Jessica* in Merchant and Bianca in Othello are more or less the girls from the other side of the tracks, true in their love for their respective beaus. Where I could, I consolidated or eliminated characters. Pocket becomes Lancelot Gobbo, Shylock’s servant. The vengeful Montressor, from The Cask of Amontillado, becomes Brabantio, and Pocket also becomes Poe’s boastful harlequin, Fortunato, both bearing nicknames given them by the doge. I might have trimmed Antonio’s entourage a bit, but I felt it only fair to leave a substantial number of “red shirts” in the cast to entertain Viv’s appetites.

The Chorus is a presence in a few of the plays, most notably Henry the Fifth and Romeo and Juliet, where they both get some of the better lines in two very poetic plays with some of my favorite speeches. In other plays (Pericles comes to mind—one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays), he uses named characters as onstage narrators. But there is no Chorus in either Othello or The Merchant of Venice. I love the poet’s voice on the stage, walking around, describing the action, appearing invisible to all the other characters, so I thought it might be amusing to shine the spotlight on him. Othello is more or less narrated by Iago, who spends an enormous amount of time in soliloquy, telling the audience what evil shit he is plotting, so it only occurs to me now, with the story finished, that I should have had him accuse the Chorus of sleeping with Emilia.

ATTITUDES

Let me make it clear here that when I’m talking about “attitudes” what I’m talking about are racism and anti-Semitism. Based on criticism I’ve read of The Merchant of Venice, and the criticism of the criticism, it seems that somewhere in the latter end of the twentieth century, academics declared The Merchant of Venice to not be an anti-Semitic play, but a play with anti-Semitic characters. “You have to see it in the context of the time it was written,” we are told. Shylock, next to Hamlet, is probably the most analyzed of Shakespeare’s characters. He is eloquent, although he speaks in a different cadence and manner from everyone else in the play, and he is both greedy and clichéd in the way he is written, but is also a product of much oppression and prejudice, and he makes an eloquent case for his thirst for vengeance.