Laury Magnus opens his essay on Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice with a quote from Ron Rosenbaum: “Should The Merchant of Venice be performed?” For much of the twentieth century, and especially from the 1930s onwards, the answer to that question was “no.” In the shadow of the Holocaust, the play risked contributing too heavily to anti-Semitic stereotypes. Shakespeare’s Merchant would not make its way into for-profit cinemas for the next 50 years (though it did get airtime on television in places where state-sponsored media was committed to producing the text as a document in cultural education).
With Micahel Radford’s 2004 Hollywood release, Shakespeare’s play was once again brought to the big screen. But as Mangus notes, the adaptation was met with mixed success; and critics have since debated the merits of Radford’s decision to cut some of the play’s most unsavory material–not just of Shylock but of Portia and other characters like Salerio and Gratiano as well.
Radford’s production is no exception to the general idea that every adaptation of a Shakespeare play will inevitably require amending or adjusting the original text in some way. What are the artistic and ideological effects of these decisions?
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