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Adaptations and cultural references

Film adaptations

The Shakespeare play has inspired several films.

• 1914—silent film directed by Lois Weber
  • Weber, who also stars as Portia, became the first woman to direct a full-length feature film in America with this film.
  • The Merchant of Venice at the Internet Movie Database
• 1916-The Merchant of Venice, a silent British film directed by Walter West for Broadwest.
  • The Merchant of Venice at the Internet Movie Database
• 1923-The Merchant of Venice, a silent German film directed by Peter Paul Felner.
  • The Merchant of Venice at the Internet Movie Database
• 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.
  • The Merchant of Venice at the Internet Movie Database
• 1973—television film directed by John Sichel
  • The cast included Laurence Olivier as Shylock, Anthony Nicholls as Antonio, Jeremy Brett as Bassanio, Joan Plowright as Portia, Louise Purnell as Jessica.
  • The Merchant of Venice at the Internet Movie Database
• 1972- television film directed by Cedric Messina for the BBC starring Maggie Smith
• 1980—A BBC television film directed by Jack Gold
  • The cast included Gemma Jones as Portia and Warren Mitchell as Shylock
  • The Merchant of Venice at the Internet Movie Database
• 1996—A Channel 4 television film directed by Alan Horrox
  • The cast included Paul McGann as Bassanio and Haydn Gwynne as Portia
  • The Merchant of Venice at the Internet Movie Database
• 2001—A BBC television film directed by Trevor Nunn
  • Royal National Theatre production starring Henry Goodman as Shylock
  • The Merchant of Venice at the Internet Movie Database
• 2002—The Maori Merchant of Venice, directed by Don Selwyn.
  • In Maori, with English subtitles. The cast included Waihoroi Shortland as Shylock, Scott Morrison as Antonio, Te Rangihau Gilbert as Bassanio, Ngarimu Daniels as Portia, Reikura Morgan as Jessica.
  • The Maori Merchant of Venice at the Internet Movie Database
• 2003—Shakespeare's Merchant, directed by Paul Wagar and produced by Lorenda Starfelt, Brad Mays and Paul Wagar.
  • Shakespeare's Merchant at the Internet Movie Database
• 2004—The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford.
  • The cast included Al Pacino as Shylock, Jeremy Irons as Antonio, Joseph Fiennes as Bassanio, Lynn Collins as Portia, and Zuleikha Robinson as Jessica.
  • The Merchant of Venice at the Internet Movie Database

Operas

• Josef Bohuslav Foerster's three act Czech opera Jessika was first performed at the Prague National Theatre, on 16 April 1905.
• Reynaldo Hahn's three-act French opera Le marchand de Venise was first performed at the Paris Opéra, on 25 March 1935.
• The late André Tchaikowsky's (1935–1982) opera The Merchant of Venice will be premiered at the Bregenz Festival,^[26][27] on 18 July 2013.

Cultural references

Arnold Wesker's play The Merchant tells the same story from Shylock's point of view. In this retelling, Shylock and Antonio are fast friends bound by a mutual love of books and culture and a disdain for the crass anti-Semitism of the Christian community's laws. They make the bond in defiant mockery of the Christian establishment, never anticipating that the bond might become forfeit. When it does, the play argues, Shylock must carry through on the letter of the law or jeopardise the scant legal security of the entire Jewish community. He is, therefore, quite as grateful as Antonio when Portia, as in Shakespeare's play, shows the legal way out. The play received its American premiere on 16 November 1977 at New York's Plymouth Theatre, with Joseph Leon as Shylock and Marian Seldes as Shylock's sister Rivka. This production had a challenging history in previews on the road, culminating (after the first night out of town in Philadelphia on 8 September 1977) with the death of the larger-than-life Broadway star Zero Mostel, who was initially cast as Shylock. The play's author, Arnold Wesker, wrote a book chronicling the out-of-town tribulations that beset the play and Zero's death called The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel.

David Henry Wilson's play Shylock's Revenge, which was first performed by The University Players at the Audimax, Hamburg, on 9 June 1989, can be seen as a full-length sequel to Shakespeare's drama.

The title of the film Seven Pounds is a reference to the "pound of flesh" from the play.

Edmond Haraucourt, the 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.^[28]

One of the four short stories comprising Alan Isler's Op Non Cit is also told from Shylock's point of view. In this story, Antonio was a boy of Jewish origin kidnapped at an early age by priests.

Ralph Vaughan Williams' choral work Serenade to Music draws its text from the discussion about music and the music of the spheres in Act V, scene 1.

In both versions of the comic film To Be or Not to Be the character "Greenberg", specified as a Jew only in the later version, gives a recitation of the "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech to Nazi soldiers.^[29]

In The Pianist, Henryk Szpilman quotes a passage from Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech to his brother Władysław Szpilman in a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, during the Nazi occupation in World War II. Given the questioning of Antisemitism in the speech and also the Nazi use of the play for antisemitic propaganda purposes, the quote is seen as particularly poignant and symbolic.

Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List depicts SS Lieutenant Amon Göth quoting Shylock's "Hath a Jew no eyes?" speech when deciding whether or not to rape his Jewish maid.

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.