Download podcast transcript / Microsoft Word Document

VOICES ON ANTISEMITISM PODCAST WITH MICHAEL KAHN
December 1, 2001
During his career as artistic director of The Shakespeare Theatre Company in D.C., Kahn has
produced The Merchant of Venice three times. It is among the most popular and the most
contentious of Shakespeare's plays, with ever-evolving relevance for modern audiences.
TRANSCRIPT:
MICHAEL KAHN:
I do not believe that The Merchant of Venice is an antisemitic play. I believe it is a play that
shows antisemitism at work, and also how antisemitism makes people feel and behave in
ways that are destructive.
ALEISA FISHMAN:
Michael Kahn is the Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington
DC. In his career, Kahn has produced The Merchant of Venice three times. It is among the
most popular and the most contentious of Shakespeare's plays, with ever-evolving
relevance for modern audiences.
Welcome to Voices on Antisemitism, a podcast series from the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum made possible by generous support from the Elizabeth and Oliver
Stanton Foundation. I'm Aleisa Fishman. Every month, we invite a guest to reflect about the
many ways that antisemitism and hatred influence our world today. Celebrating his 25th
year with the Shakespeare Theatre Company, here's Michael Kahn.
MICHAEL KAHN:
The Merchant of Venice is perhaps one of Shakespeare's most controversial plays in terms of
the response of an audience, and of course, that is because of Shylock, the character of
Shylock, and has become obviously infinitely more controversial because of the Holocaust.
The play is really a mixture of two stories that finally come together in the famous trial
scene: the story about a Jewish moneylender who gives money to a Christian and then the
Christian loses the money and there's a trial, and a story of a rich woman and her suitors.
In Shakespeare's time, there was of course antisemitism. And Shakespeare is writing in a
sense about Elizabethan England and coming out of the theatrical traditions of his time.
Before Shakespeare—the little we know about how Jews were portrayed on the stage—they
were portrayed as comic villains. They were dressed in terrible red wigs; they had big
noses; they were simply representatives of greed and evil. Now Shakespeare comes along
and does something very different. He still has Shylock in a kind of villain role, but he
humanizes Shylock by explaining that Shylock, very clearly in the play from very early on, is
treated by the Christians of his world as not a human. They call him "dog"; they spit at him;
they call him "cur." And the two things that Shylock has for his life, well three things, are his
daughter, his religion, and the money that he's earned. And those things, through the play,
are taken away from him.
There is no way to do this play without huge sympathy for Shylock. Why I think it became
very controversial was because obviously the portrayal of antisemitism disturbed people.
And I could understand that. After the Holocaust, of course, just to even bring up
antisemitism or to let a Jewish character have traits that were not wonderful, you know—
the same thing happened in the black community during the Black-Power period when
there could be no complicated portrayal of an African American, they had to be just very
good and saint-like. But Shakespeare has never made a character all-good or all-bad, ever.
You can't have an antisemitic play when you have the speech "Hath not a Jew eyes, hath not
a Jews ears? If you prick us, do we not bleed?"
But it's not a pro-Jewish play, which is what I think people think it should be when they
object to it. No, it's not. It's a play about everybody caught up in this terrible cycle of money
and treating each other as a commodity. And Shylock is part of that world. Shylock is not a
saint; Shylock is a moneylender; he lives in a world about money and money is what you
trade and money is how you treat people. So I think it's a critique of the entire society of the
play. But in the history of literature about Jews, Shakespeare has made a Jew a human being
in a somewhat inhuman society.
[Clip from The Merchant of Venice] Shylock: Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same
weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the
same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do
we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
Showing antisemitism is not the same as condoning antisemitism. And Shylock behaves the
way he does as a result of antisemitism. Why should people lie down on the street and not
fight back when they are being hurt, when they are being discriminated? Unless you fight
back, discrimination will last forever. So Shylock fights back in the only way he can. I find
that admirable. But I think it's about a lot of prejudices. Obviously prejudice against Jews,
prejudice about homosexuals—because Antonio is clearly in love with Bassanio and hides it
and they make fun of it when he's not there. And then Portia makes fun of Blacks. So for me,
the play deals with prejudice on many levels.
I have always felt and still feel that theater—live theater especially—has a role in helping
change perceptions because you are present at something happening live in front of you,
and you are part of it. And you have to see things that perhaps you have never seen before,
or people behaving in ways that you have not understood, trying to explain them. For
instance in this play, I don't think you could see a production of The Merchant of Venice
without being embarrassed about prejudice and question whether you have any yourself.
Art does change lives in that way, which is one of the perks for me of doing these plays in
Washington, because most of these plays are about power, about politics, about
relationships with different groups of people, and people come who are involved in that and
see that and I think they have to have a dialogue with the play and themselves when they go
home about their own feelings. And hopefully sometimes their feelings have changed.
ALEISA FISHMAN:
Voices on Antisemitism is a podcast series of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Join us every month to hear a new perspective on the continuing threat of antisemitism in
our world today. We would appreciate your feedback on this series. Please visit our Web
site, www.ushmm.org.
Audio from the Shakespeare Theatre Company's 2010-2011 production of The Merchant of
Venice is courtesy of the Shakespeare Theatre Company.