Interpreting Shakespeare as Historical Reckoning: A Qualities of Mercy Dispatch
by Mary Janell Metzger
Any discussion of race must deconstruct whiteness and not just focus on minoritized people — a practice with which students are familiar, if not comfortable.
Act 5 of The Merchant of Venice presents any theatrical production with clear challenges given the play’s antisemitic and racist effects. When that theater group is made up of overwhelmingly white Christian students from a community with a long history of white supremacy, Shakespeare’s closing act offers a chance to engage essential questions of literary racialization, historical memory, and the ways in which white people obscure the construction of whiteness via the dispossession and pain of others.
Living and working in a community rooted in the exploitation, dispossession, and expulsion of nonwhites, The Quality of Mercy Project challenged my students to explore how their adaptation, casting, and performance of Act 5 could reckon with whiteness in The Merchant in the context of our own racialized histories. Mercy seemed the last thing either Act 5 or our community was well prepared to perform.
Having read the play closely, with an emphasis on the construction of whiteness as a form of social power — with particular attention to Shakespeare’s women in this process — students came to the work of adaptation with a sense of how constructions of both blackness and Jewishness are used to emphasize the value of whiteness. Conversations about Portia’s manipulation of racialized discourse and gender norms to achieve her goal of marrying the hapless but privileged Bassanio, and Jessica’s sale of her mother’s ring, challenged their feminist sympathies. But the forced conversion of Shylock and his erasure from Act 5 fired their desire to seed their production with recognition of Shylock’s exploitation and exclusion.
Answering the question — how has mercy — or justice — been afforded in our community, and to whom ? — students began with representation at our university: 71% of the students identify as white, 9% as Latinx, 6% as Asian, less than 2% as Black, and less than .4% as Indigenous. Collaborating to unpack the history of such inequity they learned the long history of settler colonialism and white supremacy in our community. Along with the exclusion of Jews and Blacks in medieval and early modern Europe, students reckoned with the local dispossession and violent exclusion here not only of Native people, but of Chinese people in 1885 and South Asian workers in 1907, only three months before Teddy Roosevelt’s imperial “Great White Fleet” marched through our streets on its world tour to tout “big stick” ideology in the wake the Spanish-American war.
They learned of more recent exclusions, such as the sun-down law in effect until the seventies, a cross burning and skinhead attacks on Blacks and Asians in the 90s. Shortly before our class, books by and about Jews in our library had been destroyed, and anti-Semitic, homophobic, and white supremacist graffiti appeared on campus.
For my white students this racial reality was both unsettling and energizing. One student reflected:
Talking about our racial histories, how it’s shaped our lives, and our understanding of each other — well not to put Shakespeare down, but it was the most important experience for me. I knew something about Shakespeare but little of my own community.
By considering racialization in the play not solely via the depiction of Morocco, Shylock, and Jessica, but in the socioeconomic power of Portia, Antonio, and Bassanio and the discourse of patriarchal marriage that shapes our sense of authorized families in the play, we moved across the color line to consider the nature and force of whiteness in our own lives and the role of literature in its construction.
Aligning our readings with our local and national reality of historical, structural, and active white Christian supremacy, students began to painfully and often haltingly see and share their own experiences of conscious and unconscious racialization. These conversations were potent and difficult and their effects mixed. While students could see the alignment of the Venetians’ unjust pursuit of power and racialized triumphalism and their relation to similar forms of privilege and exclusion, they struggled with how to act on this understanding. How to adapt Act 5 in ways that reckoned with their knowledge of themselves and Shakespeare’s play to produce a performance that our exploration of “mercy” or justice required of us?
Committed to a student-centered classroom and project, I offered resources, activities, and classroom structures that included facilitation and communal commitments. Serving as support and resource as they proceeded with brainstorming their ideas for the production and developing a script and storyboard, I witnessed the discomfort of white students described by Kim Hall in my epigraph. They could see the continuity between the white Christian economic privileges of Antonio and Bassanio, or the legalism and severity of Portia’s judgment, and the economic and political violence of local whites who made use of Indigenous knowledge and Chinese and South Asian laborers only to exclude them when their communities threatened white power. Much harder was the challenge to stage the racialized whiteness of Act 5, where white women conspire with white Christian men to secure their own power at the expense of others.
Attending to gendered power and religious difference was easier. Thus the group chose to cast the lone male actor as Portia and to emphasize Jessica’s religious alienation. The most potent moment in terms of confronting the ideological and political effects of their creative work came perhaps, when the male student cast as Portia proposed dressing in drag. A white female student quickly but calmly dispatched this possibility by pointing out the derogation of queer and trans people that the move suggested. They were less successful in grappling with the embodiment of whiteness in Act 5 as a mode of performativity that authorizes exclusion; gender and an unracialized view of religious difference remained their focus.
In analyzing white authors’ representation of racialized difference, Toni Morrison asks:
In this light, the students use of Childish Gambino’s song “This is America” in the introduction to their video sits in provocative and uneasy juxtaposition with their adaptation’s emphasis on the inter-religious and gendered conflict between Lorenzo and Jessica with which Act 5 begins, the gendered power reversal of the ring ruse and resolution, and the Christian triumphalism of Portia, Bassanio, et al. at the play’s close. Whiteness as the ground of power in the play and the forms of embodiment, speech, and community that whiteness entails, though nowhere named, consequently haunts their production.
As a white woman whose family has long benefited from color lines in Chicago and Seattle, teaching Shakespeare and the whiteness it figures is an ongoing personal and pedagogical struggle. Like my students, my work requires persistent attention to how I might “be in but not of” the university where Shakespeare continues to be deified. The Quality of Mercy Project emphasized for me how studying Shakespeare within the university must work to ever more effectively resist the white supremacy at work in the educational, cultural, and political institutions and communities that uncritically celebrate the value of his work.
For my students, reckoning with our community’s racial history, everywhere present and often invisible to white Christians, was, if but a start, significant for their future relation to their worlds and their sense of themselves as change agents within them. The work of collaborating to realize their video production of Act 5 allowed them to make use of the trust developed in these discussions to continue to learn from each other in the process of producing their scene — that is, to speak up and resist interpretations they found harmful or essential, and consequently to make their educations — and Shakespeare — meaningful for their lives beyond the classroom.
Despite their inability to take on the embodiment of whiteness in their production, the students succeeded in asserting their resistance to the injustice of Shylock’s exclusion and Jessica’s subordination within her “new” community by interpolating into Act 5 a line lifted from Shylock’s grief ridden speech in 4.1 at the loss of Jessica to Christian men who appear to value little beyond themselves and their property: “These be Christian husbands.” The line is spoken by Jessica in the final line of the video, left alone as the white Christians exuberantly depart to celebrate their affirmed political, economic, and religious dominance.
Jessica’s recognition suggests, however painfully, the promise of learning how power works to reproduce itself. The line also defies Shylock’s erasure by echoing his resistance and, though less directly, recalls via comparison Shylock’s profound love for his wife Leah, reminding us not only of what he has been dispossessed, but also the corrupting influences of racialization on the “white” Christian family that Portia and Bassanio represent. Such a discomfiting end is a mark of the ongoing nature of our work.
Mary Janell Metzger is Professor of English at Western Washington University where she teaches and writes about early modern and contemporary literature, pedagogy, and critical theory. She is the author of Shakespeare Without Fear: Teaching for Understanding and most recently, “Shakespearean Tragedy, Ethics and Social Justice” (in Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now) and “‘It Is a Reeling World Indeed’: Teaching Richard III as a Skeptical Text” (in MLA Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s History Plays).
