The Merchant of Venice by Katyboo

The Merchant of Venice is what is known as a ‘problem play’. I doubt that it was that problematic to the Elizabethans who seemed fairly blasé about most things including sodomy, rape, pillage and eating fish with sugar.  They were a game old lot. 

 

In Shakespeare’s day it was classed as a rip snorting, all you can eat smorgasbord of comedy.  Although I wonder if Mr. S sensed there might be something nasty in the wood shed, because it is one of the few comedies where dancing doesn’t really get much of a look in.  There are quite a few songs to make up for it, and some quality gender swapping comedy moments.  So panic not.

 

On the other hand there are also excessive amounts of cruelty, quite a lot of brutality, a smattering of homosexuality and about fourteen metric tonnes of racism, so hang on to your hats.  The homosexuality is in the down side column because it is dour, miserable homosexuality, not jolly, smiley homosexuality, and we can’t like that.

 

You see now where the ‘problem’ bit comes in.  It’s a bit Janus like really.  Two plays pretending to be one.  One with a jolly, happy smiley face, and one with a naughty, shouty face like mummy when she finds out that small boys have been dibbling their hands in toilet water and then stroking her face.  One play should be called The Merchant of Venice, one The Verchant of Menace.  You’ve got to have a system.

 

Bassanio is a bit of a lad.  He’s never had to do a day’s work in his life, and swans around the canals of Venice throwing half chewed chicken legs at peasants, mooning elderly women who were just quietly going about their business, grooming their Zapata moustaches, and spending daddy’s money like it’s going out of fashion.

 

Unfortunately at some point before we enter the fray, it seems that the bank of daddy actually has gone out of fashion and there is no more to be had from pater.  Bassanio is undeterred by this teeny, weeny, hiccup in his plans, and merely substitutes daddy for a sugar daddy, known as Antonio.

 

Antonio is the Merchant of the title.  He is also pompous, effete, constantly depressed and far too smug about being a God botherer.  On top of that it is generally believed by anyone who has read the play in the last four hundred years that he is also a raging homosexual.  This would explain his insane belief that Bassanio is an honourable bloke and all round top friend, when it is clear that he is off his face on WKD and spends his time gambling Antonio’s hard earned money on racing earwigs.  Antonio thinks that he is misunderstood, but we understand completely that Bassanio doesn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone but himself and the number of ducats clogging up his purse.

 

The play opens with Antonio mooning about like a love sick calf, presumably for Bassanio.  Bassanio who promised to call him and invite him over to watch Top Gondola and share a family sized lasagne.  Bassanio who forgot because he was too busy trying to launch pigeons out of a whore’s suspender belt in St Mark’s Square and laughing until he was sick into the canal.

 

Antonio’s friends suggest he snaps out of it.  They’re a bit bored by all the sighing and fieing.  They remind him he’s got a business to run.  He waves his hand in a dismissive gesture and thinks about picking out wedding presents from Argos with Bassanio.  There’s no sense to be had out of him.  He’s given all his spare cash to Bassanio, who has spent it on an ice cream maker (it’ll never catch on) which he got bored of after five minutes and which is now collecting dust in the kitchen.  There is nothing to be done. Woe, woe, etc.

 

The rest of his money is tied up in his merchanting.  He has got ships everywhere, Dundee cakes from Scotland, Um Bongo from the Congo, clogs from Holland.  When his ships come in he plans on throwing a huge party with cake and tropical fruit and clog dancing, and Bassanio is going to be so utterly impressed of him that all will be well and all manner of things will be well and Elton will be your gay lover.  It’s all he can think about.

 

At this point Bassanio hoves into view with his ne’er do well gang of Venetian wide boys, Lorenzo and Gratiano. Wha hey! Antonio hates them because Bassanio would rather be lighting his farts with them than choosing dinner services with him.  He tolerates them because if he doesn’t, Bassanio sulks and won’t let him stroke his hair.

 

Bassanio dismisses his friends, which is very suspicious for a start.  Antonio is such an idiot, he thinks this is a good sign.  Everyone else immediately starts wondering what Bassanio is up to. 

 

Bassanio is up to a whole heap of things, most of which start in Tr’ and end in ‘ouble.  He has a proposal for Antonio.  Antonio is overjoyed and is already thinking about button holes and colour schemes when Bassanio bursts his bubble big time.  Bassanio’s proposal is that Antonio give him a shed load of money so that he can go and hang out in Belmont and win the hand of the fair Portia.  Portia who is unspeakably rich and who can give Bassanio everything he has ‘borrowed’ from Antonio (and the rest), and who will never run out of money for ice cream makers.  Portia is also a girl.

 

Antonio, at this point, would quite like to faint and then scream and drum his heels on the floor whilst vomiting and crying a la Violet Elizabeth.  Instead he decides to be noble and kind and practice a kind of courtly, chivalrous love.  The love of the Arthurian knights. The love of the Arthurian knights who never got their end away and usually died horribly clutching only a girlie handkerchief in their blood soaked fist.  That kind of love.  Noble. Noble and pointless.

 

His lip quivering, he picks at the wall hangings and quavers that Bassanio knows that he had his last five ducats for the ice cream maker and that there is no more.  Bassanio starts to pout until Antonio draws in a huge breath and announces dramatically that even though he’s a jolly good Christian and thinks he will go to hell for borrowing money, he will allow Bassanio to deal with the Jewish money lenders in his name and sign a deal with Ocean Finance at 900% interest in order to fund his quest.

 

It is at this point that Bassanio is supposed to renounce Portia, see what a selfless babe of a merchant Antonio is and sweep him off his feet.

 

Bassanio says; ‘Ta very much cocker!’ and rushes out to hock Antonio’s soul to the highest bidder.

 

Antonio collapses amongst the hangings, squealing like a stuck pig and being revived only by smelling salts and four episodes of Queer as Folk.

 

In the meantime Bassanio is roaming the Rialto to find Shylock.  Shylock is a ninja money lender and total Christian hater.  He particularly hates Antonio who as well as being a nancy boy, a Christian and a successful merchant who never has to borrow money from him, has also spat at him and called him rude names.  If ever one needed proof that Bassanio is an out and out bounder, and as thick as swill it is when he decides to ask Shylock for the money.  It’s like knowing what Sweeney Todd does for a living and then sending your best mate round for a shave in the vain hope that he will be alright.

 

Shylock cannot believe his luck.  He is over the moon.  He agrees to lend Antonio the money on the condition that if Antonio cannot pay it back within three months, then instead of the usual monetary forfeits, Antonio give him a pound of his flesh.

 

Shylock is sticking his neck out here, but he has seen the state of Antonio wandering about in four day old pyjamas.  The Rialto is buzzing with the news that Bassanio’s ditching him for a lady with boobs and everything, and he is banking on the whole, chivalrous martyr syndrome kicking in.  He’s a shrewd judge of character.

 

Antonio says yes.  Bassanio cannot believe his luck.  Rather than setting out to see Portia straight away he decides to spend some of the money that his best friend/lover has just put his life on the line for, on a big fuck off party and invite everyone, including Shylock.  It is amazing that he was turned down for that job in the diplomatic corps. Amazing.

 

Meanwhile we swoop off to Belmont while Bassanio is exercising his tact by asking Antonio to see to the table decorations and ordering giant bosom shaped cakes.

 

Portia is at Belmont with her trusty side kick Nerissa.  They are bemoaning the utter idiocy of men.  Portia is a good woman.  She is clever, witty, the owner of the largest castle in the world, and independently wealthy.  Normally this would be brilliant and she would be poster girl for the Venetian Women’s Liberation Front.  Unfortunately Portia has two handicaps.

 

The first is her father.  Her father is dead.  This is probably a good thing because he sounds like a right twit and a half.  On his death he compounded his idiocy by making the most ludicrous will in the history of ludicrous wills.  He has decided that he will choose Portia’s husband.  Being dead is no handicap. Oh no! He has come up with a kind of Crystal Maze style odyssey which any would be suitor has to agree to.  If they win they get a turbo powered gondola, an engraved tankard and Portia’s hand in marriage.  If they lose they have to swear that they will never marry anyone else and go and throw themselves in the canal.

 

This does not deter the suitors, thanks to the promise of the largest castle in the world and all the ice cream makers you could shake a stick at.  Portia is besieged by testosterone fuelled fortune hunters morning noon and night. It is driving her insane.  They are eating her out of house and home and their disgusting habits are making her think longingly of shacking up with Nerissa and renouncing men for good.

 

The second problem is that although she is bright as a button and knows Pi down to the last digit, she is a bit girlie when it comes to falling in love.  It transpires that Bassanio has been to visit previously and she was quite taken with him.  Someone who picks his teeth with a cutlass and can fart the Italian national anthem clearly being a welcome relief from inbred, foppish princelings. God help her.

 

Portia goes to watch a princely Moor try his hand at the Crystal Maze.  Richard O’Brien is off sick, so it is up to her to do the honours.  He has to choose one of three caskets, lead, silver or gold.  Each one is adorned with a riddle with a clue to the contents.  Inside the correct casket is a portrait of Portia.  The Moor messes it up good and proper, Portia gives a huge sigh of relief as it turns out that she wasn’t over keen on having a brown baby Wayne.  Although he was preferable to the fat, sweaty German who messed it up earlier.  She is living on her nerves.  It’s only a matter of time before some bumbling idiot picks the wrong casket.  She has no desire to marry someone wearing a wife beater, whose last successful relationship was with a farm animal, but the rate she’s going it could happen to her.

 

Back in Venice, Bassanio’s party is about to begin.  Shylock is going, but he’s not a happy Jew.  He’s only going to have a good gloat at Antonio.  He’s absolutely sick of these bloody Christians littering up the place.  Now it turns out that his thick as swill manservant Lancelot Gobbo, is defecting to Bassanio’s house because Bassanio has offered him a nicer doublet.  The cheek.

 

Gobbo has not only done the dirty on Shylock for a new coat, he is also, it transpires, running love messages between Lorenzo, one of Bassanio’s Big Up Venice posse, and Jessica, the one and only daughter of Shylock himself.  Gobbo is as thick as a whale omelette, so it’s a wonder the messages are getting through, but needs must when you only have a poorly dressed half wit in your employ.

 

Jessica is sick of being locked up in the house all day with nothing to do.  Her father’s constant mutterings about Antonio are beginning to get on her nerves and she is annoyed that he cares about his money more than her.  She has arranged to elope with Lorenzo using Bassanio’s party as a cover.  Shylock is going to be a bit cross about this.  She doesn’t care.  She wants to taste freedom.  She sees Lorenzo as Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider with gondolas.  He sees her as a meal ticket and an exotic shag.  They are a match made in heaven.

 

Lorenzo trots up to her window complete with gondola and best friends making tons of noise, giggling and shouting ‘shssshhhhhh!’ at volume eleventy twelve.  Jessica shins down the drainpipe with all her father’s wealth and they scarper into the mist singing Born to Be Wild in Italian.

 

Shylock gets back from the party to find his daughter and all his money gone.  It is not clear which he is most upset about, but we are absolutely crystal about one thing.  He totally blames Antonio for it.  This is the one time in the entire play where anyone has a smidgen of sympathy for Antonio.  He might be a smug, God bothering, Jew hater, but he has been too busy sighing and not touching a morsel, torturing himself with thoughts of Bassanio and breasts to worry about Lorenzo’s extra curricular activities.

 

Shylock calls the rozzers and demands that Bassanio’s boat of lurve, which has just set off for Belmont, be seized and searched.  All to no avail.  It merely contains Bassanio, a hung over Gratiano and a huge number of padded cod pieces.  They are free to go.

 

In the mean time Portia has successfully eluded the clutches of an effete, in bred Spanish nobleman and is lying down in the garden having a fag and a pint of Um Bongo (they drink it in the Congo), when Nerissa arrives, squealing that she has seen a gondola on the horizon and judging from the glittering of the cod pieces it means Bassanio is on his way.

 

Portia allows herself a tiny, girly, ditherspaz and rushes off to change her frock nineteen times while Bassanio unloads his cod pieces and Gratiano lounges about foppishly giving Nerissa the glad eye.  Nerissa who has previously been resigned to a life of lesbian spinsterhood and cleaning up cat wee can now see a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

 

Bassanio demands to be led to the caskets immediately. Time is short, he only has three ducats left and ice cream makers call.  Portia explains the task and stands about sweating and praying.

 

At this point it would be expected that Bassanio would make a right pig’s ear of things. He’s not slept for four days. He failed the eleven plus and the weight of his cod piece is giving him a headache.  He is however, a survivor.  In modern times he would be claiming benefits whilst sipping pina colada’s in the Maldives with his fourteen wives.  He has native cunning to see him through.

 

He picks the right casket and thanks Cheezus.  Portia thinks of all the near misses and thanks Cheezus.  Nerissa who has agreed to marry Gratiano if Bassanio hooks the right duck, thanks Cheezus.  Gratiano is too busy admiring himself in the mirror to thank Cheezus, but he would if he didn’t have the attention span of a dead gnat.

 

Just as the feasting is getting underway a telegram arrives from the Rialto for Bassanio.  It’s bad news.  All Antonio’s ships have been sunk.  No more Um Bongo.  Antonio cannot pay his debt, and Shylock, further incensed by the news that his daughter has swapped her mother’s wedding ring for a pet monkey, and the fact that his supplies of Um Bongo have dried up, is demanding his pound of flesh, pronto.

 

Even Bassanio has the good grace to feel a little guilty here.  Thanks to Antonio he now has the largest cod piece collection in the Western hemisphere, and a wife with generous breasts.  That’s not to be sneezed at.  Antonio has asked that Bassanio be present at the flesh hacking and much as he’d like to be checking out Gondola Trader, he feels he should probably pop along.

 

Portia gives him buckets of ducats to try and buy his way out of the problem and Gratiano and Bassanio get a fast gondola back to Venice, stopping only to receive rings from their wives and promise that they will never, ever, ever let them go.  You know trouble is brewing on that front, oh yes.  A promise from Bassanio is as reliable as a book on bicycle maintenance written by a porpoise.

 

At this moment Jessica and Lorenzo tip up from their exotic travels, the wind in their hair and monkeys on their shoulder.  Portia, who does not know them from Adam, gives them the keys to the biggest castle in the world and tells them to look after it while she and Nerissa go on religious retreat with a bunch of nuns.  Everyone is perplexed, but Lorenzo’s not turning down the biggest castle in the world.  He has already had visions of flooding the landing and turning into gondola drag races.  He waves them off. So does the monkey.

 

Nerissa is wondering about whether to call Doctor Apothecary when Portia outlines her cunning plan.  She has a cousin who is a lawyer.  They are going to visit him, pick his brains, dress up as two young lawyer men about town and sweep in and save Antonio from certain death.  This will mean that Bassanio will love her forever and ever, and they’ll get to wear false beards, which she’s always wanted to have a go at.  Nerissa who hasn’t been outside the confines of the biggest palace in the world in twelve years, is game for anything and wonders if she can wear a cod piece as well.

 

Back in Venice, the trial is on.  Shylock has wandered in with a big, fuck off knife and a pair of scales.  He’s not messing about.  Antonio is swooning left, right and centre and wondering where the hell Bassanio is, and the Doge is trying to be nice to everyone.  It’s not working.

 

Bassanio swaggers in, cod piece pushing its way through the crowds.  He slaps down twice the amount of the loan and sings:

 

Bassanio, Bassanio, is on his way

He found a bunch of ducats to save the day

He’s not bright, but he’s got lots of cash

Free old Antonio and let’s go on the lash

 

Nobody is impressed.  Antonio has a stress headache and has forgotten his Rescue Remedy.  The Doge has had enough amateur theatricals to last a life time and is missing Top Gondola, and Shylock just wants Antonio dead.  He’s coming down from the Um Bongo now and it’s making him really, really tetchy.

 

It’s all getting a bit tense when a messenger announces that the learned young lawyer Balthazar has come to save the day, and do a much better job than Bassanio.  This of course is Portia, complete with comedy beard and Nerissa as her clerk at law.

 

Portia asks Shylock to be merciful.  He is not impressed and starts sharpening his knife on the edge of the table.  Eventually she caves in and says that he is of course able to extract his pound of flesh.  He is jubilant.  He does a little dance.  He wanders up with the knife and waves it under Antonio’s nose.  Antonio is a bit sick into his beard.

 

Just as he is about to rend his flesh, humming; ‘The first cut is the deepest’, Portia takes great delight in pointing out that according to the law he is allowed the flesh only, and that if he spills one drop of Antonio’s blood he is for the chop and all his goods go to the state.  Shylock is quite cross.  He agrees to take the money.  Portia points out that under law he has refused it, and so he can’t have it.  He is a little bit more annoyed.  Then she points out that the law states that because he has threatened a Christian he is bound to give half his goods to the state and half to Antonio and will be sentenced to death.  Shylock explodes.  This was not the plan.  He shakes his fist and mutters about ‘you pesky kids.’  Scooby snacks are thrown to the elated crowd.

 

Antonio has by now, become rather more perky.  Bassanio is here and has let him stroke his hair, plus he’s not going to die after all.  As long as he doesn’t think about breasts or ships all will be well.

 

He puts the boot in.  He pompously announces that he will allow Shylock to keep his half of the money as long as he promises to give it to Jessica and Lorenzo when he dies, so that they can open a monkey sanctuary.  He also says that Shylock must become a Christian, and give up his unseemly Um Bongo habit for good.

 

Shylock asks to be killed instead, which would be more fun.  The Doge says no, taking a crafty sip of Um Bongo and smiling at Shylock.  Bastard.

 

Shylock is left to go slowly insane while everyone else goes back to Portia’s for a big party.

 

Portia and Nerissa scurry out, desperate to get out of these beards.  They really don’t know what men make all this fuss about, and Portia has a bit of egg sandwich trapped in hers which is doing her no favours at all.  On their way to catch the gondola they are cornered by Bassanio and Gratiano who are too stupid to recognise their own wives, even with comedy facial hair.  The offer them presents for doing a good job and invite them for a few pints of Um Bongo.  They decline the invitation but ask for the men’s rings.  Both men protest and then give in almost immediately, because they are crap.

 

Back at Belmont Portia manages to get back before Lorenzo fires the Knot Garden and sells the prize winning pigs for a pair of gold pedal pushers.  A feast is prepared and Bassanio and Gratiano rock up with a rather sheepish looking Antonio.  He has just found out that all the money for his release came from his rival, and that Bassanio is already married.  He is trying to be magnanimous but mostly he wants to cry into his chest hair and make small, whimpering noises.

 

Bassanio and Gratiano are telling of their heroic deeds and how Portia and Nerissa should have been there when the lack of ring action on their fingers is duly noted.  The women indulge in orchestrated histrionics.  Bassanio and Gratiano are not best pleased.  Antonio is in the background, utterly delighted.  If Portia keeps on like this he could be going home with Bassanio as well.  He can’t quite believe his luck.  Button hole options are back on the table.

 

His hopes are dashed when in a style worthy of the great Jeremy Beadle himself the women flourish their comedy beards and shout ‘surprise!’ in gruff, manly voices.  Everyone except Antonio is overcome with the hilarity of it all and goes off to spend the rest of the night drinking gondolas full of Um Bongo and living the high life.  Antonio hides behind the curtain, rocking purgatorially in the twilight and thinking that Bassanio might have loved him more if Shylock had bumped him off after all, and that Portia is a git.  A git with breasts and everything.

 

Fin