DIALOGUES CASTING A BLACK ACTOR AS SHYLOCK MAKES PERFECT SENSE ISHMAEL REED
John Douglas Thompson (Shylock). Photo by Henry Grossman.
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ontraditional casting doesn’t always work. Done naively or cynically, casting actors of color in roles originally conceived as white, or as white historical figures, distorts or outright erases race and racism from the lives depicted onstage. It works in The Merchant of Venice, though, because while distinct, there are parallels between the experiences of Jews in Europe and Blacks in the United States. Shylock is referred to as a devil, a fiend, and a dog, terms with which Black men have been demonized and animalized since Salem. And the play contrasts Shylock’s abuse of his daughter, Jessica, with the Christian men’s courtesy toward women. In this, Merchant reminds one of the films that purport to offer a “nuanced” treatment of the segregated South. Hollywood cautions us not to be too 8
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sympathetic to Black men, often seen abusing their wives and children, while assuring us that a white man—whatever his attitude toward, say, Medgar Evers and his murder—is at least gentleman enough to help a Black woman with her groceries. Casting Jessica as a Black woman helps us locate Merchant in the lineage of the “White Savior” narrative—that box office favorite for centuries, in which a white person (usually a white male) persuades a woman of color to abandon her background with the promise of assimilation. Jessica not only runs away with a broke Christian but gives him her father’s money. Black women are well-accustomed to being presumed untrustworthy in a white society—followed in department stores, for example—as well as, like Jessica, exoticized and sexualized. Think of the Tenderloin Riot of 1900,
