The Merchant of Venice - Anti-Semitic or Anti-Christian?

"The Merchant of Venice" has been called Shakespeare's anti-Semitic play - with good reason.

It has a Jewish villain, who gets his comeuppance at the hands of Christians, which gave Will's audiences something to cheer about.

Jews have traditionally hated the play and wished it were not in Shakespeare's body of work. Many even protest its presentation. A great number of those protestors have never read the play and some even refuse to see it staged.

To be fair, anyone who sits through a traditional performance should not be condemned for believing Shakespeare was, indeed, a bigot. But, was he?

We are about to get some new insights into the play and the man who wrote it.

Not too long ago, Television screened a documentary on "Shylock" that was interesting - not so much for showing Shakespeare's intention when he created the character - but more for the range of different attitudes towards the Jew. This could not fail to cause confusion in the layman's mind.

No one seemed to agree, not even on the way Shylock looked!

Orson Welles saw him as rather scruffy, with the black garments of the European Hassid, scraggly beard and tangled hair topped with a funny black hat.

At the other extreme was Dr. Jonathan Miller's vision, in the person of Laurence Olivier: a well-dressed, opulent, modern, integrated Jew, very much the British businessman, a far cry from the slimy character with the hooked nose and evil leer of anti-Semitic literature and posters.

The actor Charles Macklin, himself a violent man, who had killed another actor in a duel, played him as a ferocious devil figure. The malignancy he infused into the character had a tremendous (wholly negative) impact on the audience. Alexander Pope maintained he had portrayed Shylock the way Shakespeare wrote him.

On the other hand, Jonathan Miller tried to divest the character of the stereotype Jew devil - the dirty, filthy pig suckler - eater of pig excrement, and the foul polluter of the holy Christian world, so he made him a gentleman, no different from the Christians around him.