ABSTRACT
Reviewing Shakespeare on stage in 1993, Alan C. Dessen (1994: 6) referred to the ‘devious’ and ‘suspect’ route by which the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production, directed by David Thacker, achieved a more sympathetic portrait of Shylock, in part by ‘the major rewriting’ of 3.1.1 Dessen remarked that the director ‘took the refashioning of Shylock farther than any other production I have ever seen’. When the play was performed at the Barbican in London, the Guardian critic, Claire Armitstead chaired a discussion between the playwright, Arnold Wesker and the RSC director. Wesker (Armitstead 1994) argued that his own strategy of writing a new play, The Merchant (in stages of rewriting and production between 1976 and 1978, and later called Shylock) was ‘a more honest approach to the problems than rejigging and imposing on the play’. His play appealed to questions of historical record in order to correct the stereotyped account of Jews and Jewish history that he found in Shakespeare’s play. My essay examines the influence of local contexts on our understanding of what constitutes a ‘genuinely Shakespearean’ appropriation of The Merchant of Venice and the geo-politics of Thacker’s heavily cut production of The Merchant of Venice at Stratford-upon-Avon and London, and the British premiere of Wesker’s play at Birmingham.
