‘Hard hearts’ resounding now: anatomising race,resistance,and community in The Merchant in Venice (2016) and Julius Caesar (2017)

What Caesar, battling for democracy,

Unasked, relinquished his regime?

What cotton king decried slavocracy?

What cat forwent its dish of cream?

If we expect disinterested

Judgment from Congress, from our vested

Arms gluttons – from the White House down –

We’re living in cloud-cuckoo-town.

We cannot wait for legislation.

There is no shame in following

Thoreau and Anthony and King,

The old traditions of a nation

That once, two hundred years before,

In its own birth resisted law.

Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate ¹ For all of the welcome benefits of new media, live performance (whether a Shakespeare play or conference talk) still allows presenters unique power over the timing of revelations made to an audience. At least, this is ordinarily true, if the audience plays along. But the rhetorical situation shifts when reading text or watching online, erasing the presenter’s temporal control. So while this essay began as a temporally structured speech act, it cannot recapture – only encourage readers to experience – some effects central to my discussion of sense perceptions, performance echoes, and the disruption of theatrical norms in two recent high-profile, politically charged Shakespeare productions. At the same time, this very change makes visible the central importance of contemporary contextualisation, remediation, and (especially) re-citation.

To illustrate: in textual form, one cannot delay attribution of the quotation below until after the recorded voice is heard (even if a link is provided), nor is a reader’s possible recognition of its speaker a sign of aural memory. By contrast, when presenting at ESRA’s 2017 conference in Gdańsk, Poland, I asked the audience first to listen, as a community, to an unidentified voice recorded exactly fifty years prior:

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood – it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, ‘Too late’. There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on’.

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action… ²

Time’s relentless passage is both theme and spur to political action in these words, as it was in 1967 when Dr Martin Luther King Jr. announced his opposition to the Vietnam War – linking it, moreover, with domestic policy and race relations. Delivered at an ecumenical service in New York City’s Riverside Church on 9 April, King’s ‘Beyond Vietnam’ address resounded with rich insights that unfortunately still ring true, as when he opined, ‘When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered’. Nonetheless, hearing that ghostly voice’s peroration echo in a new millennium a continent away, most auditors recognised neither the occasion nor the speaker, indicating both cultural differences and (more significantly) just how adamantly time has rushed on. Apprehending in the present before comprehending as the past reinforced the urgency of engaging with the temporal paradoxes King dramatised.

Thus, it is poignant and fitting that King’s rhetorical performance also fought against time’s linear passage through multiple allusions to earlier speakers and yesterdays – including his own. For that uniquely resonant phrase, ‘the fierce urgency of now’, is itself a re-citation, coined in his more famous ‘I have a dream’ speech delivered at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. As he moved (riskily, remarkably) to connect domestic racism with the need to oppose geopolitical violence, he recited his own words in a new context, thereby acknowledging the ethical connection between his past and present usages in the ‘fierce urgency of [a new] now’. Recitation across time – specifically, re-citation within stage performances that reanimate Shakespeare as both past and urgently present – connects what follows with King’s global concerns.

Introducing their 2013 collection, Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now (omitting King’s key word ‘fierce’), Cary DiPietro and Hugh Grady comment on not King’s but Barack Obama’s, Al Gore’s, and others’ frequent use of the (then) fifty-year-old titular phrase in its first iteration:

Far from becoming a cliché…the repeated appropriation of King’s coinage exemplifies how the recontextualization of words spoken in different places and times can retain the force of their original utterance…even while they are translated into new and ever-shifting contexts. As such, the legacy of King’s words demonstrates through analogy a fundamental principle [applicable to] Shakespeare’s plays […]: that the significance of texts is never static or ‘timeless’, but rather involves a […] constant renegotiation between horizons of interpretation and an ever-shifting present, from which we view the past with new understandings, with different interpretive lenses, with different senses of what is important and relevant, and what is not. ³

Agreeing with the gist of their argument as to how Shakespeare’s legacy functions, I find it perhaps too optimistic regarding both translation and ‘new understandings’ – if they mean consequently learning from, rather than superimposing our fierce present upon, the past. For one year to the day after giving his incisive ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech, King was assassinated, and the inner cities of America burned. ⁴ The war expanded, rifts among justice and peace movements as well as violence in the streets widened, and another of his dreams was deferred. Hauntingly, another unmarked re-citation in King’s speech quoted above refers to an ancient time of civil unrest, unrealised hopes, and war – one that takes the relationship between his Vietnam address and Shakespeare’s plays beyond analogy to direct allusion, and into treacherous waters.

‘The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood – it ebbs’. To anchor his modern carpe diem plea, King hearkens back to Julius Caesar, where Brutus likens the Roman Republic’s military fortune to those of merchant-adventurers at sea:

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves

Or lose our ventures. (4.3.217–23) ⁵

King’s allusion to this passage, in a speech linking postcolonial racial and state violence, has not received the attention that has recently canonised Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island annotation of Caesar’s own ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths’, in the communal Shakespeare ‘Bible’ circulated among South African apartheid’s political prisoners. Perhaps for good reason: after all, Brutus’ argument here for fighting at Philippi goes horribly wrong, yet another of his mistaken tactical judgements. Moreover, and more surprisingly, Brutus’ extended metaphor obliquely recalls the world of Shakespeare’s titular merchant of Venice; Antonio shows similarly misguided confidence regarding sea ventures and time – one of several resonant echoes across the plays. Then again, Shakespeare’s appealingly portable lines seldom display motto-like simplicity: Caesar’s own bravado, as marked by Mandela, is similarly found wanting in dramatic context.

It is tempting for Shakespeare scholars to call out such ironies of decontextualised re-citation, but King knew what he was doing rhetorically: piling memory on memory, recalling lost possibilities and fleeting chances, in a long series of short declarative sentences. That was his point, his method. Khayyam, Shakespeare, himself: the historical witnesses line up not to be interrogated, but to testify – whatever the objections and unknowable future – to the need to take a stand, now. King’s echoing allusions served his moment, conjuring a potent community of resistance. Thus, I cite this doubly cautionary example so as to press beyond the ‘gotcha’ moment or, conversely, the simple celebration of Shakespeare’s persistent global presence, in order to anatomise similarly consequential resonances, both aural and embodied, in his own works – including Julius Caesar itself. These examples, resounding on contemporary stages, focus on the fractures that divide men and political communities, serving as reminders of Shakespeare’s awareness of the complexities involved in trying to create human empathy within troubled societies…and of the daunting work still left to do.

**

This essay began as a tale of two summers. Two productions, and the two Shakespeare plays they reimagined, became emblematic of larger cultural forces: just as The Merchant of Venice seemed ubiquitous amid escalating racial and religious intolerance during 2016, with the Globe’s touring production and spinoffs such as Aaron Posner’s District Merchants, Cary Mazer’s Shylock’s Beard, and Howard Jacobson’s novel Shylock is My Name, so (especially) after Donald Trump’s election was Julius Caesar everywhere in 2017. I will limit myself to discussing two productions: Compagnia de’ Colombari’s The Merchant in Venice and The Public Theater’s Julius Caesar, which both garnered ‘unusual’ press coverage and faced challenges in terms of reception with regards to performance and aesthetics.

In July 2016, I was a participant-observer for two weeks in Venice, conducting interviews and videotaping a project that epitomised the best of the ‘Shakespeare 400’ commemorations: the first-ever performance of The Merchant of Venice in the originary Ghetto. This was a politically conscious, forward-looking international collaboration. But even then, the regressive appeal of Brexit and acts of political violence in Europe (Nice, Brussels, Paris) loomed large. The following year took the world in unimagined directions, with the US presidential election seeming for some to transform ‘the best of times’ into ‘the worst’. In June 2017, that political discourse collided with the role of Shakespeare in America, in a national furore over The Public Theater’s free Julius Caesar at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, in which the title character resembled the new President. In terms of Shakespearean subgenres, the nation indeed seemed to have shifted from comedy to tragedy. Nonetheless, the juxtaposition of those two plays and their particular stagings also suggested affinities that complicated any simple contrast between them or the changing times. Shared resonances trumped Trump, indicating a more profound form of political theatre.

The multifaceted Merchant in Venice project began in 2014–2015, with Shaul Bassi and David Scott Kastan contemplating the temporal coincidence of the 500th anniversary of the first Jewish Ghetto’s founding and Shakespeare’s death a century after. Karin Coonrod’s Compagnia de’ Colombari was enlisted to develop a site-specific production, linked with a Ca’ Foscari- and Fondazione Giorgio Cina-sponsored summer school. This was indeed ‘Shylock’s unheimlich return’, using location to complicate as well as conjure a return to origins. ⁶

The theatrical production was intercultural: Francesca Sarah Toich as Lancillotto Gobbo was instructed to combine her commedia dell’arte training with Mick Jagger and David Bowie poses; her prologue from Ruzante followed a carnivalesque entrance by the full company singing dismissively of romantic love, ‘Amore an?’ (to a merry tune composed by musical director Frank London) – all before the audience heard a word of Shakespeare’s English. The show’s smatterings of Judeo-Venetian, Ladino, Yiddish and more, with each Shylock scene featuring some such linguistic alteration or addition, both recalled the polyglot place of performance and disoriented any audience members wishing to be masters of Shakespeare’s text.

Probably the most discussed production choice, beyond its history-making outdoor location, was the casting of five Shylocks (who doubled other roles) to perform sequentially across each evening. The director considered this wider dispersal of Shylock’s identity to be ‘the heart’ of the show, maintaining it as she subsequently adapted the play for other venues with predominantly new casts. ⁷ The five facets she emphasised were Shylock as businessman, father, mother, widower, and killer; she wanted to avoid excessive attention to a single actor’s performance or a historically false sense of ‘recovery’. This fragmentation of Shylock accorded with Bassi’s palimpsestic reading of the Ghetto, recalling layers of irretrievable lives. Sabine Schülting has documented other multiple-actor renderings of Shylock in Europe, but the particular choices here derived from the site-specificity, as well as an extensive workshopping process. ⁸

At only two moments did all five Shylocks appear together in the production. Their first group appearance takes place during the transition to 3.1, after Jessica’s elopement, culminating in a huge howl of grief from the one female Shylock. ⁹ The second, to me even more powerful group appearance, is the arrival of the Shylocks en masse at the play’s conclusion, cutting through Shakespeare’s ‘happy ending’ in order to reprise a speech that has received less attention than the ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ passage, which followed the howl.

Many have emphasised Merchant’s formal comic structure, and certainly Shakespeare’s text moves from Antonio’s first words of unrooted sadness to Gratiano’s last lines of ribald gaiety. Performing at the site of the first ghetto where inhabitants had for centuries been confined and curfewed nightly for their Jewishness, this felt wrong. Thus, Coonrod reworked the ending to allow the Shylocks the last word…or rather, to re-cite (and ‘re-site’) Shylock’s trial speech, describing others’ idiosyncratic ‘humours’ as analogous to his own refusal to explain his relentlessness in enforcing the murderous bond (4.1.41–63). The lines were distributed among the five actors as they entered, drowning out Portia’s final words (and pre-empting Gratiano’s entirely). They moved forward out of the night shadows between the ‘Christians’ of Act 5 to confront the audience directly, each repeating Shylock’s conclusion to that speech: ‘Are you answered?’ ¹⁰ With this modified ending, the performance defied generic resolution and the presumption of our finding communal understanding.

A non-verbal coda followed: frantically, Jessica ran the circuit of the playing space before turning aghast towards the cast, at which point the harsh sound of horns blared as the word ‘Mercy’ was projected in Hebrew, Italian, and English on the Ghetto’s synagogue walls. But the projection was just that: a plea for forgiveness after exorcising the cartoon Jewish stage villain who has haunted the centuries, in a public campo lined with World War II death-camp memorials recalling the fate of a fraction of its actual inhabitants. Many ghosts remained. The Shylocks’ dispersed-yet-collective words gave voice to a multiplicity of excluded ‘others’ at a time of rising anti-immigrant and religious divisiveness breeding terrorism. Nonetheless, the sounds of disaffected humanity ended not with a howl but a question, a pointed challenge to the audience that invited thought and political action, not affect alone.

By giving the Shylocks these re-cited last words, the production emphasised the unfinished, present-day work to be done in facing inequities and estrangements within cultures and states. Moreover, it defied obvious political as well as narrative solution, extending Shylock’s humour-based diagnosis of human differences to embrace any individual form of recalcitrance and refusal to ‘adapt’ to social norms. And specifically, it returned the audience to the trial they had witnessed, where Shylock #5 (Ned Eisenberg) refused to be comprehended or assimilated. It also sent me back to one particular moment, which would become even more resonant in the year that followed – quite literally, in The Public Theater’s Julius Caesar.

This moment – the trial’s climax in Venice – was not only a tableau of diverse actors holding Antonio bound, his chest bared to Shylock’s knifepoint; it was also a physicalised temporal catachresis, juxtaposing that static pose with the disguised Portia’s lengthy harangue of triumphant correction. The supreme plot twist of power reversal was thus both dynamic and frozen, simultaneously stopping time and hammering change.

In rehearsal, some actors questioned holding the tableau so long as unrealistic; but the knife to the breast crucially offset and complicated the relentlessness of Portia’s words (4.1.340–2). The audience could not ignore that this was indeed Shylock the killer, with all the anti-Semitic overtones of early modern religious debates regarding the threat of circumcision and the meanings of Saint Paul’s ‘circumcision of the heart’, as well as repugnant myths of Jewish ritual murders, embodied and frozen in time. ¹¹

Portia (intelligently realised by Linda Powell) was far from the romanticised, often sentimental heroine of nineteenth-century productions, intuitively doing ‘good deed[s] in a naughty world’ (5.1.98) and supposedly modelling ‘The quality of mercy’ (4.1.188). ¹² Letting go of theatrical tradition can be emotionally difficult for some, even as it feels liberating for others. Of course, those politically inflected differences in reception are part of what contemporary performances can help us begin to work through collectively.

Thus, this Merchant’s composite effects led me back to the hearts that are so focal to its climax, both in tableau and words. Echoing through the Ghetto campo, among the most powerful moments was Antonio’s ugly outburst of anti-Semitism earlier in the scene:

You may as well do anything most hard

As seek to soften that than which what’s harder –

His Jewish heart. (4.1.79–81) ¹³

This hard-hearted reference eliding punning, metaphor, and embodiment clearly resonates with post-Reformation debates about the ‘stony hearts’ of unbelievers, and God’s capacity (alone) to soften them. ¹⁴ But the specific alliterative sounds sent my aural memory back as well to another famous (mock)trial: Lear on the heath, with his desire to dissect his unfeeling daughter so as to comprehend such ‘hard hearts’:

Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart.

Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts? (King Lear, 3.6.80–2)

Moreover, hard hearts abound in the medieval English history plays, from ‘hard-hearted Clifford’ near the beginning of Shakespeare’s career (Henry 6, Part 3, 1.4.173) to the Duchess of York’s dismissal of ‘this hard-hearted man’ (her husband) when pleading for her son’s life in Richard II (5.3.87). ¹⁵ When listening to Shakespeare, a hard heart is not hard to find. ¹⁶

**

Because of these sound patterns and the wrenching Venetian tableau that physicalised the metaphors and debates at stake, when I attended The Public’s Caesar I was attuned to its ‘hard hearts’ from the start:

Cobbler.…we make holiday to see Caesar and to rejoice in his triumph.

Marullus. Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?

What tributaries follow him to Rome

To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?

You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!

O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,

Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft

Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,

To towers and windows, yea, to chimney tops,

Your infants in your arms, and there have sat

The livelong day, with patient expectation,

To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome.

And when you saw his chariot but appear,

Have you not made an universal shout,

That Tiber trembled underneath her banks

To hear the replication of your sounds

Made in her concave shores? (1.1.30–48 [emphasis added])

The passage contrasts memory and forgetting sonically, recalling the crowd’s once ‘universal shout’ that made the river tremble. As would King centuries later, here Shakespeare was also replicating his own sounds for a new context (and perhaps a new concave playing space). Significantly, in the noisy Central Park amphitheatre, these words of chastisement and appeal to remember the murdered were spoken by an African American actress, contributing to the show’s sustained connection between those opposed to the Roman Dictator and the Black Lives Matter and Occupy movements as forms of resistance under a new regime. Hearing those ‘hard hearts’ onstage now, as well as within genre, the patterns in Shakespeare’s rhetoric never echoed more powerfully. ¹⁷

The aural resonances between these productions, and the place of hard hearts and tableaux in each, reach a pinnacle in their fourth acts. But before turning to that most interesting dimension of The Public’s Caesar, I must acknowledge how greatly such analysis diverges from the dominant media and scholarly discussion of Oskar Eustis’s staging. For there was another shared experience linking these two summers of outdoor theatre: the extraordinary presence of police sniffer dogs, metal barricades, and heavily armed guards carrying out extensive security checks. In the Ghetto, the location itself inspired such caution, increased by recent religion-based acts of terrorism and the rise of European neo-fascism. More surprising was what happened in Central Park. Shortly before the opening, the right-wing press (first Breitbart, then Fox News) expressed outrage at the show’s representation of Caesar as Donald Trump, despite similarly topical past stage evocations of Obama, Boss Tweed, and even Abraham Lincoln – who really was assassinated at the theatre by an actor (putatively) quoting Brutus. ¹⁸ In the case of Eustis’s Caesar, one may decry the director’s literalism in satirising Trump, or conversely mock the media’s facile reading of the play’s politics: plenty of journalists, scholars, and online commentators took each of these positions. But a more profound worry derived from the chilling effect of sponsor withdrawals, as well as a cowardly denial by the National Endowment for the Arts that they had provided funding. Delta Airlines was The Public’s most hypocritical ex-backer, professing standards of ‘good taste’ lay behind their actions (although they had had no such problem sponsoring Rob Melrose’s 2012 Julius Caesar, in which the slain Caesar resembled then-President Obama). The knock-on effects in June 2017 included death threats against Shakespeare companies in New York, Texas, and elsewhere…and indeed against other outdoor theatres, with some consequently denying all association with Shakespeare (as if that were the issue). ¹⁹ Most outrageous was the accusation, on the very day when a Republican congressman was shot in Alexandria, Virginia (June 14), that the New York production had inspired this political violence – its baseless source being a tweet circulated by the President’s son (among others). ²⁰ Within such a context, the prospect of directors and companies becoming cautious in their artistic choices, or even being silenced, loomed – and still looms – large.

During that tumultuous week, leading figures in New York theatre organised counter-protests – with full marks for ingenuity, including chants such as ‘Fox and Friends, it’s not so hard, / Take some time to read the Bard’. They chose (wittingly or not) the historically resonant location of Astor Place on the Ides of June for their rally: the home of The Public Theater and the site of the bloodiest theatrical protest in US history. Not only had the 1849 rioting begun over the performance of Shakespeare, but, in tragic anticipation of what Eustis’s dramaturgy represented, ‘the Republic’s own soldiers “shot point blank at American citizens”’, killing dozens and wounding many more. ²¹

Fortunately, in 2017, the murders remained confined to the Delacorte stage. But the threat of violence did not. With the polarisation I then called ‘Delta versus Democracy’ also came a swift conflation of spheres, as if just going to see the show were a political act. Soon, a more viscerally disturbing protest against this Caesar emerged. On the final nights, conservative media-inspired protesters charged onto the stage at random moments during the performance. This was especially uncanny given that actors playing unruly Romans, crying out from the audience and rushing up the aisles, were already scripted into this production’s opening and as crowd responses to the funeral orations of Act 3. The art/life boundaries were gone, each moment’s status uncertain.

When I attended the final performance (June 18), the first interruption came early, soon after ‘Many a time and oft’:

Flavius.…Disrobe the images

If you do find them decked with ceremonies.

Marullus. May we do so?

You know it is the feast of Lupercal.

Flavius. It is no matter; let no images

Be hung with Caesar’s trophies. I’ll about

And drive away the vulgar from the streets;

So do you too, where you perceive them thick. (1.1.65–72)

After security guards removed a woman screaming against ‘liberal hate’ (dared anyone think her ‘the vulgar’?), the stage manager ingeniously announced over the loudspeaker or ‘god mike’ that they would resume at, ‘It is no matter’; this drew audience cheers.

However, a second protestor rushing into the assassination scene proved harder to recover from. Again, boundaries blurred eerily, as the protester’s removal from the onstage stabbings was followed by a hush as police attended him in the front row: for a moment, fear of actual injury evoked our common humanity. But then the man jumped up (surprise: he was acting!) to yell another slogan, and the audience became uncannily like the Roman mob, loudly booing throughout the intruder’s enforced exit. All of us in the audience suddenly had become police enforcers, trying to drive that collective ‘vulgar from the streets’. Moreover, the subsequent attempt to re-enact the historical re-enactment of Caesar’s murder had been upstaged, turning out to be far less viscerally disturbing than the real-life drama it followed.

Outside, the parade of decontextualisation, online and across broadcast media, continued to escalate, although in Central Park before the show (beyond the perimeter of baggage x-ray lines, conspicuously armed police, and those dogs) there were fewer than ten protesters; a cameraman was giving them the publicity they wanted. The same day, the writers’ organisation PEN America posted its Twitter support for the show: ‘Today is the final performance of @PublicTheaterNY’s Julius Caesar. We stand with their right to free speech. Bravo’. But the accompanying production shot they chose represented Elizabeth Marvel’s Mark Antony, who closes down free speech after the assassination to unleash the (no longer just metaphorical) ‘dogs of war’, becoming the demagogue who as a member of the triumvirate orders massive state killings. In Eustis’s staging, this happens via onstage firing squads, and among those executed is Cinna the poet (who, consistent with the production’s dramatisation of a rising police state, had previously been beaten not by the mob but by the onstage police). The proscription scene (once often cut from performances) set the tone for the latter acts’ dystopian vision of the US Republic unravelling, quite literally; from the Capitol – in Washington, DC rather than Rome – which served as backdrop, flag streamers suddenly fell to the stage floor in heaps. Resistance protesters were gunned down in full-out urban warfare: for the new triumvirate, No Lives Mattered.

This was hardly an advertisement for ‘liberal hate’, resistance ‘by any means necessary’, or assassination as a plausible political tactic. However, all sides in the social media ‘surround’ were losing – or never knew – the specifics of the show’s representation, its actual politics. ²² Instead, the attention there, in journalistic accounts, and even some scholarly reviews, was drawn to Trump and the Act 3 assassination. In such a climate, it was perhaps understandable that David Bromwich, in a headline article for the London Review of Books noting the Trump-Caesar correlation, dismissively quipped: ‘Of course it trashed the play’ because it made Brutus’ hesitation ‘unintelligible’. Bromwich was focused elsewhere: he was merely using the production as emblematic of there generally being too much attention paid to Trump the man at the expense of the real political issues at stake. ²³ As regards the mainstream media’s political coverage of the Trump Administration, his is a sentiment with which I agree. Yet, his article repeats its own identified mistake by failing to describe this performance’s larger frame and other particular choices – especially in those later acts.

**

Of course, discounting the latter acts of Julius Caesar is a common pattern in theatre history and scholarship as well – at least for the many generations since the early nineteenth century, when the Act 4 Brutus-Cassius argument was instead regarded as central. In New York, my attention to that scene was without doubt increased by the juxtaposition with Colombari’s Merchant. For here again, the audience witnesses an Act 4 audiovisual tableau of a man offering his breast to another man’s dagger, in a context where the heart becomes the recompense for missing money. (The First Folio’s capitalisations of the line-ending words ‘Dagger’, ‘Heart’, and ‘Gold’ help punch Shakespeare’s pattern of emphasis.) Opening with a histrionic apostrophe to their mutual enemies, the defensive Cassius responds to his brother-in-law’s accusation that he has withheld monetary support, indicative of corruption:

Come, Antony, and young Octavius, come,

Revenge yourselves alone on Cassius,

For Cassius is a-weary of the world:

Hated by one he loves, braved by his brother,

Checked like a bondman, all his faults observed,

Set in a notebook, learned and conned by rote,

To cast into my teeth. O, I could weep

My spirit from mine eyes! There is my dagger

And here my naked breast: within, a heart

Dearer than Pluto’s mine, richer than gold.

If that thou beest a Roman, take it forth.

I that denied thee gold will give my heart.

Strike as thou didst at Caesar. For I know

When thou didst hate him worst thou loved’st him better

Than ever thou loved’st Cassius. (4.3.93–107 [emphasis added])

Not only did these world-weary words calling for his own destruction oddly recall Antonio at his most vulnerable, but the casting and directorial concept also conjured Shylock’s sense of social injustice. The major black actor John Douglas Thompson, who had been an energetic Tamburlaine in Michael Boyd’s BAM production of Marlowe’s plays two years prior, brought comparable intensity to his Cassius. And in an era of slavery reparations debates, his Act 4 anger at being checked like a ‘bondman’ resonated even more strongly with Shylock’s 1.3 use of the same word (as well as with Shylock’s Act 4 exposure of Venetian slaveholders’ hypocrisy, within the refusal sequence The Merchant in Venice so emphasised). For this was no colour-blind production. Brutus, played by Corey Stoll, was white; his wife Portia, like Cassius, was not. Cassius first entered with a ‘Resist’ banner, in scenes where (consistent with the show’s transmutation of the supernatural into the political throughout) Shakespeare’s thunderstorms had been translated into the noise of police helicopters above. Likewise throughout, more seriously than in its passing parody of the First Family, design and performance choices made clear the political stakes of multi-ethnic, multicultural democracy being under attack, offstage as well as onstage.

Threats to the familial and legal ‘bond’ of brotherhood in Shakespeare’s text could not be unravelled from the crumbling cross-racial alliance these actors both embodied and represented. Brutus’ reply that Cassius sheathe his dagger, and his profession to exchange ‘heart’ with ‘hand’, became a highly charged, poignant performance of interracial brotherhood (momentarily, fragilely) sustained:

Brutus. Sheathe your dagger.

Be angry when you will, it shall have scope;

Do what you will, dishonor shall be humour.

O Cassius, you are yokèd with a lamb

That carries anger as the flint bears fire,

Who, much enforcèd, shows a hasty spark

And straight is cold again.

Cassius. Hath Cassius lived

To be but mirth and laughter to his Brutus

When grief and blood ill-tempered vexeth him?

Brutus. When I spoke that, I was ill-tempered too.

Cassius. Do you confess so much? Give me your hand.

Brutus. And my heart too. (4.3.107–18 [emphasis added])

Even, or especially, in a performance context doomed not only by history and Shakespeare’s text but also by the men’s association with non-violent popular movements shown to be technologically powerless against an increasingly brutal military/police state, the brothers-in-laws’ handshake of reconciliation signified. This gesture was more than a dignified alternative to the US President’s notorious ‘diplomatic’ handshakes: it contributed to a powerful combination of metaphorical, physical, and verbal connection in a production where race mattered.

The controversy surrounding this Caesar made even more visible its layers of political potential, as interviewed actors encouraged consideration of the intersections between on- and offstage representations. In reflecting upon those final performances, Stoll writes,

it felt as if we were acting in two plays simultaneously – the one we had rehearsed and the one thrust upon us. The protesters never shut us down, but we had to fight each night to make sure they did not distort the story we were telling. At that moment, watching my castmates hold their performances together, it occurred to me that this is resistance. ²⁴

It was resistance for the actor, as well as the character. Speaking with the New York Times, Eustis declared, ‘the whole thing is an anxiety nightmare parable about our current state, and that’s why it looks the way it looks’. ²⁵ A dimension beyond the strictly visible, however, was Stoll’s self-identification as a secular Jewish New Yorker, and how that registered (or not) when he shook hands with Thompson/Cassius, depending on one’s local knowledge. For those who remembered 1980s New York, when the hostile exchanges of Jesse Jackson and Ed Koch symbolised a painful fracture between two politically progressive minority communities who had been historic allies throughout the Civil Rights era, the stage handshake took on added resonance.

Lest the Ronald Reagan era seem too far from the fierce urgency of this now, it is worth recalling that Eustis played a major role in the genesis not only of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton in 2015 but also Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, set then and there: ²⁶ these theatrical allegories of the nation in its ethnic, religious, sexual and racial complexity provide the more hopeful cousins to his staging of Caesar. Angels also suggests an exaggerated gloss on the later production’s dramaturgical choices and struggles, both in its tortuous relationship of clueless (Jewish) Louis and wearily savvy (black) Belize, and in the comically rendered evil of the powerful Republican (and Trump mentor) Roy Cohn. To see the lead conspirators’ strained fellowship and forgiveness, as well as the Trump satire, reflected in the light of Angels relocates this Caesar in a contemporary director’s dramatic corpus rather than within the Shakespearean subgenre alone.

Not that these two perspectives are necessarily at odds: indeed, bringing them together better illuminates the patterns and reasons motivating the public furore. The most sinister, consequential confusion of art and life involving Julius Caesar shall always be the assassination of President Lincoln; it is worth remembering that John Wilkes Booth’s overt defence of African slavery as both in itself good and a foundational principle of the United States was what led him to believe that shooting Lincoln was a performance analogous to that of the republican Brutus. About a decade after Lincoln’s assassination and for many years subsequently, Julius the Snoozer, a burlesque of Julius Caesar, featured the assassination of a ‘whiteface’ Boss Tweed, the corrupt New York politician; ²⁷ within an obviously troubling dramatic genre, this particular minstrel show exposed post-Reconstruction racist regression by importing into the action an extraordinary Louisiana mixed-race politician, P. B. S. Pinchback. Briefly the first African American to become governor of a US State, Pinchback later ‘campaigned tirelessly for black voting rights and fought against segregation and for equal access to public facilities and offices’, but was targeted by Southern whites on charges of graft to prevent his holding elective office in the US Senate. Within the primarily New York-centred satire, then, Sharon McCoy concludes that the show ‘explicitly connects working-class whites and African Americans of all classes as victims of the same corruption…Julius the Snoozer brings Rome’s corruption and conspiracy home’. ²⁸

One might even say that, in quite a different way from Orson Welles’s famed 1937 Mercury Theatre modern-dress Caesar overtly invoking the rise of Fascist Benito Mussolini, Julius the Snoozer prefigures the 2017 production, especially in the latters’ allied representation of Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements. Most recently, as mentioned earlier, Rob Melrose’s 2012 Julius Caesar, ‘in which an Obama-like Caesar was stabbed by right-wing conservative conspirators’, was in his words the ‘inverse’ of Eustis’s within the political fiction; however, because Brutus was a black conservative, even that production allowed the assassination to fit a ‘black on black’ model too many are willing to dismiss. What Eustis did was flip the script – and with it, he both exposed and challenged the power dynamics of race that have shaped the nation’s history, and of Julius Caesar within its culture. It was this possibility of reversal, the white man killed by ‘women and minorities’ (as many right-wingers fumed), that was there for all to see. ²⁹

What if one chose to be ‘colorblind’ then – and thereby lost the opportunity to use interpretive analysis either to refute the show’s attackers or to comprehend the performance in its entirety? Jesse Green’s predominantly positive review in the New York Times shows in its self-contradictory phrasing how such a stance in fact blinds one not to colour, but to meaning. Finding the production ‘a bit desiccated and incoherent’ after Caesar’s assassination, he partly blames the play and then adds, ‘I am not sure what Mr. Eustis may have intended by making most of the conspirators, except for Brutus, black, but in any case the colorblind and gender-blind casting is apt and excellent’. ³⁰ Allowing oneself to register colour (and ethnicity) as meaningful makes it easier to imagine, and prompts re-examination of the reasons for anger. For this, Caesar targeted Trump not in isolation, but rather within the far-from-equal ‘playing field’ of white (implicitly heterosexual and ‘Christian’, indubitably masculine) privilege which Eustis repeatedly addresses in his many productions, both thematically and through casting.

Historical memory might also help counter the accusations that the political allegory was too crassly topical and local for Shakespeare, and explain why the production of counterfactuals to show that Trump was far from the only leader to be so satirised fell on deaf ears. For even when the parallelism with Obama-as-Caesar was pointed out by its director himself, Delta Airlines neither felt compelled to explain why only one instance ‘crossed the line on the standard of good taste’ nor to reverse their sponsor withdrawal. Melrose and many others attributed the initial uproar to the fact that few had actually seen Eustis’s show – which was no doubt a factor – but it is not comprehensively true nor does it explain the righteous outrage among both those who did and did not attend. ³¹ For that, the wilfulness of trying to pretend Americans as a culture can be neutrally ‘colorblind’ – rather than colour-conscious – provides a better diagnosis.

**

The overt racial politics of Eustis’s staging provide an impetus to look again at how Compagnia de’ Colombari’s Merchant puts pressure on colour-blindness. Coonrod’s consciously international production was more variegated in its relationships to identity: in the refusal of only one embodiment for Shylock, its casting of an African American actress as Portia, its gender-bending Lancillotto, and its doubling across gender, religion, and ethnicity. Nonetheless, the director also consciously drew on gendered associations (the ‘howl’ by Shylock-as-mother linked with keening) and patterns (in tensions across the ‘romantic’ couples’ relationships); and made conscious gestures at connecting actors to language and geography (the Hebraic languages for Aragon/Shylock #2 and New Yorker Shylock #5). Moreover, when returning from the cosmopolitan hub of Renaissance Europe to the United States, Coonrod brought the power of the Ghetto and different forms of Judaism into dialogue with uniquely American histories of oppression. In New Jersey, only months after the Caesar controversy, her third Shylock was no longer Welsh but an African American woman, and the ‘howl’ echoed differently. So did Shylock #1’s performative speaking in a ‘bondman’s key’ (coming from the same Indian/American/Parsi actor as in Venice), now addressed to a black Antonio. Such shifts in casting choices exemplified the fluid, multiple ways of addressing categories of identity that defy simpler allegories but carry their own progressive potential, serving as useful reminders that the forms in which embodiment intersects with history are local and diverse.

The contrasting Act 4 tableaux of men’s hearts and daggers in Merchant and Caesar reinforced the interweaving of comedy and tragedy across genres, the mixing of satire and pathos. Perhaps unexpectedly, it was in the tragic genre and the politically divisive production that an optimistic potential for human kindness shone forth. For Stoll and Thompson’s form of ‘resistance’ was also an act of physicalised communal empathy: a truth that becomes especially vivid when Brutus’ invocation of humoral psychology and his own underlying mildness is set against Shylock’s implacable use of the same physiosocial vocabulary. The symbolic exchange of hands and hearts between brothers-in-law was not the play’s last word any more than the Trump Caesar had been, but it did provide a strongly enacted assertion of solidarity across embodied difference, sustained under the most challenging of performance circumstances.

At the same time, and resonating more strongly than the emblematic differences between these tableaux and productions as a whole, was their kinship in taking on the political, artistic, and social challenges of making theatre seriously matter amid the fierce urgency of now. In combining Shakespeare’s patterns of metaphor, embodiment, and referentiality with innovative modern casting practices, each scene emblematised the historical progress that has transformed the meaning of ‘brotherhood’. From worlds in which religious, gendered, and racial ‘others’ were denied representation both onstage and in the state, we have undoubtedly arrived at a more diverse political community with space for fluidity and inclusion. Yet, the fact that both of these productions were surrounded by armed guards, in situations where the legacies of religious and racial hatred remained visible, made it impossible to perceive Shakespearean performance as aesthetic escapism or (even were one to wish it) an impermeable bastion against cultural change. The unresolved conflicts within their fictions became emblematic of our human failures to realise the spoken ideals of equality and common humanity, leaving us to wonder whether we, any more than the hard-hearted hypocrites within each play’s first scenes, will learn from historical memory and what Marullus called ‘the replication of [its] sounds’.

To return to King’s ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech, which re-invokes Shakespeare’s nautical metaphor to advocate for more serious forms of love, ‘[t]he oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate’. ³² Yet even in contexts as divisive as The Public Theater faced, there is also still the dream of addressing the audience as a thoughtful living community, offsetting tragedy, as Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska’s ‘Theatre Impressions’ captures well:

For me the tragedy’s most important act is the sixth:

the raising of the dead from the stage’s battlegrounds,

the straightening of wigs and fancy gowns,

removing knives from stricken breasts,

taking nooses from lifeless necks,

lining up among the living

to face the audience. ³³

There can be tenacity and bravery as well as (post)humanist hope in looking beyond the dramatic representation to those actors fulfilling and resisting so many challenges to face the audience. And there is bravery in looking to the audiences themselves – at least if we acknowledge, as does Kwame Kwei-Armah, that ‘the’ audience itself is not uniform but fragmented:

I’ve learned there’s no such thing as one audience. There are multiple audiences and the job of an artistic director is to speak to each of those audiences specifically at some times and all of them at some times. ³⁴

It is all the more timely, then, for audience members and scholars as well as directors to lend our ears to a wider dialogue. No less important is it to acknowledge the dynamic, phenomenological complexity within each performance as we also attune our senses to notice patterns across boundaries of genre, location, and medium. Hearkening to all the resources of our increasingly diverse scholarly, online, and theatrical communities, we have to decide why and to whom we listen; when to soften our hearts; and when to use our hands, mouths, and minds to resist larger cultural forces. To repurpose just a few more words of that assassinated but not silenced King of peace from half a century ago, ‘Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world’ – a world in which we also follow him in remembering the lost embodied voices that came before. As Shakespeare’s old words echo in this fierce, violent century, let us hope their performances can serve as one tidal current carrying us – as the two productions witnessed here attempted to do – towards those new understandings so long overdue.