ABSTRACT
Decades of contending with the text of The Merchant of Venice, comprising academic writing, teaching, and translating the text, culminated in my own stage adaptation of the play. My production, in which the plot is set in 1516, the year the Jewish Ghetto in Venice was inaugurated, opens with a caravan of Jewish refugees wandering from the Iberian Peninsula on the ways of Europe. It is an image that corresponds both to the myth of the “wandering Jew,” rampant in the popular imagination at the time (and later to be compared to the rootless or artist in general – see, for example, Nietzsche, 1969, or Toller, 1978), and to the acute image of displaced refugees in today’s Europe. This affect (in Deleuzian terms) of deterritorialization, moving from the literal meaning of the term to its Deleuzian connotation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), may serve as an emblem to my reading of the play, informing my stage production of it, divided between Shakespeare and not Shakespeare. Just as the adaptive use of the Shakespearean text is rhizomatic, so is the position of the Jew in Venice, at the same time aspiring for constancy vis-à-vis its adopted territory (which rhizomatically adopts him in turn as a citizen/non-citizen) and insisting on its distinction and separation from its core and immersing into perpetual nomadism. This paper will move to and fro from an account of the production and its source of inspiration in what Douglas Lanier will conceive as the relation between Shakespeare and his cultural capital (Desmet et al. 2017: 171; and see Lanier 2014).
