How genuinely Bassanio can love Portia the lottery prize is another. Whether he and Bassanio were actually lovers is a good question. The reason for this is implied by Shakespeare and made clear by Radford: Antonio is in love with Bassanio, and in effect is being asked for a loan to finance his own romantic disappointment. The play famously opens with Antonio's melancholy ("I know not why I am so sad"), but the casting of Jeremy Irons makes that opening speech unnecessary he is an actor to whom sadness comes without effort, and a dark gloom envelops him throughout the story. He will need money to finance his courtship and turns to his friend Antonio. Elementary gamesmanship cries out "Lead! Choose the lead!" but one royal hopeful after another goes for the glitter, and the impoverished Bassanio still has a chance. She has been left by her father's will in the position of a game show prize her suitors are shown chests of gold, silver and lead, and made to choose one inside the lucky chest is the token of their prize.
The plot is driven from the comic side, by the desire of Bassanio ( Joseph Fiennes) to wed the fair Portia ( Lynn Collins). A written prologue informs us of the conditions of Jewish life in Venice in 1586 Jews were forced to live in a confined area that gave the word ghetto to the world, were forbidden to move through the city after dark (although they seem to do a lot of that in the film), and were tolerated because Christians were forbidden to lend money at interest, and somebody had to.
One of the strengths of the film is its clarity. Shakespeare's great courtroom scene, in which the Doge must decide between the claims of Shylock and the life of Antonio, is undercut by the farce of the cross-dressing Portia's last-second appeal on the merits of the case, Shylock should win.īut I have written as if you know who Shylock and Antonio and Portia are, and you may not "The Merchant of Venice" is studiously avoided in those courses that seek to introduce Shakespeare to students, who can tell you all about Romeo and Juliet. That Antonio comes within a whisper of losing his flesh and his life is, after all, the result of a bargain he quickly agreed to, because he also thought he would escape without paying interest. That Shylock lends him the money against the guarantee of a pound of flesh is not simply a cruelty, but has a certain reason Shakespeare's dialogue makes it clear that Shylock proudly declines to accept any monetary interest from Antonio and has every reason to think Antonio can repay the loan, which means that Shylock will have borrowed the money at cost to himself and lent it to Antonio for free. That Antonio spits at Shylock, asks him for a loan of 3,000 ducats and boldly tells him he would spit at him again is, in modern terms, asking for it. The film opens by visualizing an event referred to only in dialogue in the original: We see the merchant Antonio ( Jeremy Irons) spit at Shylock on the Rialto bridge, as part of a demonstration against the Jews who are both needed and hated in Venice - needed, because without money-lenders, the city's economy cannot function, and hated, because Christians must therefore do business with the same people they have long executed a blood libel against. Radford's Shylock, played with a rasping intensity by Al Pacino, is not softened or apologized for - that would deny the reality of the play - but he is seen as a man not without his reasons. Although Shylock embodies anti-Semitic stereotypes widely held in Shakespeare's time, he is not a one-dimensional creature like Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta," but embodies, like all of Shakespeare's great creations, a humanity that transcends the sport of his making. Yet Shylock is an intense, passionate character in a great play, and Radford's film does them justice.
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