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Dialogues: Casting a Black Actor as Shylock Makes Perfect Sense by Ishmael Reed
ISHMAEL REED
John Douglas Thompson (Shylock). Photo by Henry Grossman.
Nontraditional 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 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,
ignited when a white policeman mistook a Black man’s girlfriend for a prostitute.
Shylock, called an “inhuman wretch” by a courtroom full of enslavers, reminds them that they are the ones treating human beings like asses, dogs, and mules. Through Shylock, Shakespeare points out the hypocrisies of slavery that England and her colonial descendants would perpetuate for centuries. (The supposedly enlightened Hamilton, for one, in letters and his law practice, upheld the notion that enslaved people were as much property as cows and horses.) Shylock argues that if they can own whole human beings, why can’t he own a piece of one? But like many Black men who find themselves in the courtroom, Shylock can’t win against a rigged system. The Duke, as presiding officer, and Portia, acting as judge, are personally biased against Jews, but it’s the anti-Semitism of the law that gives them scope to bankrupt and humiliate Shylock.
Portia’s much-quoted “quality of mercy” speech articulates another hypocrisy of a dominant majority, here Christians. They’re always asking that we not be angry, to turn the other cheek while vigilantes and rogue police officers run amok, shooting us while we’re lying in bed. She urges Shylock to show mercy, but prosecuting him, she is merciless. She seizes his property and forces him to become a Christian—the sort of proselytizing that goes on in Boccacio’s The Decameron. Not only were Jews living under miserable conditions during this period, but they had to put up with Christians pestering them into conversion. I think that Shakespeare ultimately bowed to the prejudices of his audiences by having Shylock cower under Portia’s sophistry. He becomes the dog who is defanged. My late lawyers, Abraham Freedman and Ellis Friedman, would have ripped her arguments to pieces.
Should a Black man play Shylock? A better question: What took them so long? John Douglas Thompson has got the acting chops to do a great job. I hope it’s seen by as many people as possible.•
Danaya Esperanza (Jessica). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.
ISHMAEL REED is the author of over twenty-five books including Mumbo Jumbo, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Conjugating Hindi, Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico and most recently Malcolm and Me and Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic: the trickster tradition, or NeoHoodooism. A regular contributor to CounterPunch and founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley for over thirty years, retiring in 2005. Reed is the only person to be nominated for the National Book Award in two categories in the same year.
