On Monday afternoon, while opening “The Quality of Mercy”: Visions of Justice in The Merchant of Venice, GW law professor Jeffrey Rosen expressed hope that the informal panel discussion would “offer the pleasure of being at a really good dinner party.”
“But we’re not serving food,” Law School Dean Paul Schiff Berman added hastily.
Maybe not, but the guest list was impressive. Dean Berman, a former avant-garde theater director, was joined in the Michael K. Young Faculty Conference Center by Barry Edelstein, director of the Shakespeare Lab at New York City’s Public Theater—whom NPR has called “one of the country’s leading Shakespeareans”—for a wide-ranging conversation on The Merchant of Venice’s legal vision and its conception of justice.
Mr. Edelstein, who directed a production of The Merchant of Venice in 1995 and was the associate producer of the immensely successful 2010 Broadway and Shakespeare in the Park production that starred Al Pacino as Shylock and was produced by the Public Theater, said that there is a “profound connection” between Shakespeare and lawyers.
Law, like the study of Shakespeare, is based on “canonical texts that have to be interpreted as the world changes,” and theater professionals, Mr. Edelstein elaborated, approach Shakespeare in much the same way that scholars of constitutional law approach their canon. “Strict contextualists” attempt to reproduce the original atmosphere and context of the plays, while “activist directors” mediate and rework them through a modern lens.
Each time he’s staged The Merchant of Venice, Mr. Edelstein went on, he’s received multiple unsolicited essays by attorneys on its interpretation. “Different writers,” he clarified, to laughter. “It’s almost like a cottage industry.”
It’s easy to see why lawyers would be tempted to weigh in. The Merchant of Venice is Shakespeare’s most famous “legal” play, culminating in a courtroom scene wherein Shylock the Jew, the merchant of the title, demands a pound of flesh in contractual exchange for a debt owed.
The heroine, Portia, acting in defense of the borrower, delivers a soliloquy on “the quality of mercy” that leaves Shylock unmoved. At last she outmaneuvers him by conceding that, while he is entitled by law to his pound of flesh, his contract doesn’t specify blood—so he’ll have to extract it without shedding any.
This glib maneuver, though in Dean Berman’s opinion “nonsensical from a legal standpoint,” decides the case, and Shylock—in one of the Bard’s more uncomfortable “happy endings” for a modern audience—is forced to forfeit his debt and to convert to Christianity.
The scene’s legal incoherence, Mr. Edelstein suggested, is because the scene is “what Hitchcock called a Macguffin,” a plot device which is ultimately beside the point.
“Shakespeare’s looking at bigger questions,” he said, including religious morality, the battle between metaphor and literalism, and the psychological costs of doing justice.
“One of the things I love about theater is that there isn’t merely one narrative voice,” Dean Berman said. “Multiple voices express multiple stories and perspectives—and to me, that’s what the law is, too. It’s the only profession that’s ethically obligated to articulate all points of view. And that sense of justice is the same thing you get in theater.”
In Shakespeare, Mr. Edelstein concurred, “The truth emerges in the spaces in between those opposing viewpoints.”