Vela
Gold's 1980 version, filmed for the BBCseries, sets the
The Merchants of Venice: The Importance of Context
in Film Versions of the Play
Richard Vela
In December of 2004, Michael Radford's film The
Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino as Shylock, Joseph
Fiennes as Bassanio, Jeremy Irons as Antonio, and Lynn
Collins as Portia opened to limited engagements in
England, America, and Italy. While there have been no
commercially viable films of Shakespeare's TheMerchant of
Venice, a few silent era versions survive, and three
interestingly different versions (essentially filmed stage
productions) have been made for television. Jonathan
Miller's 1969version starred Laurence Olivier as a late
nineteenth century businessman in Victorian England,
who is desperate to assimilate himself to the business
world whose principles and dress he imitates, and who
hides his yarmulke under a very proper top hat. Jack
31
play in the Early Modem period, but reflects late
twentieth century critical concerns, emphasizing the
homoerotic nature of Antonio's friendship, the teenage Ii
rebellion in Jessica's rejection of Shylock, and the problems
of cultural and religious identity in Shylock's treatment by I:
the Christian mercantile society. Trevor Nunn, in his 2001 Ii
production for Exxon Mobil Masterpiece Theatre, cleverly
opens the play in the cabaret world of Germany in the late
1920s, thus simultaneously avoiding and anticipating the
Nazi anti-Semitism that forever changed our reading of
the play. Contrasting the cabaret with the ghetto, this r
version emphasizes Shylock's separation by specific
additions to the play, such as having him speak Hebrew f
when he orders Jessica about or when he sings with her.
Later, at the end of the play, when Jessica receives the
I
letter telling her about Shylock's losses and her
inheritance, she sings the same song in her father's
language as she sits in the isolation of Christian Belmont.
Radford's film sets the play in sixteenth century I
Venice, whjch is presented as both "a vital trading port"
(Familiar Cineaste) and "a mine of distrust, tom between I
extreme Christianity and Judaism" ("Pacino"). It is a i
world fleshed out with scenes of "Jews being abused and !,
Venetian whores with rouged nipples" (buzzerbill), a i
I
Vela 32
world that extrapolates a line from Shylock's hypothetical
argument ("Fair sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last, /
You spumed me such a day, another time / You called me
dog; and for these courtesies / I'll lend you thus much
moneys"? 1.3.123-126)and builds it into a scene in which
Antonio actually spits on Shylock. Radford, who also
wrote the script, has heightened these conflicts because, as
he says in an interview, the play is about "two cultures
who don't understand each other" ("Pacino").
Using this set of very distinct ways of presenting The
Merchant of Venice, this paper will argue that context, the
milieu created within the film, provides an important key
to understanding Shakespeare adaptations, a key that has
been largely overlooked or subordinated to other matters.
For many years the dominant question in evaluating
adaptations of Shakespeare has been, in Kenneth S.
Rothwell's phrase, "but is it Shakespeare?" (ix), a notion
that Elsie Walker analyzes in a recent essay that again
frames the issue in a question, "Getting Back to
Shakespeare: Whose Film is it Anyway?" (8). Although
fidelity remains a popular criterion for evaluating
Shakespeare adaptations, and many performances claim
authenticity by getting back to the time, spirit, or
performance style of the original, the issue of being
faithful to Shakespeare has become more problematic and,
Vela 33
at the same time, less relevant in the theory of adaptation
than the more complex issue, as Catherine Beasley
describes it, of how an adaptation "offers us a way of
grasping the ideological conditions of its own production"
(61-62). According to Sarah Caldwell, each of these film
versions is a kind of "meta-text" (14), and we would do
well to recognize that" a later adaptation may draw upon
any earlier adaptations, as well as upon the primary
source text" (25). Indeed, Caldwell questions the notion of
an "'original' source/individual adaptation relationship as
a direct, unmediated and ahistorical one" (25).1 Adapting
a Shakespeare play, is not, in other words, just a matter of i
I
plucking up Shakespeare's text and'suddenly restoring it
to something that he and every other Elizabethan would
have recognized as being of their own world.
Playwright Charles Marowitz, author of TheMarowitz
Shakespeare,in his comments on his own adaptation of The
Merchant of Venice,gives a good example of how context
can be used to change the effect of the play. He chose to
set "the action in Palestine during the period of the British
Mandate," thus evoking the "anti-Semitism engendered
during this period" and identifying Antonio with Ernest
Bevin, the Foreign Secretary of Clement Atlee, whose
policies largely caused the crisis. Marowitz comments
that" one created a completely different moral balance
Vela 34
between the opposing forces in the play" by transforming
"The Venetian capitalists and adventurers.. .into British
colonialists and the Jews into committed Nationalists"
(473). The effect was to put" Antonio's character into
question" by identifying him with failed British policy and
to give Shylock a victory when, at the end of the trial
scene, Shylock's supporters take "authority out of the
hands of the British colonists and [put] it in the hands of
Zionist guerillas" (473). Making these changes, Marowitz
argues, allowed him to engage the play with
contemporary ideas and to inject an element of "surprise,"
leading audiences away from their "fixed expectations"
(474).
Among the several issues encountered in this play-a
daughter bound in her choice of husbands by a father's
will, a young man equally enraptured by beauty and
money, an old friend whose melancholy seems more
curious to us now than it might have to Shakespeare,
another daughter willing to leave her father's home and
religion to embrace her father's enemies-perhaps the
most dominant issue in the history of this play has been
the character and treahnent of Shylock, the Jewish
moneylender whose bond for a pound of Antonio's flesh
becomes the focus for the most dramatic incidents in the
play. Kiernan Ryan is representative of current
Vela 35
approaches to the play when he castigates "the romantic
idealist conception of the play" and claims the play is
really about "Shylock and the significance of his revenge"
(16).2 It is also perhaps impossible to read the play other
than in the shadow of the atrocities of World War II, but it
would be wrong to assume that sYmpathy for Shylock's
case did not occur until the middle of the Twentieth
Century. In fact, many earlier anti-Shylock productions
framed him as a comic villain. The French silent film
Shylock,ou IeMore de Venise, with French stage actor Harry
Baur in the title role, brought to America in 1913, provides
a good case in point. Although Shylock had been treated
as a dignified character on the Victorian stage by Henry
Irving, who wrote that he saw "Shylock as the type of a
persecuted race; almost the only gentleman in the play
and the most ill-used" (qtd. in Ball 147), Baur's portrayal
owes nothing to that interpretation.
Richard Hamilton Ball, in his study of silent
Shakespeare films, cites a contemporary reviewer who
wrote that "M. Baur would seem to have gone back to
earlier traditions for his impersonation of Shylock,
reviving memories of the time when the Jew was regarded
more or less as an object of ridicule and mirth rather than
II
sympathy" (178). The opening titles of the film identify
Shylock as "The crafty Money Lender who for centuries II
 ~ ~""' ..- - - - -.
Vela 36
has stood forth a living symbol of cunning and greed." At
the end of this version, when Shylock finally loses his case
and is carried off, the action shifts to Bassanio's giving up
his ring to the lawyer, then later facing Portia to confess
that he no longer has her gift. Antonio stoutly defends his
friend's honor, and Portia kisses both of them. Then,
when the friends are reunified, suddenly Shylock appears
again, asking whether he can at least have the principal on
the loan, and the Venetians tell him he can only have
punishment. When Shylock leans against a door and
weeps, they laugh at him. In this version, Shylock
becomes the figure of qvarice, a comic Vice in the figure of
the Jew.
A general shift in sensibility, together with the
horrific events of World War II, changed forever the
context of this play, and no significant available film
version of TheMerchant of Veniceappeared until 1969,
when Jonathan Miller filmed his National Theatre
production of the play with Laurence Olivier as Shylock,
setting it in a nineteenth-century mercantile society. John
Gross says that Olivier's Shylock longed for social
acceptance, but when it came to it, he found the old
prejudices were still bubbling away. And the bigotry of
the well-bred Christian characters was meant to be all of a
piece with their other vices. They were portrayed as
I"
Vela 37
corrupt, cold-hearted frauds" (327). Olivier himself claims
to have modeled his characterization on George Arliss's
portrayal of Benjamin Disraeli and on his own Uncle
Sydney, the first Lord.Olivier and Governor of Jamaica,
who, Olivier says, "had a beard and looked quite Jewish"
(97). .
The characters in this film do, in fact, occupy a world
in which money and privilege seem the primary values.
Marion D. Perret makes the point that this version shows
Shylock as "a successful financier," for whom "the 'bank'
is his home," even as he "puts a top hat over his skullcap 1
1
in a fruitless effort to seem one with the frock-coated
gentlemen who speak frostily to him" (158). Next to
Olivier's Shylock, the other characters seem to live in the
superficial and dandified world that Oscar Wilde's
characters occupy, an impression supported perhaps by
Miller's comment that he modeled Bassanio Geremy Brett)
I
and Antonio (Anthony Nicholls) on Athe relationship
between Oscar Wilde and Bosie" (107). In Belmont, Joan
Plowright's Portia certainly seems as indolent and well- u~ i
cared for as the women in a Wilde play, and the handling II
of the Belmont scenes suggests a continuing criticism of
the values of this society. Portia's suitors, here a
grandiose Prince of Morocco and an aged Prince of
Aragon, are reduced to caricatures of ethnic stereotypes.
Vela 38
Later, when two sopranos, dressed alike, deliver the
"Where is fancy bred" line in an animated operetta-like
fashion, they leave Bassanio with no doubt as to which
casket to choose and 'create the impression that Portia has
disingenuously trivialized the choice. In this context,
Portia's accounting of herself in metaphors of trade as she
congratulates Bassanio seems, as June Schlueter
comments, "testimony to the endurance of Venetian
values 0:verBelmont's" (173). .
Against this world stands Shylock, with many of his
hate-filled lines excised and an emphasis instead on his
sense of personal and familial loss. By turn, he is shaken
when he discovers that Jessica (Louise Purnell) has left,
jubilant when he discovers Antonio's ships have
floundered, and filled with grief when he finds his
daughter has traded his ring for a monkey. Miller has the
camera linger in a moment of silence on the broken
Shylock pulling his shawl around himself. Other touches
that reinforce this characterization include the surprising
off-stage wail of pain heard just after Shylock leaves the
court and the mournful sound of the Kaddish, the Jewish
requiem (Rothwell, History 70), played as a saddened
Jessica separates herself from the cheerful Christians in
Belmont to read the letter telling her father's fate.
Jonathan Miller also produced the 1980 version,
Vela 39
directed by Jack Gold for the BBC series, The Shakespeare
Plays. The earlier National Theatre version emphasized
Shylock's attempt to look like his nineteenth century
counterparts, and Olivier played the role with restrained
emotions that burst out only at moments when he is
isolated and therefore unconcerned with saving face. The
BBC version puts Shylock back in the Renaissance world
where the obvious dissimilarities in attire underscore the
other differences between Shylock and the world around
him. Olivier's clipped speech gives way to Warren I
I .
Mitchell's heavy accent. In Mitchell's Shylock, the pain I,
seeps through the humor that he wraps around his. IJ
sharpest lines. He is short, animated, gesturing and joking I:
in his delivery; a kind of salesman trying to work a hostile
audience, an earthy man who pumps his arm as he tries to
explain "the work of generation." More of a conniver than
Olivier's desperately dignified Shylock, Mitchell's
Shylock, instead of having his less acceptable views Ii
omitted, delivers them in cautious asides, momentarily
taking the audience into his confidence as he continually II:
struggles between what he feels and what he can safely
say.
In general, this BBC version presents a more openly
hostile world than the National Theatre version, but it is a
hostility that cuts both ways. Miller, in an interview,

Vela 40
makes the point that, while "The play's central theme is
the conflict between the world of the Old Testament and
the world of the New Testament," Shakespeare also
"shows us that those who are exponents of mercy act
unmercifully when given the opportunity to use the law
against the Jew" (Hallinan 142). If Shylock is violent in
both his asides and his intentions, the Christians in this
version are very physical in their contemptuous treatment
of Shylock. When Salerio Oohn Rhys-Davies) and Solanio
(Alan David) taunt Shylock with the fact that his daughter
Jessica (Leslee Udwin) has left him, this version has the
hefty Venetians manhandle him and then mock Shylock
and laugh at him as he delivers the "Hath not a Jew eyes"
speech (3.1.55-69). Later in the trial scene, when Shylock
realizes he is defeated, Gratiano (Kenneth Cranham)
knocks him to the floor and pulls his beard, while the
other Christians form a threatening circle around him.
Ironically, after the Duke points out that the Christians are
more merciful, Gratiano knocks the yarmulka from
Shylock's head, and Salarino takes an elaborate and large
cross from around his own neck, and, placing it on
Shylock, forces him to kiss it. Through all this, Shylock
writhes in pain. The effect of these events is to make it
seem that it is not only mercantile Venice that is villainous
but also Christian Venice.
Vela 41
Trevor Nunn says that his Royal National
Theatre production of TheMerchant o/Venice, restaged
and filmed for Exxon-Mobile Masterpiece Theatre and
broadcast on PBS, developed out of his attempt to
reconcile the apparent racism in the play with his
own sense "that Shakespeare is the greatest humanist
who has ever lived." Nunn set his production in the
late Twenties, he says, "Because it was that very
period when anti-Semitic thought and anti-Semitic
behavior was becoming current and even...voguish
and the subject of wit and amusement." The effect of
this shift in time looms over everything in the play,
since all the emotions and incidents must somehow
foreshadow the Holocaust. The slightly decadent
world of this production opens in an after-hours
smoky nightclub where the melancholy Antonio
(David Bamber) punctuates his lines with a bit of
piano playing. When Gratiano (Richard Henders)
and, later, Bassanio (Alexander Hanson) enter
dressed like the rest in tuxedos, Gratiano steps up to
an open microphone to say hiS lines in a drunken
voice. When Bassanio asks for the money, Antonio I'
goes over to his table and tousles his hair before he
agrees to stand for the loan. Meanwhile, back in
Belmont, Portia (Derbhle Crotty) strikes languid
poises as Nerissa (Alex Kelly) runs black and white
11.1
Vela 42
movies of Portia's suitors and the two women
evaluate their qualities. Henry Goodman's Shylock is
somewhere between Olivier's and Mitchell's; he is a
businessman in black suit and overcoat, revealing a
yarmulka under his fedora, but accented, full of
gestures and mannerisms, conspiratorially engaging
the audience by speaking into the camera, but clearly
a complex person in a complicated world.
The contrast between the cafe world of the
Christians and the ghetto world of the Jews becomes
an important part of this version. Shylock is
patriarchal and imposing in his home and speaks
Hebrew when he orders Jessica (Gabrielle Jourdan)
about. She is an unhappy, frustrated young woman
in a plain dress and a thin sweater, finding solace in
the kindness of Launcelot (Andrew French) and
seeking escape through her love for Lorenzo (Jack
James). Later, when Shylock is getting ready to have
supper with the Christians, he and Jessica have a
tender moment in which they sing together in
Hebrew, yet when he tells Jessica to shut his house
against the Christian revelers, he slaps her in the face,
seems to regret doing so, and then, just before he
leaves, stares briefly at a photograph of his dead wife,
Leah. At the end of the play, in Belmont, Jessica,
whose material fortunes have clearly risen since she
Vela 43
left her home and joined Lorenzo, remains under her
father's influence. As Trevor Nunn explains, "She
realizes that people continue to see her as an alien and
even joke about her alien nature, and she feels very
much an outsider." At the end of the play, when
Jessica breaks into song after reading the letter
describing her father's fate, according to Nunn, "she
sings that song again in Hebrew because that is her
identity, and she is not going to masquerade in a.
different identity again."
Michael Radford's version of the play
emphasizes, as he says, the notion of cultural I
I
misunderstanding. The implications of that idea II
become more apparent as we watch the film itself. I
'.
Jessica (Zuleikha Robinson), when we first meet her
here, is interested in escaping the temporary I.
difficulties of being a young woman in the house with
an older man set in his ways. Lorenzo is her means of
escape. In a parallel manner, Bassanio (Joseph
Fiennes) will escape impoverished aristocracy by I
winning Portia (Lynn Collins) and thus rise to the II
financial level he assumes when he befriends Antonio
(Jeremy Irons). Portia escapes her father's will by
finding in Bassanio a man who is able to solve her
father's challenge of the three caskets by choosing the
lead casket at the same time that he himself presents
I.
I
Vela 44
an attractive physical presence for her. There is no
emphasis on the song with its hint of the answer, and
instead Portia shifts from anxiety to ecstasy as she
agonizes over Bassanio's choice. Shylock himself is
very clearly placed in this film within the context of
sixteenth century Venice. Radford comments that
"The first thing I did when I was adapting it was.
create a backstory so that you knew how the
characters relate to each other, so that eventually
when they started to interact you were with them and
already involved in the story, which is why you see
Antonio spitting at Shylock at the beginning of the
film" (Murray). 3
The film itself begins with a date, 1586,
superimposed on the image of a monk preaching
from a gondola. Anti-Semitism is rampant. It is the
atmosphere in which Pacino's Shylock negotiates
each day. In these opening scenes, we see the rough
side of a religiously divided commercial port in which
Shylock operates, as John Orgel explains the role, not
so much as a complete outsider as, instead, "a
member of a recognizable underclass...that is, not as
an outsider at all, just the insider we prefer not to
know" (144). In this world religion is hate, just as
commerce is hate. They are equally means of
applying an advantage over another person, and the
I
Vela 45
literal masks seem symbolic of the hypocritical faces
this conflict encourages and, indeed, requires.
Shylock's world, when Bassanio and Antonio enter it
to make the bargain, is not the world of the
Christians. Yet, within this world, Shylock, as
portrayed by Pacino, is comparatively slow to anger.
He is an old man, used to bargaining in a world that
would rather pretend he does not exist. Many of
Shylock's angrier lines are delivered in an
understated matter-of-fact way. Shylock consults
charts to determine the rate for the loan. His lines to
Antonio define the characterization, "Still have I
borne it with a patient shrug, / For suff'rance is the
badge of all our tribe" (1.3.106-107). Often in the
bargaining, he avoids direct eye contact. Later,
however, at the trial, his abuse by Gratiano (Kris
Marshall) and the others is minimized. There is no
scene of his kissing the cross. Instead, when Antonio
..
I
requires as part of the judgment that Shylock become
I:
a Christian, Shylock simply sinks to his knees and
bends over in silent anguish.
II
The handling of the fifth act follows suit.
Belmont's specialness as a place for love is reduced by
moving the list of famous lovers and placing it before I
the trial scene. By the time we return to Behrlont after :' I.
the trial, as the "Official Teacher's Guide" phrases it,
 Vela
"strain is beginning to show in the relationship of
Jessica and Lorenzo" (Cregan). The comedy of the
last act is reduced, and generally it may be said that
the comic elements of the play, to the extent that they
depend on stereotypes of age, gender, religion, and
ethnicity, are generally subdued or absent in this
more politically sensitive version of the play. At the
end we see Jessica isolated, looking out over a lake
where a man is standing in a boat, shooting fish with
. a bow and arrow. We cut back, briefly, to the Jewish
Sabbath ceremonies, where Shylock stands outside in
the street, then someone shuts the door closing him
off from the religion and traditions that identify him.
Finally we cut back to Jessica, still watching the man
shooting fish. Her escape from her tradition
rendered into a parallel lifetime of isolation.
Each of these film versions puts the action of the
play into a specific context-a time and place-which
calls for a specific reading of the play. Miller's choice
of a Victorian atmosphere allows him to emphasize
the conformity of the financial world and make
Shylock into a person who seems to want inclusion.
Gold, on the other hand, although he places the action
in the Early Modem period, as Susan Willis explains,
"put all the representationalism in the costumes and
kept the entire setting stylized, so the actors stand out
46 Vela 47
against their spare environment" (209). One of the
effects of that choice is to demonstrate Shylock's
difference through his clothing and his language, the
opposite of the point that Miller made in his
presentation of Shylock an apparent member of the
financial community who discovers the depth of his
difference through the course of the play. Trevor
Nunn draws on the "decadence and extreme anti-
Semitism" (Gussow) of the late 1920s and early 1930s
to.place the action in what Michael Phillips calls" a
world ruled by more insidiously casual sense of evil.
It's a martini-swilling, very English prejudice, with a
smile." Finally, Michael Radford's version, like
Gold's, sets the action in the Early Modem period, but
in opposition to the abstract and impressionistic
world of Gold's production, Radford shoots his
Venice on location and emphasizes the historical and
physical reality of the world. Radford's world of
religious zealots, whores and merchants, docks and
alleys underscores the notion of the world as
comm,odity, where Portia's flesh is as much a part of a ~
I
bargain as Antonio's is. The textual cuts and other
alterations in these productions follow as the logical
result from the placement of the action, forcing us to
interpret the play through the. logic of context.
I
Vela 48 Vela 49

Notes The Familiar Cineaste. "The Merchant of Venice." 8 August 2005.

<http://www.variagate.com/merchant.htm?RT>
I See.Stam's review of the fidelity issue in his essay "Beyond Fidelity: The Gross, John. Shylock: A Legendand Its Legacy. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Dialogics of Adaptation." 1992.
Gussow, Me!. "What News on the Rialto? Decadence and Injustice." The New
2 See also Moisan and O'Rourke for good statements of the current position. York Times. October 7,2001. 4.
Richard Halpern in his chapter, "The Jewish Question: Shakespeare and Anti- Hallinan, Tim. "Interview: Jonathan Miller on The Shakespeare Plays."
Semitism" (159-226), does a gqod job of explaining the intellectual history behind Shakespeare Quarterly. Summer 1981.134-145.
Twentieth Century interpretations. Halpern, Richard. ShakespeareAmong the Moderns. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press. 1997.
3 The prologue to the film, including the scenes Radford describes and a Marowitz, Charles. "Shakespeare Recycled." ShakespeareQuarterly. Winter 1987.
scrolling text explaining the situation of Jews in Venice at this time, is discussed 467-478.
by many reviewers of the film. See Ebert, Edelstein, Drucker, and Scott for Miller, Jonathan. SubsequentPerformances. New York: Viking. 1986.
representative comments. Moisan, Thomas. "'Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?': subversion
and recuperation in The Merchant of Venice." ShakespeareReproduced. Ed.
Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor. New York: Routledge. 1987.
188-206
Works Oted Murray, Rebecca. "Interview with 'The Merchant of Venice' Director, Michael
Radford." About.com. 8 August 2005.
Ball, Robert Hamilton. Shakespeareon Silent Film. London: George Allen and <http://movies.about.com/od/merchantofvenice/a/merchntmrl22304_p.ht
Unwin, Ltd. 1968. m>.
Beasley, Cathenne. "Shakespeare and Film: .A Question of Perspective." Nunn, Trevor. "An Interview with Trevor Nunn." ExxonMobile Masterpiece
ShakespeareonFilm.Ed.RobertShaughnessy.New York: St.Martin's Theatre: The Merchant of Venice 8 October 2001
Press. 1998. 61-70. <http://www.pbs.orglwgbh/masterpiece/merchant/eCnunn.html>.
Buzzerbill. "Somewhere between a near miss and a travesty." User Comments. Olivier, Laurence. On Acting. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1986.
The Merchant of Venice, The Internet Movie Data Base. 11 November 2004. Orgel, John. Imagining Shakespeare.New York: Pal grave Macmillan. 2003.
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379889/>. O'Rourke, James L.. "Racism and Homophobia in 'The Merchant of Venice:"
Caldwell, Sarah. Adaptation Revisited. Manchester and New York: Manchester ELH 70:2 (Summer 2003). 375-397.
University Press. 2002. "Pacino draws Oscar buzz in compelling 'Merchant of Venice:" The AliI Need
Cregan, Mary E. Official Teacher's Guide: William Shakespeare's The Merchant of News. 4 November 2004.
Venice. 2004. <http://www.theallineed.com/news/news/or09/137706.htm>.
Drucker, Michael. "Merchant of Venice: What will you want to trade to get this Perret, Marion D. "Shakespeare and Anti-Semitism: Two Television Versions of
DVD?" IGN. 14 August 2005. The Merchant of Venice:' Shakespeareon Television. Ed.J. c. Bulmanand H. j:
!
http://dvd.ign.com/articles/636/636314pl.html>. R. Coursen. Hanover and London: University Press of New England.
Ebert, Roger. "'Merchant of Venice' gets its due." Chicago Sun Times. January 21, 1988. 156- 168.
2005.14 August 2005. Phillips, Michael. "A Casual Prejudice in 'Merchant:" The Los Angeles Times.
<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article? AID-/20050120REVI November 6, 2001. Ebscohost.11 December 2001.
EWS/50103003/123&temp>. Ryan, Kiernan. Shakespeare,3n1edition. New York: Palgrave.2002.
Edelstein, David. "Kosher Ham." Slate. January 12, 2005. 8 August 2004. Rothwell, Kenneth S.A History of Shakespeareon Film. Cambridge: Cambridge
<http://slate.msn.com/id/2112221/>. University Press, 1999.

j
Vela 50

~-. "How the 20th Century Saw the Shakespeare Film: 'Is It Shakespeare?'"
Shakespeareinto Film. Ed. James M. Welsh, Richard Vela, and John C.
Tibbetts. New York: Checkmark Books. 2002. ix-xxi.
Schlueter, Jane. "Trivial Pursuit: The Casket Plot in the. Miller/Olivier
Merchant." Shakespeare on Television. Ed. J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen.
Hanover and London. University Press of New England. 1988. 169-174.
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. The Arden Shakespeare. John
Russell Brown, ed. London: Methuen. 1955.
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice (1969), directed by Jonathan Miller
and John Sichel, adapted by John Sichel, Precision Video.
Shakespeare, William TheMerchant of Venice (1980), directed by Jack Gold,
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Television. Ambrose Video Publishing, Inc.
Shakespeare, William The Merchant of Venice (2001), directed by Trevor Nunn and
Chris Hunt, adapted by Trevor Nunn. Exxon Mobile Masterpiece Theatre,
Image Entertainment.
Shakespeare, William The Merchant of Venice(2004), directed by Michael Radford,
adapted by Michael Radford. Columbia Pictures.
Shylock, ou Ie More de Venise (1913), directed by Henri Desfontaines, adapted by
. Louis Mercanton, Eclipse/George Klein.
Scott, A. O. "Putting a Still-Vexed Play in a Historical Context." The New York
Times. December 29, 2004. 2 January 2005.
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