The Shylock and the Shakespeareans, which ran at the New Ohio Theatre from June 1 to June 17 (and remains available online until July 31), is a morality play. Not the medieval affair quite, with roles for Justice and Virtue and Freewill, although that is not a bad image to keep in mind. The Shylock and the Shakespeareans is a morality play in the sense that it is designed, above all, to make a moral argument. 

That argument can be broken into two parts. The first is that Shakespeare was an anti-semite; the second is a bit harder to put precisely, though arguments like it are made all the time, and usually take the form of “there is a direct line leading from Shakespeare’s anti-semitism to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.” 

Since the play is, obviously, very intensely concerned with morality, it is worth tackling these questions on their own terms before moving on to the more important question, i.e., whether the play is any good. The first point is absolutely true. The second might be, but the way in which the playwright, Einhorn, makes the argument is so sloppy that even a sympathetic spectator like myself begins to doubt. 

I should explain how the play makes its argument, which will help us weigh it on the much more important scales—the aesthetic ones—later on. If my exposition prejudices you against the play, I can only plead my honesty; if it prejudices you for the play, I can only plead your insanity. 

The play makes its case via a retelling of The Merchant of Venice. The plot of The Merchant of Venice runs like this, in case you forgot: Bassanio, a young nobleman, has lived well beyond his means and becomes indebted to his merchant friend Antonio. He wants to make good by marrying a rich and pretty heiress, Portia, but of course, he needs money first to make a good impression. Antonio’s money being all tied up, they turn to the Jewish moneylender Shylock for a loan, and Antonio agrees that if they do not pay the money back in three months, Shylock can cut out of his body a pound of his flesh. (Like Shakespeare’s bastards who hate their brothers because they are good, and not only because the world hates bastards, Shylock hates Antonio because he is a Christian, and not only because he is an anti-semite.) Meanwhile, Shylock’s daughter Jessica leaves his joyless house to marry Lorenzo, become a Christian, and assimilate into Venetian high society, stealing many precious jewels from him in the process. Bassanio marries Portia, but cannot return in time to pay the debt; Shylock demands his pound of flesh, and legalistic Venice seems poised to grant it to him; Portia appears disguised as a doctor of law, frustrates Shylock on a technicality, and forces him to convert to Christianity to avoid a far worse punishment.

The Shylock and the Shakespeareans changes the above in many ways, but the chief change is that the Jewish moneylender turns out not to have sought vengeance against Antonio after all, much less in the form of a pound of flesh. The bloody business is a Christian invention. Tracing this invention to its source will explain how the main point of the play is argued. 

There is an alt-right gang about town, the Shakespeareans, whose leader (yes, you have guessed his name) claims that the Shylocks (Jews) bring foreigners onto Venetian soil to take the natives’ jobs and infect their streets. Also, they eat Christian flesh. Antonio is a great fan of Shakespeare, and has repeated these claims to Bassanio many a time. After they go to Jacob (an actual jeweler and a very kind and upstanding one at that, only dubbed “Shylock” as a slur) to obtain the necklace that will impress Portia, they manage to persuade themselves, or cynically decide to pretend, that he asked for a pound of flesh as surety, when in fact he asked nothing more than that Antonio tell his fellow Shakespeareans that the Jews do not eat Christian flesh and so forth. The big lie builds; the Shakespeareans go on marches wearing white hoods with his likeness, chanting “Jew will not replace us,” burning down Jacob’s house; Jacob goes to court to get his money back after Antonio failed either to pay or to keep his promise; and gang member Gobbo enters the courtroom with a semi-automatic rifle, killing Shylock and Lorenzo and maiming Nerissa. 

Several things undermine the argument here. First, why are Jews accused of ushering in other foreigners to take natives’ jobs and infect their streets? In the eyes of the Christian Venetians of those days, the Jews themselves were the job-stealers (their usury made money that the gentile couldn’t) and the vectors of infection (hence their confinement to the first ghetto). In England, Jews were hardly even immigrants; they had been banned from the country for three hundred years. Putting words and ideas obviously alien to Shakespeare (“Jew will not replace us” too) in his mouth, in order to argue that he is their grandfather, only makes the spectator wonder whether you have no better argument to make. 

Second, the emphasis on blood libel as cannibalism is just a bit strange. The cooking of matzo in blood is mentioned once, but otherwise, the element of cultic ritual, which historically wrapped and permeated the blood libel, is missing; one gets the impression that the Jews are being accused of raw cannibalism such as Montaigne described, which is just a very different thing.

Finally, one gaping omission further reveals Einhorn’s disinterest in history, never useful in making a historical argument. He wants to stage Shakespeare as a first mover of anti-semitism. Of course, some poetic license is his due. But the choice makes anyone familiar with the composition history of The Merchant of Venice object on two grounds. First, the play’s plot is lifted from an Italian novella already two hundred years old. Second, the play was written in the aftermath of the trial and execution of Roger Lopes. Lopes was a converso, a refugee from the Inquisition and Queen Elizabeth’s royal physician; he was alleged to have conspired with the Spanish Crown to poison the Queen, and his death was cheered in England amid a wave of anti-semitic sentiment. Shakespeare’s own greed may have entered into the composition of his anti-semitism, as he tried to capitalize on the newest trend—painting a more complicated picture, and a more interesting one, than Einhorn’s.

This brings us to the most important point: aesthetics. Morality is a rather dreary business, like doing one’s taxes. The only way it can be addressed in a work of art, without destroying both the beauty of the work and (as a consequence) the power of the moral appeal, is indirectly. Ulysses is an anti-anti-semitic work because the reader believes that when she opens its pages she opens a window into life, and therefore that whatever moral lessons she takes from the book, she takes from life itself. 

When, on the other hand, plot and characterization are directed by abstract moral arguments, this lie that enables art to be art cannot be believed. Characters go through the motions of scenes, as though thereby rowing themselves to the destination they and the audience both know is theirs. Actors cannot imagine feelings and attitudes in their roles that the writer never did in the first place, feeling and attitude and character having been second to his moral argument. 

So the Christians of The Shylock and the Shakespeareans spontaneously become, or turn out to be anti-semites of the first order, without explanation, in some cases despite having previously regarded the Shakespeareans as fringe. Jacob must be martyred, after all. So Antonio exchanges his friendly generosity for cupidity—he is now a closeted gay man attracted to Bassanio. Bassanio ceases to be Shylock’s foil, the spendthrift who gets by on Christian privilege, on pure social and cultural capital and noble blood; he must be the worst-dressed character in the play, his manners and speech blue-collar, a moron for good measure. So Portia can no longer be subtle, directing Bassanio to the right casket while maintaining plausible deniability. She must choose or deny her suitors aggressively, to make the racism already obvious in Shakespeare still more obvious; we must be robbed of her cross-dressing ruse, the mischief that comes with it, and the indication therein of her previous, light and lawyerly interference in the choosing of the caskets, in order that she be made a judge by profession, and the corrupt nature of Jacob’s trial the more obvious. So the costumes and the speeches must be a mix of Early Modern and contemporary, but to no effect other than rendering the Early Modern an opaque intrusion, a curiosity, quaint. So Jessica loses her reasons to convert one by one, the Christians’ joyous masque having been replaced by hateful politics, her father the embittered miser by a man of dignity.

So Jacob protests aloud, so Jacob asserts his humanity, so Jacob defends his innocence, and the spectator cannot help but think, “Well whoever said you were guilty?” Of course, the other actors said so, many times, and the spectator listened attentively and heard them, but he could not believe them. The other spectators sitting around him could not believe them. Not even Jacob could believe them, because they did not believe themselves. 

And so the spectator cannot help but feel: if Jacob’s protest is not directed at the other actors, it can only be directed at me. For some reason, the playwright feels that I need to hear this, that I need to be told that the blood libel was always that, a libel, so that now, rather than watching a play, I am being lectured, without my lecturer having any reason whatever to believe I am guilty of the error. 

A dreary business, indeed.