The play has inspired many adaptions and several works of fiction.
Film, TV and radio versions
- 1914 – The Merchant of Venice, a silent film directed by Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley. Weber played Portia and Smalley, her husband, played Shylock. With this film, Weber became the first woman to direct a full-length feature film in America.[41]
- 1916 – The Merchant of Venice, an unsuccessful silent British film produced by Walter West for Broadwest.[42]
- 1923 – The Merchant of Venice (Der Kaufmann von Venedig), also The Jew of Mestri, a silent German film directed by Peter Paul Felner. Though based in part on Shakespeare's play, it was also based on Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, as well as stories by Giovanni Fiorentino, Masuccio Salernitano and Pietro Aretino.[43]
- 1941 – Shylock, an Indian Tamil language film directed by the duo Sama-Ramu.[44]
- 1953 – The Merchant of Venice, a French-Italian drama film directed by Pierre Billon and starring Michel Simon, Andrée Debar and Massimo Serato.
- 1961 – The Merchant of Venice, an Australian television adaptation.
- 1969 – The Merchant of Venice, an unreleased 40-minute television film directed by and starring Orson Welles; the film was completed, but the soundtrack for all but the first reel was stolen before it could be released.[45]
- 1972 – The Merchant of Venice, BBC video-taped television version directed by Cedric Messina for the BBC's Play of the Month series.[46] Cast includes Maggie Smith, Frank Finlay, Charles Gray and Christopher Gable.[46]
- 1973 – The Merchant of Venice British Associated Television version directed by John Sichel. Broadcast in the United States over ABC-TV.[46][47] Set in the late Victorian era, the cast included Laurence Olivier as Shylock, Anthony Nicholls as Antonio, Jeremy Brett as Bassanio, and Joan Plowright as Portia.[46]
- 1980 – The Merchant of Venice, a version for the BBC Television Shakespeare directed by Jack Gold.[46] The cast includes Gemma Jones as Portia, Warren Mitchell as Shylock and John Nettles as Bassanio.[46]
- 1996 – The Merchant of Venice, a Channel 4 television film directed by Alan Horrox.[48] The cast included Bob Peck as Shylock and Haydn Gwynne as Portia.[48]
- 2001 – The Merchant of Venice, a Royal National Theatre production directed by Trevor Nunn.[49] Set around 1930, Henry Goodman played Shylock.[49]
- 2002 – The Māori Merchant of Venice, directed by Don Selwyn.[50] In Māori, with English subtitles. This film was based on a 1945 translation of the play to Māori by Pei Te Hurinui Jones.[50]
- 2003 – In Shakespeare's Merchant, a film directed by Paul Wagar, Antonio and Bassanio have a homosexual relationship.[51][52]
- 2004 – The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford and produced by Barry Navidi. This was the first "big-screen" adaptation of the play. The cast included Al Pacino as Shylock, Jeremy Irons as Antonio, Joseph Fiennes as Bassanio, Lynn Collins as Portia, and Zuleikha Robinson as Jessica.[53]
- Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 22 April 2018 and transposing the plot from Venice to the City of London and the financial crisis of 2007–2008. The cast included Andrew Scott as Shylock, Ray Fearon as Antonio, Colin Morgan as Bassanio, Hayley Atwell as Portia, and Lauren Cornelius as Jessica.[54]
Operas
- Josef Bohuslav Foerster's three-act Czech opera Jessika was first performed at the Prague National Theatre in 1905.[55][56]
- Adrian Welles Beecham, 15-year-old son of Sir Thomas Beecham, composed an operatic version which premiered at the Grand Theatre in Brighton on 18 September 1922 followed by 32 performances at the Duke of York's Theatre in London from 20 November to 16 December 1922.[57] Augustus Milner sang Shylock, later replaced during the run by producer F. R. Benson.[57] Although described in the vocal score as "a Shakespearean Opera" the play was perhaps better defined as a "play with music", with 27 musical sections or arias.[58]
- Reynaldo Hahn's three-act French opera Le marchand de Venise was first performed at the Paris Opéra on 25 March 1935.[59][60]
- The late André Tchaikowsky's (1935–1982) opera The Merchant of Venice premiered at the Bregenz Festival[61][62] on 18 July 2013.
Cultural references
Edmond Haraucourt, French playwright and poet, was commissioned in the 1880s by the actor and theatrical director Paul Porel to make a French-verse adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. His play Shylock, first performed at the Théâtre de l'Odéon in December 1889, had incidental music by the French composer Gabriel Fauré, later incorporated into an orchestral suite of the same name.[63]
St. John Ervine authored a sequel play, The Lady of Belmont, in 1924, in which the characters from Shakespeare's work reunite ten years after the events of the earlier play.[64]
Ralph Vaughan Williams' choral work Serenade to Music (1938) draws its text from the discussion about music and the music of the spheres in Act V, scene 1.[65]
In both versions of the comic film To Be or Not to Be (1942 and 1983) the character "Greenberg", specified as a Jew in the later version, gives a recitation of the "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech to Nazi soldiers.[66]
The rock musical Fire Angel was based on the story of the play, with the scene changed to the Little Italy district of New York. It was performed in Edinburgh in 1974 and in a revised form at Her Majesty's Theatre, London, in 1977. Braham Murray directed.[67][68]
Arnold Wesker's play The Merchant (1976) is a reimagining of Shakespeare's story.[69] In this retelling, Shylock and Antonio are friends and share a disdain for the crass anti-Semitism of the Christian community's laws.[70]
David Henry Wilson's play Shylock's Revenge, was first produced at the University of Hamburg in 1989, and follows the events in The Merchant of Venice. In this play Shylock gets his wealth back and becomes a Jew again.[71]
The Star Trek franchise sometimes quote and paraphrase Shakespeare, including The Merchant of Venice. One example is the Shakespeare-aficionado Chang in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), a Klingon, who quotes Shylock.[72]
Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) depicts SS Lieutenant Amon Göth quoting Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech when deciding whether to rape his Jewish maid.[73]
In David Fincher's 1995 crime thriller Seven, a lawyer, Eli Gould, is coerced to remove a pound of his own flesh and place it on a scale, alluding to the play.[74]
The German Belmont Prize was established in 1997,[75] referring to 'Belmont' as "a place of destiny where Portia's intelligence is at home." The eligibility for the award is encapsulated by the inscription on the play's lead casket, "Who chooses me must give and hazard all he hath."[76]
One of the four short stories comprising Alan Isler's The Bacon Fancier (1999) is also told from Shylock's point of view. In this story, Antonio was a converted Jew.[77]
The Pianist is a 2002 film based on a memoir by Władysław Szpilman. In this film, Henryk Szpilman reads Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech to his brother Władysław in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation in World War II.[78]
In the 2009 spy comedy OSS 117: Lost in Rio, a speech by the nazi Von Zimmel parodies Shylock's tirade.[79][80]
Christopher Moore combines The Merchant of Venice and Othello in his 2014 comic novel The Serpent of Venice, in which he makes Portia (from The Merchant of Venice) and Desdemona (from Othello) sisters. All of the characters come from those two plays with the exception of Jeff (a monkey); the gigantic simpleton Drool; and Pocket, the Fool, who comes from Moore's earlier novel Fool, based on King Lear.[81]
Naomi Alderman's The Wolf in the Water is a radio-play first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2016. The play continues the story of Shylock's daughter Jessica, who lives in an anti-semitic Venice and practices her Jewish faith in secret. Part of the BBC's Shakespeare Festival, the play also marked that 500 years had passed since the Venetian Ghetto was instituted.[82][83]
Sarah B. Mantell's Everything that Never Happened is a play first produced in 2017 at the Yale School of Drama. Similar to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the play occurs in the gaps between scenes of the canonical The Merchant of Venice, with the characters gradually recognizing how conflicts over assimilation and anti-Semitism recur throughout past, present, and future.[84][85][86]
