Unlocking the Secrets of Shylock’s Past

Shylock was a tough one for actor Gareth Armstrong.

While rehearsing the controversial role of the Jewish money lender for an English production of “The Merchant of Venice,” Armstrong had trouble finding something in the character to warm up to.

“You have to like the character you’re playing,” Armstrong says, explaining the challenge faced by an actor cast as a villain. “You don’t have to think he’s right, but you have to find an empathy with him.”

Armstrong had been able to get inside Macbeth and Richard III when he played those parts, but the key to Shylock remained elusive. Then, one day during rehearsals, Armstrong realized no one was talking to him when the company broke for coffee. Suddenly, the Welsh actor had an insight into Shylock’s lonely essence and something to build a performance on.

“In the play Shylock doesn’t have a real relationship with anybody. People talk about him and at him but he’s very isolated. I just felt very on the outside, and that’s exactly what Shylock is.”

On Sunday afternoon, Armstrong will present his “Shylock” at Cal State Northridge. It’s the Los Angeles premiere of a one-man show that hopes to entertain, but also to illuminate Shakespeare’s most problematic character and place him in context.

In the show, Armstrong appears as Tubal--the only other Jewish character in Shakespeare, who has a mere eight lines in “The Merchant of Venice.” Through Tubal, Armstrong reveals some of the anti-Semitic history that helped produce Shylock, shares anecdotes from the play’s 400-year performance history and shows how an Elizabethan actor might have donned a red wig to play the part. He even offers a psychoanalytic explanation of Shylock’s infamous demand for a pound of flesh.

Armstrong’s contention is that none of the many academics who have written about Shylock know what it’s like to be Shylock. “Only an actor,” Armstrong insists, “knows that.”

Armstrong began reading all he could on Shakespeare and the Jews almost five years ago after he mastered his lines for the role and found himself with time on his hands. Learning the part took just four days, recalls Armstrong, who points out that Shylock appears in only about a quarter of the play.

The history he discovered was a shock to Armstrong, who is not Jewish--in fact, he’s the son of a Presbyterian minister. Until he began digging, Armstrong hadn’t realized that the Jews had been expelled from England by King Edward I in 1290 and, as a result, that it was unlikely that Shakespeare actually knew any Jews. Armstrong had never heard of the blood libel, the vicious legend that Jews were responsible for the ritual murders of Christian children that have been the pretext for anti-Jewish violence for millenniums.

Inevitably, reporters ask Armstrong if he thinks Shakespeare was an anti-Semite. The question was made more urgent by Hitler’s genocidal campaign against the Jews in the 20th century, but it has always mattered. We are talking about Shakespeare here, arguably the greatest writer of all time. In spite of his having created a character whose very name has become an anti-Semitic slur, we don’t want the Bard to be a bigot.

Never hesitant to take a stand, Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom has no doubts on the matter. Bloom starts the relevant chapter in his massive 1998 bestseller “Shakespeare” by declaring: “One would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to recognize that Shakespeare’s grand, equivocal comedy ‘The Merchant of Venice’ is nevertheless a profoundly anti-Semitic work.”

*

Bolstering that view is the fact that Hitler loved it. But Armstrong is less willing than others to label Shylock’s creator an anti-Semite or his only major Jewish character nothing but a vicious stereotype. The plot of the play certainly reflects the anti-Jewish attitudes of the period, Armstrong says, conceding that’s a “weasel-word answer” to the question.

“I think, to Shakespeare’s audience, Shylock was a comic villain. But Shakespeare’s not capable of writing one-dimensional characters. If he did, Shylock wouldn’t be reverberating 400 years later,” says Armstrong, a former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company whose colleagues included Ben Kingsley.

The fact that the play raises questions about anti-Semitism makes for lively classroom discussions about insiders and outsiders, according to CSUN’s Tobias Gregory, who teaches Shakespeare to non-English majors. “In some ways that makes it continually relevant to today’s students,” he says.

Armstrong has taken his provocative show around the world. In December, he performed it in Tel Aviv (he wasn’t able to visit Jerusalem because of the recent violence), and he is looking forward to an upcoming date at Utah’s Brigham Young University.

Depending on their backgrounds, audiences respond differently to the show, he says. Jewish audiences usually know about the horrors he reveals during the performance. Non-Jewish audiences are often learning about them for the first time. His favorite audiences are a mix of both.

For 52-year-old Armstrong, the show has been a professional boon. “I didn’t have to audition,” he jokes about the material he tailored to his own interests and strengths and that has proved more successful than he ever dreamed.

“If you’re a middle-aged actor, waiting for the phone to ring, and you’ve got something people want to book way into the future--it’s an American term, isn’t it?--it’s empowering,” he said.

Currently, Armstrong and his director, Frank Barrie, are working on a new show for Armstrong that deals with Shakespeare’s Prospero--one of his strongest older characters--and the real-life necromancer, John Dee, on whom the character was based.

“There’s nothing but King Lear left,” the longtime interpreter of Shakespeare says with a laugh.

*

Gareth Armstrong will perform “Shylock” Sunday at 4 p.m. at the Center for the Visual and Performing Arts in CSUN’s University Student Union. The campus is at 18111 Nordhoff St. For ticket information and directions, call (818) 677-2488.