From The Merchant of Venice, at Theater for a New Audience.
Photo: Gerry Goodstein/(c)2021 Gerry Goodstein
The merchant in The Merchant of Venice has it tough. He cares about a jerk who keeps borrowing money. He’s lost more argosies than you’ve had hot dinners. And worst of all — no one remembers that he is not Shylock. The actual merchant in Shakespeare’s play is the melancholy Antonio, who survives Shylock’s plot to extract a pound of flesh for a loan gone bad. Yet our loyalties have slewed around so completely in the last 400 years that we now think the play (even its title!) belongs to the man who is, dramaturgically speaking, merely the villain.
Admittedly, the non-Shylock parts of Merchant are hardly…
