Bloom, who has wrestled for decades with The Merchant of Venice and with the efforts of Shakespeare revisionists to reinterpret Shakespeare’s genius for modern consumption, remains convinced that the play is irredeemably anti-Semitic: “It would have been better for the last four centuries of the Jewish people,” Bloom writes, “had Shakespeare never written the play.” In fact The Merchant of Venice was so admired and so often performed in German theaters in the 1920s and during the Third Reich that some Jews still living in the shadow of the Holocaust draw a line from Shylock to Auschwitz.īarry Navidi, the producer of last year’s big-screen version of The Merchant of Venice, had a quite different reaction to the play. If you agree with Harold Bloom, these failures were a good thing. There had never before been a big-screen version of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice-Orson Welles had given up in the middle of rehearsals, and Laurence Olivier did a stage production but could not raise enough money to make a complete film.
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