Adaptation and Historical Resonance: Brigid Larmour and Tracy-Ann Oberman’s The Merchant of Venice 1936 (2023) and Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice (2004)

This essay considers one stage and one screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘problem play’ in the context of contemporary anti-Semitism. It examines the degree to which this prejudice has been intensified as a result of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on the Nova Music Festival on 7 October 2023. This is illustrated through the increasingly hostile responses to Brigid Larmour and Tracy-Ann Oberman’s stage version, The Merchant of Venice 1936, which itself was set against the racist march of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and the Battle of Cable Street. The essay goes on to consider the strategies Michael Radford deploys in his film adaptation, in order to arouse sympathy for Shylock. It analyses the departure from the playscript of the adaptation’s ending and notes an unexpected modernity of the film with its attention to sexuality and materialism, identity and discrimination. The essay concludes that, in spite of Radford’s attempts to insulate the audience from the religious fundamentalism of sixteenth-century Venice, the play’s historical resonance continues, inescapably (no less than The Merchant of Venice 1936), to address concerns of the present moment.