Die Erde Hat Mich Wieder! or, Life Goes On!

1.

I remember, long  ago, watching a German-language movie directed by Willi Forst. It was made in the 1930s; if I remember correctly, the title was Burgtheater, the name of the famous classical theatre in Vienna. At the end of the movie, a troubled actor returns to the stage and triumphantly quotes a line from Goethe's Faust: die Erde hat mich wieder! The literal meaning is "Earth has me again;" the figurative meaining is  "Things are back to normal; my problems are over!"

Problema resuelto! That's the way my wife and I felt as we ventured to Washington D.C. on April 13, for the first time since the pandemic lockdown, which began two years earlier. (A conservative aquaintance warned us not to go and risk illness or even death. But I felt as if I had been cooped up far too long for the old bird I was rapidly becoming.)

Things had certainly changed in the past two years. Improvements had been made to the Amtrack trains; they were now newer and provided a far smoother ride. (Something's still rotten in the state of America, however; we're not in Denmark yet.) Unfortunately our tickets, purchased prior to the pandemic, were no longer valid. Another change: there were far fewer passangers now. Things were definitely not back to normal.

We went to D.C. to attend a perfomrance of The Merchant of Venice at the Shakespeare Theater. Upon arrival in the capital, we tried to take the metro to Gallery Place, where the theater is located, only to discover that our senior metro cards were no longer valid either. We attempted to get new cards, but left the queue due to lack of time. Shylock was not going to wait for us!

We had to show our vaccination cards to get into the theater. Masks were required during the perfomance, which was well attended. It seemed that the stage had become a theater in the British sense of that word, and we, hermetically sealed behind our masks, were about to watch an operation.

Well, it was an operation, at the end of which we were restored to life. Yes, die Erde hat uns wieder!

2.

The performance was excellent.

I have always been fascinated by the beginning of the play. Antonio, another merchant of Venice and Shylock's foil, is sad. The play opens with Antonio saying the following lines:

In sooth I know not why I am so sad.
It wearies me, you say it wearies you,
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
what stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn:
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me
That I have much ado to know myself.

Having been acquainted with the night for most of my life, I know well what Antonio is talking about.  He realizes not only that he is weary of being depressed, but that his friends are tired of his lugubriousness as well. Nobody wants you when you're down and out; some of his friends probably do not abandon him to himself because he is a wealthy and influential person. His mood often makes him behave as a 'want-wit' and who wants to be friends with a mope? The reason why he is so sad is a mystery to him; it has been a mystery to me as well. Regarding inner cliffs, Hopkins wrote, "Hold them cheap/ May who ne'er hung there..." Very true, but this was written over two centuries later, when much more about the inner workings of the psyche wERE beginning to be known. Those who try to console Antonio assume that he is suffering from an external problem, economic worries, for instance. It is only in modern times that we have theorized that the problem might lie inside, in our very genes. 

It is often interpreted that Antonio suffers from a homosexual crush on Bessanio, for whom he risks so much. If this intepretation is correct, and it is a reasonable one, we must remember that Antonio is unaware of it. The Stonewall Riots occurred centuries later; the concept of a homosexual identity was not an Elizabethan concept. If Antonio suffered from repressed sexuality, it is reasonable to assume that he wasn't aware of its cause.

In the performance we saw, Antonio's repressed nature was expressed with a beautiful gesture. To show his gratitude that Anonio is ready to sacrifice a pound of flesh for him, Bassanio gives him a manly hug. Antonio hesitates to respond. He gives him half a hug, and only after a poignant moment of hesitation, closes the embrace. That second or two of hesitation was, I think, very effective theater. Later on in the play, however, Bessanio gives him a passionate--and anachronistic--kiss, which I thought was dramatically a bit over-the-top.

The staging was minimal, and thus very Shakespearean. Much was left to the imagination; I think it would have been better if that kiss had been left up to the imagination as well.

Performances of this play have become problematic in this post-Holocaust age. Antisemitic references abound. One must recall, however, that Jews had been banished from England since the end of the thirteenth century. There were virtually no Jews in England at the time this play was written. Shylock was based more on Marlowe's Jewish villain, Barnabas, more than on prejudice on Shakespeare's part. Neverteless, the antisemitic references in the play must be qualified, since, despite the unspeakable crimes against Jews in the past century, antisemitism is alas alas alas very much still with us. 

The director toned down the antisemitism by casting Shylock with a very talented African American actor, John Douglas Thompson, who gave a very poignant performance. Not only that, Shakespeare being Shakespeare, was incapable of creating a caricature villain such as Marlowe's Barnabas. Shylock's anger is well-founded: Antonio has treated him like a dog. The latter is as unaware of his monstrous behavior as he is unaware of the source of his depresssion. No wonder Shylock views him as his enemy. That the other characters have no objections to Antonio's vile behavior in an indictment of the way humans often behave towards members whom they consider to be aliens.  

3.

Probably because this is a problem play, most performances today go to great lenghs to portray Shylock as  sympathetically as possible. There is a limit, however, to this approach. We must not forget that Shakespeare meant Shylock to be a villain. His villainy gives the play its dramatic drive. However, with such a great author, things are never simple.

I consider Shylock to be a Brechtian figure. Brecht believed, correctly I believe, that society shapes the individual, and that the individual doesn't emerge intact as Venus mythologically did, having arisen intact and unchangeable from the brain of Jupiter. Nor does the individual remain static during its lifetime. To believe otherwise, as many do, especially in the United States, is to ascribe to what I call 'toxic individualism.' ('Don't tread on me?' Time will do the treading, either with an abrupt kick, or, more likely, graduallyand inevitably.)

Brecht also believed, obviously with reason, that we live in a corrupt society. It is therefore virtually impossible, according to the playwright, to be truly good in a world where evil is no stranger. 

Let us apply this philosophy to Shylcok. We have great sympathy for him, due to the self-righteous abuse he receives from a Christian society that isn't even aware of the evil it does against him. But we lose sympathy for Shylock when he chooses to do evil himself. He did not have to persist in his demand for a pound of flesh; he could have walked away a richer man, with more ducats than he initially loaned out. (Similarly, according to Brecht, Mother Courage ddin't have to live off war.) Demanding a pound of flesh puts Shylock in the category of such evildoers as medieval torturers. Yes, society created a monster; but Shylock is a monster, nevertheless. If Shylock is simply a decent man who is driven to anger by the evil done to him, the play loses its dramatic spine and becomes a flabby concatenation of words. And The Merchant of Venice certainly isn't that; it might not be Shakespeare's greatest play, but it still remians one of the greatest plays ever written.

At the end of the play, the director has Jessica and Shylock recite a portion of the lovely kol nidre, presumably to further elicit  sympathy for the Jewish characters. It doesn't work. One can't escape the fact that Shylock is a villain.

After the performance, we headed for our favorite Chinese restaurant. (The theatre is situated in easy walking distance to D.C.'s China Town.) We have been subscribers to Shakespeare theatre for many years; after each performance we usually have a meal in China Town. Due to the pandemic, however, we hadn't been there for two years. What a pleasant surprise it was for us to see that our favorite waitress was still there! (The last time we were there, the lockdown was about to begin. We were the only ones in the restaurant. We noticed that many of the surrounding resturants had disappeared.)

After a rich cultural experience followed by a rich culinary experience, we headed home. What a great day we had! I can truly say, pace Antonio, die Erde hat mich wieder!