Art is not like any other trade, in the words of a wrestling promoter: the champ ain't who wants it the most, the champ is who gets over.
For four hundred years intellectuals have argued, excused, and apologized for The Merchant of Venice, they do this for two reasons: the play is a work of genius that cannot be killed off by politics or morality; the work by the author is missing any logical through line of anti-semitism to build a case around. This is confounding: how could a twenty year career of writing contain what might only amount to three weeks worth of a specific type of bigotry? It's a puzzle that makes good critics veer into magical thinking. I've read published criticism devoted to this theory:
You see, Merchant is not only not anti-Semitic, it is actually a defense of Jews, (by a man who never met a Jewish person), because Shakespeare is writing on a level of symbols and imagery so deep we mere peons can only scratch the surface of it; while no brain has yet cracked William's code, we assure you the code will show this whole play to be a satirical trap to out the true bigots.
Uh huh. Basically Shakespeare's brain is alien technology, and while the writing is really fun to read, no one understands it to the deepest fathom where, were we able to troll, we would unlock the morality hidden under the cruelty. Treating Shakespeare's writing as a spell book of both white and black magic is fine, (and kind of fun), if you're an actor refusing to speak MacBeth's name, but silly if you're selling your expertise on history and literature.
I have a simpler explanation for Merchant, but it is darker than the above voodoo. Shakespeare isn't too deep for the reader to fully comprehend, he's too shallow. Shakespeare didn't spend one minute thinking about Jews; Jewishness had no impact on his life nor his thoughts; nor was Shakespeare much concerned with religion, politics, love, sex, monarchy, slavery, nature, murder, rape, heaven, hell, war, lust, the sun, the moon, or ghosts. He's just the guy who put the best words together about these things. His mind wasn't hassled by deep thinking on grave matters, deep thinking is unnecessary if a man's shallow thinking seduces and enslaves every subject he danced with.
As was said about Brando when a biographer asked a witness on how the famed instructors Adler and Strassburg had trained him as an actor: "Lee Strasburg claiming he taught Marlon how to act is like saying he taught a tiger how to walk in the jungle."
Ironic that Adler and Strassburg are the godparents of modern American acting, when every Pacino or Duvall who subscribed to their co-opted "method" did it because Brando supposedly did. I won't wind this analogy too tight, but look at the great method actors; compare how hard Pacino is working, then compare it to Brando's effortlessness.
I understand that the scale of what Shakespeare's words have had on humanity when compared to how little he might have put into them can mystify; no wonder people need invent conspiracy theories as to the authorship -- they're terrified that this tiger could so effortlessly create their own thoughts with none if that fussy artistic suffering. While genius and phenom are easily tossed off signifiers, to encounter a talent that could read you as a mark, and then inscribe words to the soul he likely did not believe you possessed, words you would always remember, words he likely forgot once the box office was counted, feels like a transgression -- it takes gentle romantic Will, and reconstitutes the image of the man as a venal carny. Unfortunately, this speculation fits the evidence of his life, the country hick, the preoccupation with growing his wealth and status, the chameleon philosophy of his work, the evidence he was a mercenary pen. Critics have nervous breakdowns crafting conspiracies: Will was a front for the true writer, the Earl of Oxford; Will was a pen name for a consortium of poets to safely post their most dangerous ideas; William was a warlock -- any explanation but that Will was a mutant talent, and he used this gift with the haphazard immorality of a man doing the thing that comes easiest to him. No idea was too small, too foolish, nor too classless, despicable, that he refused it his words. The same gift that provided the world comfort in the heartbreak of losing a child, by death or irreparable mistake, (in Lear, Merchant, Juliet), safety to take part in the foolishness of romance, (be you a hormonal teenager like Romeo, or perhaps a bit past your prime as in the Sonnets), is the selfsame creator of cruel violence to please an audience who gets off on it; racism and misogyny for no reason but the fun of it; and no overriding ethic or morality but that ethics and morality is food for rubes and marks. Shakespeare's nihilism is a black hole beyond Nietzsche or Machiavelli. These two constructed life works on how meaningless morality is, Will just improv'd. But then that's the poison of pretty words: within every play is a viable path to be or not to be.
