This book offers essential reading on a wide array of theatre and film productions of Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice. Richly contextualised analyses of individual productions by major directors help produce a nuanced picture of the performance history of the play, guiding the reader from the 1930s through the early twenty-first century.

PART II An Elizabethan Merchant: performance and contextII Henry Irving and the great traditionIII Wayward genius in the high temple of bardolotry: Theodore KomisarjevskyIV Aesthetes in a rugger club: Jonathan Miller and Laurence OlivierV The BBC Merchant: diminishing returnsVI Cultural stereotyping and audience response: Bill Alexander and Antony SherVII Shylock and the pressures of historyPART IISegue The Merchant of Venice: pressures of war, ideology, and the crises of late capitalismI Magical spectacles and nightmarish times: Max Reinhardt’s productions of The Merchant of VeniceII Peter Zadek’s challenges to the post-war German legacy of The Merchant of VeniceIII A post-Holocaust balancing act: The Merchant of Venice directed by Trevor Nunn at the National Theatre, London (1999)IV Desperate outsiders in a money-drunk world: The Merchant of Venice directed by Daniel Sullivan (2010) and Rupert Goold (2011)V Crises of the new millennium: The Merchant of Venice directed by Robert Sturua (2000) and Edward Hall (2009)VI The Merchant of Venice on filmVII The search for justice: The Merchant of Venice in Mandatory Palestine (1936) and the Venetian Ghetto (2016)Appendix A Some significant twentieth- and twenty-first century productions of The Merchant of Venice Appendix B Major actors and creative staff for productions discussedBibliographyIndex

Boika Sokolova and Kirilka Stavreva’s second edition of the stage history of The Merchant of Venice interweaves into the chronology of James Bulman’s first edition richly contextualised chapters on Max Reinhardt, Peter Zadek, and the first production of the play in Mandatory Palestine, directed by Leopold Jessner. The main focus of the book is on post-1990s productions across Europe and the USA. The Segue provides a broad survey of the interpretative shifts in performance from the 1930s to the second decade of the twenty-first century. Informative chapters on productions of the play by major contemporary directors present the work of Trevor Nunn, Robert Sturua, Edward Hall, Rupert Goold, Daniel Sullivan and Karin Coonrod’s staging in the Venetian Ghetto. An extensive section engages with the cinematic history of the play, from silent-era adaptations, like Peter Paul Felner’s Der Kaufmann von Venedig (The Jew of Mestri), through Pierre Billon’s talkie Le Marchand de Venise; it includes a close analysis of Don Selwyn’s Te Tangata Whai Rawa or Weniti (The Maori Merchant of Venice) and Michael Radford’s William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.This broad picture of key theatrical and film transformations of The Merchant of Venice will prove essential to students of the history of performance, scholars interested in the general trends and local specificities of the play’s staging and reception, as well as to theatre practitioners and all those who are prepared to look into the dark history of anti-Semitism and oppression, reflected in the stage fortunes of Shakespeare’s play.