing. There is no getting around the end of the play, where Shylock is outwitted, humiliated, robbed by the court and forced to convert to Christianity.

There just one problem, though, one nagging thing: Merchant of Venice is a good play! And this is troubling, because it's also simultaneously kind of repellant. So what do we do to deal with this discomfort? We either explain it away through deconstruction and revisionism, or we decide to boycott the play and not read it (which takes us down a logical rabbit hole to not reading Shakespeare at all or anything we disagree with) or we live in the uncomfortable place that art can put us in of seeing the merit in something we don't like or agree with.

So while I have no particular desire to direct Merchant of Venice (although I'd love to take a look at the revisionist Yiddish version, which starred Jacob Adler and helped make his career) that doesn't mean I don't recognize its power, or its beauty as a work of art. And it certainly doesn't mean that boycotting Shakespeare makes any kind of sense at all. For if we start there, where does it end? Do we stop reading Pound, stop listening to Wagner or reading Dickens? Or watching Disney films? Should we stop reading Gunter Grass now that it turns out he was in the Waffen SS? Or, to get even more ridiculous... should we avoid Roman Polanski movies because he's a rapist? should we cease watching Woody Allen films because his relationship with Soon-Yi is creepy-to-da-max?

Although I think it's fair game to include discussions of politics in discussions of art, and vital that we frankly discuss whether we find a work of art offensive and why, I don't want to live in a world where audiences only encounter work that further narrows their world view.

Comments

[Joshua James]

Hmm,

It should be taught that racism is a part of history and therefoere a part of all history's art, I think . . . so those plays SHOULD be covered at length. It only does us all a disservice to, ahem, whitewash, ahem . . . history and history's ugliness in context.

That's what I think.

I think Mark Twain is a fantastic writer - one of America's best humorists . . . I of course understand that folks have issues with Huckelberry Finn and its character specifically named "Nigger Jim" . . . but it's also a part of that time and history.

Plus, Huck Finn the novel was unique in that it had Huck and Jim share a meal together - a white boy and a black man shared adventures and a meal together - something that during the time of the writing of that book, wasn't a part of the popular culture, and considered a bold move - in a sense, Twain could be said was suggesting the two characters were equals, so to speak - so all the more reason a book like Huck Finn should be a mandatory read in American Lit.

Just my opinion, of course.

[Troubador]

If Shakespeare and not Newton had written the "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" then presumably those students would boycott a career in maths or physics.

[Herxanthikles]

I think the central problem here is whether you think the political harm a work is doing is greater than its artistic worth. It would seem ridiculous to get mad at say, Homer for his sexism, because we don't expect him to have the answers and we don't model our behavior on him. So it goes for other work of litereture that are remote from our culture or era. The Merchant of Venice doesn't seem to do much harm nowadays, but if I was a Elizabethan jew, I think I could justifiably reject the work.

[isaac]

Good point, herx. of course, after the various efforts at ethnically cleansing the jews out of england, shakespeare wouldn't've had to worry about that too much.

[Herxanthikles]

p.s. Have you seen that Playing Shakespeare video with John Barton mediating between two Shylock interpretations by Patrick Stewart and David Suchet? It's really good. Suchet points out that being a Jew himself, he allows his interpretation to be much more "ethnic." Part of what's good about the video as a whole is having really great Shakespeare interpreters wrestling honestly with both the character of Shylock and the political dimensions of the role.

[isaac]

yeah. i love that video. i watched in andrea oram's acting 1 class in high school!