DRAMA ® Merchant of Venice production at Stratford renews criticism te debate stirred up when the Merchant of Venice was first selected as one of the two Shakes- _ pearean plays to be presented at the Stratford Festival this year continues to rage now that it has been produced, and not least in the labor press. Martin Stone’s review of the Merchant of Venice, contained in kis appraisal of the Stratford ~ festival carried by both the Can- _adian Tribune and the Pacific Tribune, has been angrily attack- ‘ed iby George Samuels, who re- viewed the play for the Canadian Jewish Weekly: Stone’s comment on the play “was: “If Julius Caesar and Oedipus Rex created a stir, the Merchant of Venice stirred up a storm. For months people debated the propriety of performing the play at this time in Canada. j “It is argued that regardless of Shakespeare’s intention, the char- acter Shylock has become a weap- on of slander and persecution against the Jewish people, that six million Jews wete slaughter- . €d in our time by the Nazi ex-. ponents of anti-Semitism, and that the forces which brought . Hitler to power are at work again. “It is argued that Shakespeare created a character which has been vulgarized and distorted and has now. assumed its own identity. as’ a sort of runaway _.Frankenstein’s. monster. These - are valid arguments. : “The Merchant of Venice in our view is not an anti-Semitic play. _It is a play about the bitter rival- mes between money-lender and merchant, about the social and economic racism. “.. + because he (Shylock) is a usurer {not ‘because he is a Jew) we cannot admire such a man — “aly more than we can admire his enemies, the merchants (not be- cause they are Christians but be- eause they are money-hungry). _ “And Dr. Guthrie has done an tmteresting thing with Shylock’s enemies. In their ordinary lives they. are mostly ‘nice people,’ cultivated, friendly and charm- ang; but when they ‘bait Shy- lock and insult.him because he is a Jew, they assume the ugli- hess of a pogrom pack and excite our evulsion — all of them, even the pleasant Bassanio and the comely + Portia.” Res Bes Be3 In a letter to the Canadian Tribune, Samuels writes: Ss . It would have appeared axiomatic to me that on the ques- tion of the Merchant of Venice, all progressive Canadians would have beeen united, “I cannot understand why the Canadian Tribune now finds it pos- stble to stand aloof from the jus- tified wave of criticism that has again been levelled at Tyrone Guthrie and the Stratford man- agement over their selection ‘of . the Merchant of Venice as one ot the two Shakespearean plays to be performed by the festival this year. “Such criticism comes from various quarters, Jewish as well as non-Jewish. It unites people ot various views whose respect, appreciation, love and regard for what Stratford is and can be, is no less than that possessed by ~ those who have been attempting to whitewash this gross and will- _ ful error of choice and judgment. “By asserting the wholly false conception that the Merchant of Venice is not ‘an anti-Semitic play’ Stone inevitably joins the whitewashers. : “Stone compares the portrayal of Shylock given several years ago by Donald Wolfit with that siven by Mr. Valk and justifies, the play on that account. As if ° {he anti-Semitism in the Mé@rch- ant of Venice can be judged by tne lines assigned to Shylock! The anti-Semitism is manifest not in Shylock but in the people yho surround him — in Antonio, Portia; Bassanio, Salerio, Salar- ino, Gratiano, Salanio, Lorenzo, and even in the lowly Launcelot Gobbo.” 5 e2 a $o3 in an editorial footnote to Samuel’s letter the Canadian Tribune noted: : “The Canadian Tribune said at TYRONE GUTHRIE the time the plays were selected that the Merchant of Venice was a ‘bad choice which could. bring no eredit to Stratford and which Sive rise to anti-Semitic expres- sions. We hold to that opinion— and one has to look no further than two editorials in the Toronto Glove and Mail to see how anti- Semitism is expressed in the de- bate over. the. play.” bes SOR aatg ses Samuels, in his own review in tee Canadian Jewish Weekly,. quoted this. from Herbert Whit- taker’s review in the Toronto Globe and Mail: _ “Shylock . . . is what Shakes- peare made him ... a blood- thirsty proud man when re- venge seizes him .. . In the trial seene, Mr. Valk (Shylock) is bloated with revenge, a great destructive force ready to be un- ieashed. Guthrie has brought Antonio closer to the knife’s point than ever Antonios had been brought before, Ill war- rant, for he has him bared to the waist, strapped to the board and gagged ready for the blow.” Then Samuels comments: “This is Dr. Guthrie’s ‘sympa- thetic’ Shylock, ready to cut An- ronio’s heart out to obtain his pound of flesh, actually making ready to plunge the dagger. And in the background stands the only other Jew in the play, Tu- bal, looking and acting like the most Nazi-like caricature of.a Jew, dangling the scales so that he can make sure that Shylock gets his full pound of flesh. “With this portrait Guthrie has -ventured forward to create ‘sym- ‘pathy’ for Shylock. . “No wonder then that the To- “ronto Telegram’s columnist Stan delleur, after discussion with some of the prominent Jews who were present at the performance, selt it expedient to write: ; | “*).. This writer, a Christian ——.a Roman Catholic, to be spe- tific — feels bound to say he _ Was disturbed by the interpreta- tion. _ This was too much the ‘prototype’ — the popular defin- ition of a popular prejudice. I left. the tent with the uneasy feeling of having been party to a mockery’.” ¢ ; e / Samuels concludes his review: “But the main point of con- tention in the Merchant of Venice. hinges around the play itself. -Cotncil ' Theatre on Monday, August 8, “That the world’s greatest dramatist should have’ written the world’s most effective anti- Semitic play is a fact that re- quires a good deal of historical understanding and literary knowl- edge.” 5o3 Bes Seg The Merchant of Venice has been produced both in Australia and Britain in the past three ‘r.onths,: ‘but apparently without _arousing the controversy it has in this country. : In Australia it was presented as the opening play in the Old Vic Shakespearean season in Syd- ney and Paul Mortimer, com- menting on the play in the Sydney Tribune, progessive labor weekly, had ‘this to say: “Shylock is one of the im- mortal characters of world ,liter- ature. © : “The . genius of Shakespeare fashioned him from the class re- sations of his time. “Feudalism had persecuted the ‘Jews. It had excluded them from ownership of land, and from the eraft guilds. “It had driven them into ghet- fos, and into trading and money changing as a meant of liveli- hood. aie “This méant poverty and degre- dation for the majority of the Jews of Europe; but it also plac- | ed a few of them in a trategic control of the acid that was eat-- iag away the whole feudal struc- ture — money. ~§ “Shakespeare wrote the Mer- chant of Venice about 1594 — the halcyon period in the alliance Setween the up and coming mer- chant capitalists and the crown. “The Jews had been driven out of England nearly three centuries before Shakespeare’s time. “But the social atmosphere in which he lived was one that en- abled him to penetrate the hide- ous superstitions on which anti- Semitism fed, and reveal the Jew as a human being. “Consequently, although Shy- Icck loses the argument in the Merchant of Venice, he wins all the debates. “And more important, in his defeat the audience does not-en- joy a triumph but suffers the most profound pity. ‘In the person of Antonio, of course, Shakespeare flatters the merchants and the monarch who were his patrons; but he was too great an artist to allow this ne- cessity to dominate him entire- ly. : . “Antonio makes no real de- fease against the charges laid against him by Shylock; and his To sing at rally Folk singer Claire Klein will give a group of peace songs at . the “No More Hiroshimas” rally being sponsored by B.C. Peace at the PNE Outdoor at 8 p.m. Featured speaker will be Mrs. Mildred MacLeod who aitended the recent World Peace Assembly at Helsinki. ’ Woman filrins Eskimo life Elsa Jenkins, director of women’s activities for the dian National Exhibition, shown here with two Eskimos, Avaconna and Alex Greenland, is making a 5,000-mile ke the North to.make films and tape recordings of Eskimo life friend Bassanio in describing his lady love Portia, laid more stress . on her wealth than her virtue. “In fact, in true capitalistic ethic, he proposed his marriage to her as a way of recovering his fallen fortunes. “Thus Shakespeare presents us with a picture of the embroyonic capitalist. “Tt was inevitable that in any: head on clash between bankers anc: merchants that merchants | should win. “But Shakespeare also showed that despite religious differences and deliberate distortion, there was little separating the morals aid conduct of an Elizabethan merchant from a European mon- ey lender.” . i Shes tate o9 In Britain, the Merchant of Venice was produced as a tele- ieval story about a creditor de cant nald tour of Re Daily ted: vision play over the BBC. viewing it for the London Worker, Alison Macleod 2? *: * d- “Shakespeare took a: late We acting a pound of flesh, and mnt the creditor a Jew because was topical — a Jew had D ‘pia ecuted for trying to poison“ — beth I. Jaa ‘ ne “(An Italian version, PY fe Gregorio Leti, makes the hae vengeful creditor a Christial this the poor debtor a Jew, but pli¢ would not thave suited PUY taste). ... . i ‘For the rest, the play 15 vie able to us now only because continually contradicts the 339 The Christians are portraye ting low, stupid, . fortune - hun) crowd; the Jew the only of€ ",,, can make out a rational cas* nimself.” - : i) on Significant Canadian Novel _ Fatherless Sons — _. by Dyson Carter’ A story of the Canadian people : : f as exciting as Canada itself x pee ta” never lost. ‘ ee , an 3 Fatherless Sons take you far beyond one family g one town as it unfolds the story of a headstrond 7 ye miner and the courageous woman whose It.sweeps you across our magn auth country, in to the lives of a host of Canadians: 7 ‘ful and aged, the brave and the defeated. he ee te ove jeificert Now on sale at 337 WEST ‘PENDER CLOTH $4.75 oe People ’s Co-op Bookstore MArine 5836. - ADD 5% SALES TAX A BOOK. YOU: WILL WANT TO READ — ) PACIFIC TRIBUNE — JULY 22, 1955 — PAG™ VANCOUVER 4 ‘PAPER $2.50 : ‘