Latest news with #TheMerchantofVenice
IOL News
19-05-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
The political parallels of Trump and Shylock in 'The Merchant of Venice'
Ramaphosa should go no further than only saying 'I do' to the laws he signed and not give an inch beyond for the 49 Afrikaners who were Trump's flagship and pound of flesh have a Portia 'not a drop of blood' addendum to them as Trump tries to cut his pound of flesh. Image: AFP The second coming of Trump on the political platform of the United States with his arse open for would be wiling lickers reminds me of Shylock, the money lender in the Merchant of Venice. But the book comes with entertaining memories. In 1969 at the age of twelve I was in the seventh year of schooling and a year shy away from sitting for the exit exams that would qualify me to enter the five year duration of secondary and high school study. In my class were some distinguished veteran scholars who were aged 25 and 26 years respectively. These veterans had been on it from the day my eldest brother who is thirteen years older than myself set foot in school. They had been in class with each of my four siblings subsequently and ultimately myself. I was the last to share experience of studying with them. Our set book was The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare the greatest author of literature. Those who read the work of Shakespeare will know how complex it is to read it. It comes deep with Victorian English of thou and shalt and third person expressions and long complex sentences. In the 20th Century Shakesperean writing appear akin to English. It is not easy to read. By way of background Shylock, the Jew was a shrewd money lender and between himself and Antonio, a wealthy merchant, there was no love lost. Antonio had his dear friend Bassanio, who needed money. Antonio borrowed money from his worst enemy. A bond was signed for the money and Antonio offered a pound of flesh that would be cut from his left breast should the money fail to be delivered on the day. Shylock would perform the act of slicing out the pound of flesh. A sure death sentence to his enemy, Antonio. As fate would have it, Antonio's fleet of ships could not arrive on time and Shylock sought justice. But even as the ships arrived, but late, Shylock would have none of it but wanted justice - his pound of flesh. We had to act play the Merchant of Venice and often the teacher will nominate those who should read. The veterans were always reluctant to do so given the complexity of the English and the Shakespearean structure. On this afternoon, we had to act play Chapter 4 from page 88 and surprise, surprise Mrs Mabusa asked for volunteers this time around. One of the veterans raised his hand and Pinkie Motloha who was seated next to me and I started giggling, so was the rest of the class burst in laughter in anticipation. And we raised our hands too. But the order of selection was by who raised their hands first. The veteran was first. You see page 88 starts with two short sentences and subsequent ones are massive paragraphs. The veteran volunteered himself to be Antonio. At that the giggles turned into massive laughter because not only does Antonio answer with a short sentence of 'I do' when Portia the lawyer asks, 'Do you confess this bond?' but that is the only utterance Antonio he makes in the whole section. Of course, after regaling the court with sentences that were appealing to Shylock and the Jew was getting ready for his pound of flesh, Portia made the most devastating sentence to Shylock – not a drop of blood should be shed. The Duke affirmed the legal standing of that ordering Shylock to cut one and only a pound and no blood shed. Shylock was about to collapse as he forfeited not only the pound of flesh but the money that was borrowed. Perhaps when asked about the laws he signed, Ramaphosa should go no further than only saying 'I do' to the laws he signed and not give an inch beyond for the 49 Afrikaners who were Trump's flagship and pound of flesh have a Portia 'not a drop of blood' addendum to them as Trump tries to cut his pound of flesh. This is the 'no drop of blood addendum.' Whilst South African government has performed very badly on the economy, crime, corruption and everything else. They have not lied about the facts as these are not only in the reports of the Statistician-General, they are also in our faces. What is also in our faces regarding these numbers is the fact that Whites only have a 6.5% unemployment rate, a mere 2 percentage points above the US unemployment of 4.3 %. This is a far cry from the 43% unemployment rate of the Blacks. The data of the Statistician-General shows that 73% of Whites are in the fifth quintile as opposed to only 13.7% amongst Blacks. Of course, duplicity ridden Trump will turn the tables against Ramaphosa and question his governance over poverty of the Black. He may well justify the massive inequality gap as one leaving Whites with no option but to fear for the greedy eyes of Blacks over White god given accumulation. He may well ask for guarantees. Ramaphosa has to stick to 'yes I do' regarding the bills he signed into law. No more no less. He should leave Trump's arse to trump. Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa. Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, among other hats. Image: Supplied BUSINESS REPORT
New York Times
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Othello and Iago, a Marriage Made in Both Heaven and Hell
Who exactly is in charge here? Is it the strutting general or his self-effacing ensign? The man celebrated for his 'free and open nature' or the sociopath who keeps stockpiling secrets? That question has been occupying the minds of theatergoers and readers since Shakespeare's 'Othello' was first performed in London in the early 17th century. And it is doubtless being puzzled over by audiences at the star-charged Broadway revival of this tragedy of homicidal jealousy, with Denzel Washington in the title role of the noble Moorish warrior and Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago, his eminently credible, equally duplicitous aide-de-camp. On the most basic level, the answer is obvious. (For those unfamiliar with 'Othello,' serious spoilers follow.) It's the resentment-riddled Iago, the ultimate disgruntled employee, who takes command of his commander, and pretty much everyone in his orbit, in coldblooded pursuit of revenge. It's Iago who gives the orders to his boss, while making his boss believe otherwise. And it's Iago who's still alive at the end. But in another sense, the contest has never been that easy to call. Put it this way: After you've seen it, who is it who dominates your thoughts? Which character's point of view wound up ruling the night? In other words, who owned the production? Othello may have the glamour, the grand poetic speeches and a death scene for the ages. But there is a reason that Laurence Olivier, who would play the part blackface to divisive effect in the early 1960s, would worry about having 'the stage stolen from me by some young and brilliant Iago.' 'Othello' is Shakespeare's only major work in which the hero and antihero are given equal weight. (If you keep score by monologues, Iago has eight of them; Othello only three.) And as the Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom summed up the dichotomy: It is Othello's tragedy, but it is Iago's play. There is another way, of course, in which 'Othello' is singular in Shakespeare. Its leading man is Black, and for centuries he was almost always portrayed by white men with dark makeup. And it is as impossible now to see 'Othello' without thinking of racism as it is to revisit 'The Merchant of Venice' without thinking of antisemitism. It was Paul Robeson — the titanic actor, singer and political activist — who cracked open the door for the many Black Othellos who have followed, though white classic theater stars (including Anthony Hopkins and Michael Gambon) would continue to take on the role. Robeson's debuts in London in 1930 and on Broadway in 1943 were watersheds, by any measure, and wildly acclaimed. 'A tragedy of racial conflict' was how Robeson described 'Othello,' who said, around the time of the London run in 1930, that he was 'killing two birds with one stone' in performing the part: 'I'm acting and I'm talking for the Negroes in the way only Shakespeare can.' Yet reflecting on his own portrayal of Othello some 50 years later, Willard White (the renowned opera singer) said, 'One thing you have to remember is that he's not a jealous Black man, he's a jealous man.' He added: 'Of course the issues in the play are partly racial, but for me they're not the defining factor.' It is far more than race, in fact, that defines Othello's otherness. He inhabits an empyrean realm where emotions are absolute and belief unconditional. Small wonder he's easy prey for someone as completely worldly as Iago. The fatal clash between the two men is that of two irreconcilable approaches to life. In the ideal 'Othello,' each of these warring worldviews seems to feed the fire of its opposite. Then a magnificent conflagration ensues. As the following list attests, such perfect chemical balances occur only rarely. Paul Robeson and Maurice Browne By all accounts, Robeson's opening night at the Savoy Theater was one of those extraordinary evenings when an audience felt it had witnessed history in the making, and it ended in 20 curtain calls. 'Old playgoers searching their memories can recall no such scene in a London theater in many years,' G.W. Bishop wrote in The New York Times. This was, after all, the first Black actor to appear on a mainstream London stage as Othello in nearly a century, when another American, Ira Aldridge, briefly took over from an ailing Edmund Kean. Never mind that, as Iago, Browne (also the play's producer) registered as 'some incommensurate gnat,' according to the fabled critic James Agate. The booming-voiced Robeson brought out the deepest purple in many reviewers' prose. The Observer's Ivor Brown described him as 'a superb giant of the woods for the great hurricane of tragedy to whisper through, then rage upon, then break.' Paul Robeson and José Ferrer It took 13 years for Robeson's singular, boundary-shattering brand of Shakespearean lightning to strike in Manhattan. But this production, astutely directed by Margaret Webster, was a more unconditional triumph. It helped that Ferrer's Iago was, as Lewis Nichols put it in The Times, 'a half dancing, half strutting Mephistopheles.' (Desdemona was, if you please, Uta Hagen, Ferrer's wife, who became Robeson's lover.) At a time when anti-miscegenation laws were still on the books in the States, there were worries that the interracial love affair might alienate audiences. But the opening-night ovations were again thunderous, and reviews were largely ecstatic. (The Herald Tribune described it as a 'tribute to the art that transcends racial boundaries.') The production broke records for a Shakespeare play on Broadway, clocking 296 performances. Laurence Olivier and Frank Finlay Those who saw Olivier's Calypso-cadenced Moor onstage swear he was mesmerizing. His 'power, passion and verisimilitude,' wrote the critic in The Sunday Times of London, 'will be spoken of with wonder for a long time to come.' (Finlay's Iago, on the other hand, was dismissed in The New York Times as 'mercurial at best and trivial at worst.') But captured on film the next year, Olivier's blackface makeup and exaggerated mannerisms registered as grotesque and, to many, deeply offensive. A university professor recently discovered it was not a film to show latter-day students. James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer Jones's imposing presence and resonant baritone made him a natural for the Moor, whom he first portrayed for the New York Shakespeare Festival when he was 23 in 1964. On Broadway, 18 years later, the Times's Frank Rich observed of Jones that the 'ease and authority as a military commander seem his by birthright, even as he maintains the uneasy aloofness of an outsider.' But it was Plummer who really wowed Rich, who wrote that this Iago 'gives us peeks into a nihilistic void of a soul — a mysterious, inexplicable blackness that is horrifying precisely because it cannot be explained away.' Willard White and Ian McKellen An opera star of mighty voice and physique, White proved a stately (and mellifluous) Othello. But it was McKellen's take on Iago — as a salt-of-the-earth, pipe-smoking old soldier in a 19th-century uniform — who haunted the imagination with his unblinking matter-of-factness. Trevor Nunn's interpretation for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in a 100-seat theater, brought out the play's emotional claustrophobia and — more important for future productions — the sense of characters shaped and confined by a military ethos. Patrick Stewart and Ron Canada In this racially reversed production by the British director Jude Kelly, Stewart's 'vigorous, sinewy' Othello was the only white character onstage. The approach, Peter Marks wrote in The Times, 'does not tilt the play toward ham-handed irony; rather, it tends to take the racial issue off the table.' While Stewart, Marks said, was 'devastatingly human,' Canada's Iago was 'dishearteningly wooden.' David Harewood and Simon Russell Beale Sam Mendes's 'spellbinding,' Fascist-era production from the Royal National Theater was built around the conceit that Iago would be virtually invisible to everyone around him. Beale's chillingly summoned air of soldiery servitude and efficiency, I wrote in the Times, disguised the inner 'festering have-not, tired of being passed over.' Harewood's 'strapping, handsome' Moor was ultimately 'too overwrought and unvaried' to hold his own against this stealth saboteur. Keith David and Liev Schreiber In Doug Hughes's production at the Public Theater, all the world was Iago's stage and all the play's other characters merely puppets. Schreiber's truly terrifying Iago, my review noted, was 'a Mephistopheles who was born, as he sees it, not just to rebel against God but to usurp his function.' You could often find 'him in an aisle of the theater, looking on like the archetypal nervous director.' Never had it been clearer that Othello — portrayed by David in the style of 'a self-involved businessman' — was following his ensign's script. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor In his review for The Times, Matt Wolf described McGregor's Iago as 'oddly blank.' But with the 'richly spoken' Ejiofor in the lead, the production 'restores pride of place to the play's fiercely tender, then rabidly jealous title character.' The London Observer's Susannah Clapp wrote, 'He is the best Othello I've ever seen: the best for generations.' John Douglas Thompson and Michael Hammond A genuinely majestic Thompson established himself as one of America's leading Shakespeareans with his Othello, a role he later played Off Broadway. His mellifluous speech and kingly bearing seemed, my review said, 'to create a cosmic divide between' the play's 'hero and those around him,' especially Hammond's weary functionary of an Iago. What separated Othello here was less his race than 'his greatness, the blessing and curse of feeling things too greatly and acting proportionately.' John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman From the internationally acclaimed experimentalist Peter Sellars, this high-tech production presented its characters as ordinary Americans locked in a domestic tragedy. 'The mighty, exotic general Othello and his diabolical flunky Iago have been stripped of their singularity, whether of greatness of spirit or capacity for evil.' Even the brilliant Hoffman fizzled. His Iago, my review said, was someone for whom 'revenge is a dish best served hot, like a Big Mac picked up on the fly.' Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear Nicholas Hytner's contemporary production made 'killing use of the pressures and protocol of military life abroad to explain how the play's homicides could happen.' Turning his uniform into camouflage for every occasion, Kinnear was the most disturbingly convincing liar of any Iago I have seen. Though played with bone-deep conviction by Lester — who also memorably portrayed Aldridge, the first Black Othello on London stages, in the historic play 'Red Velvet'— this Othello never stood a chance. David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig The most perfectly matched pair of moral combatants I have ever encountered in an 'Othello.' It was clear from the get-go that each carried his own doom within himself. Sam Gold's scorching version, set largely in the barracks of 'a no-exit theater of war,' presented 'the intimate spectacle of two disastrously different, equally great minds in collision.' With its stars 'at the top of their game, in a marriage made in both heaven and hell, the story of Othello and Iago could not possibly end otherwise than it does. 'And, O the pity of it!' I wrote. This may by the only 'Othello' at which I fully experienced that wrenching, breathless release we call catharsis.
CBC
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
‘The arts need to step up' in tense political times
Ahead of a return to the Toronto stage in his one-man show Playing Shylock, Canadian actor Saul Rubinek spoke with The National's Ian Hanomansing about his portraying of Shylock, the controversial Jewish moneylender in Shakepeare's The Merchant of Venice, as well as antisemitism and why he says the arts need to 'step up' in the current political climate.
Express Tribune
30-03-2025
- Politics
- Express Tribune
Beyond the patriarchy
In the Shakespeare play 'The Merchant of Venice' the character Shylock highlighted societal discrimination: 'If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?' The prevalent gender inequality in Pakistan, in the words of Shakespeare, owes to societal discrimination. The gender disparity in Pakistan is abominable. Women alongside transgenders are being treated unequally on multifaceted grounds: social, political and economic. There is also a growing gap in employment opportunities owing to the glass ceiling. Concomitantly, women in politics remain on the back foot and get elected on quota. Similarly, the lack of health facilities has increased the mortality rate of mothers and children. Therefore, the impacts of gender inequality are immense. Gender-based violence is one of them and it continues to haunt marginalised gender in Pakistan. Pakistan's rating on the Gender Parity Index speaks volumes about gender inequality; Pakistan stands at 142 out of 146 countries (2023). The question arises as to why there is such an inordinate figure in the context, despite Pakistan's strong commitment to adhere to democratic norms. A worm's eye view of Pakistan's patriarchal society helps in answering it. Patriarchy prevails from bottom to top in all spheres and is deeply ingrained in society, further posing serious challenges in overcoming gender inequality. However, not all is lost. Gender inequality can be abated. The silver lining lies in farsightedness. The panacea to this discrimination lies in pragmatism; pragmatism lies in smart choices; and smart choice lies in absolute compliance with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals i.e. SDGs. Concerted efforts are required to abolish patriarchy, empower women and achieve gender parity – for us to rise as a nation. Ramsha Ashraf Islamabad
Washington Post
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Trying to fix what Shakespeare got wrong
To say that playwright Sarah Mantell is no fan of 'The Merchant of Venice' would be several thousand ducats' worth of understatement. 'It's a really deeply antisemitic play. It's a really sexist play. It's a really racist, anti-Black play,' the New York City-based writer says. A memorable glimpse of the work at the Yale School of Drama left Mantell 'extremely disturbed and upset' and with a self-imposed mandate: 'Shakespeare didn't know what he was doing, and I need to fix it for him.'
