 In all the ways that really matter, this perfect combination, this perfect brainstorm is not at all surprising. With this collection of others in a place suspicious of yet dependent on them for survival, Merchant is the right play for us. Not only because it vibrates with national and global issues, but also because it speaks to this university's own embrace of diversity. It's a stroke of good luck that we should have all of this right here, right now. Reading and to some extent performing Shakespeare is an important part of what we do here. Like the university itself, Shakespeare, I'm sorry, our study has changed, grown and morphed along with us. Having been here longer than most of the buildings on campus, I have witnessed a lot of those changes. We have always talked about Shakespeare in Montclair State. We have had to. A major part of our mission has always been the preparation of teachers at secondary and middle schools where they are called upon to teach the touchstone plays. Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Maybe a Little Hamlet. Generations of area teachers have learned to do that here. As the schools have changed and the population of New Jersey has changed, so has what we ask of Shakespeare and how we hear him. I'd like to say a few words about how we got here. When I started teaching here in 1972, we had one English department course devoted to Shakespeare's work. It was called Shakespeare's Major Plays. One course for all that amazing material. Speed records were set, but no one was thinking very much about how and why. It was automatic and pedestrian and for me completely impossible. I proposed that we offer at least two courses. My colleagues humored me. We still have those two in multiple sections every semester, plus three more at the MA level. We have a fourth teaching Shakespeare in the works for our graduate students. Already tried out on several occasions as workshops sponsored by the Center of Pedagogy in a program called Teachers as Scholars. Designed not only to inform their pedagogy, but also to remind them of who they were when they were learning and how excited they were by their discoveries. That's exactly what they want for their students. There was one disturbing event in the 70s involving Merchant that I wanted to share with you. I can't remember exactly what year it was when our theater department mounted a fairly straightforward production of the play. I got phone calls from local residents demanding that I, newbie that I was, put a stop to this production. How could I allow the college as it was then called to stage this anti-Semitic play? Neither the time I have today nor professional protocol will allow me to tell you what I said in response to those calls. But it was all a fairly colorful and protracted version of, but that was New Jersey in the 70s and I knew then that we had a lot of work to do. Montclair State College, then, was mainly white across faculty and student populations and Shakespeare was pressed into the service of a very conservative social agenda. We never performed Merchant after that, as far as I know. I don't think we ever performed Othello at all. We did not wish to offend. But if you're going to address the concerns, interests, and identities of our own demographics, our own diversity, the perfectly legitimate demands of our students, that the literature they study and the theater they perform be responsive to and reflect who they are, you had better look around and listen up. In 1991, the public theater in New York in the last season of Shakespeare in the park in Joe Papp's lifetime brought a troop of Brazilian actors to perform completely in Portuguese amid summer night stream. The souvenir t-shirts announced the production's mission. Shakespeare para todos. Shakespeare for everyone. It was a bit of a radical statement in 1991. Now, it's what we expect of ourselves and what our constituent students and faculty and public expect of us. Shakespeare para todos. It's not very far off from higher education para todos, which, while it isn't yet on any of our t-shirts, is a central claim of our mission. The Merchant of Venice is a play that looks closely at issues of inclusion, diversity, and the consequences to a community that scapegoats and bullies and would homogenize those that it allows to live in it. It's obviously a play for our time, and it is very much a play for our campus, for our students, and for our surrounding communities in the plural. In my teaching, and I have two witnesses, I ask my students to find something in the plays that they are studying, the characters and situations represented, that they can recognize in themselves. I want them to own what they read, to find their own way in, to see that apart from a few linguistic distractions, a few these thousand those, Hamlet, or Othello, or Shylock, or Antonio, are us, like toys are us. They really are. No one ever asks me, though I know the question is out there somewhere, why we still study Shakespeare, and why we study Shakespeare at Montclair State? Here's my answer, you don't have to ask. It's because he knows us. He knows who we are now. We don't just talk about Shakespeare as a dead carver of cultural relics, though there's some of that too. He also helps us to understand ourselves now, and our place in the world now. It's not like we've changed all that much. Shakespeare's still, and really, is patototos. It's now my great pleasure to turn this program over to the people who really came to hear. Thank you for your ears. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my honor, my privilege, and boy am I very excited to introduce James Shapiro, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Thank you. I think we're all thrilled to be here today, and I think Jim and I feel a bit like spear carriers. We know why you're here, and I feel very much the same way. So I have the honor of asking the first question to the justice, and it's sort of embarrassingly a softball in this Yogi Berra home too. There's some advantage to that. But I wanted to begin just by asking Justice Ginsburg that I had read that you have a distinguished acting career that hasn't been quite as fully revealed as it might be now. Would you like to talk a bit about the acting you've done, especially Shakespeare? The Shakespeare Theater in D.C. invited the justices to do bit parts for a lawyer's night at the Shakespeare Theater. So my first role was the epilogue in Henry V. If you turn me on, I can start small time, but in that small. The next one at the Shakespeare Theater was not a Shakespeare play, it was here again. And I was the troll Chamberlain. And then in Henry VI, I was Dick the Butcher, who has the famous line, first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Which I then have to explain that that was not meant to be a put down of lawyers. It takes place, it's in Jack Cade's Rebellion, so Jack Cade is an anarchist, and you need the law to save the society from chaos. One of the things that I'd be very interested in, as somebody who also grew up in Brooklyn and attended school there, is your earliest experience of reading or seeing Shakespeare on stage. My earliest experience was not on stage, and it involved the Merchant of Venice, which was banned in public schools in New York. So then I decided to read the play, and it had these two bursts, the phalloc's famous speech, that's not a Jew eyes. And then Porsche's speech, the quality of the verse, is not strained. It also came to me, these are two wonderful speeches, but neither character is likeable. Porsche isn't, and Shylock isn't. There isn't in the Merchant any hero or heroine, or fun people. I think I saw Henry V at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. When I was in school, there was the Lawrence Olivier film, which I must have seen at least three times. Do you remember in 1962, I think you were clerking in New York around then, that there was a production of the Merchant of Venice in the Delacorte Theater in Central Park? Joe Papp was staging it, and it was controversial because the rabbis, the rabbinical groups in New York were terrified that this was going to be televised on CBS. And they protested unsuccessfully. And I think it was the first time in post-war America. I didn't know the play had been banned from the public schools, but it raises the question for me that I'd be very curious about your views. Can you imagine circumstances in which Shakespeare should be banned from the classroom, from the stage, or from television? Or are there no circumstances in your mind where censorship should exist? I can't imagine any such thing. Through the ages, authors, composers were plagued by censors. The famous answer of Justice Brandeis' solution for bad speech, what we should do about that speech, is to have good speech. It was kind of a replay of that when the Metropolitan Opera decided to put on death of clean opera. And there were protests. It was even a disruption, an opening night. The issues, obviously this is a play that just encourages all sorts of anxieties and strong responses. The fear that it is anti-Semitic or it will provoke anti-Semitism in other people. It was a famous production of a merchant in May of 1943 in Vienna at the city theater, the Berg Theater, in which it clearly was designed as a kind of provocation and actually the one thing they had to do with that because the laws prevented marriages of Gentiles and Jews, so you had to rewrite the ending. And the way what they did was Jessica, it turned out, was a foster child. So with the strong statement you just made about being opposed to censorship, that the answer to bad speech is good speech, what would you say, do you find the play anti-Semitic? I was interested in your comment before that neither Portia nor Shylock is admirable or likable. She is less, I mean she's the least likable. I came to understand that not the first time I read the play, but you think of the quality of mercy is not strained. And then two pages later she's beating up on poor old Shylock showing him no mercy at all. There's a clue very early on when the various suitors are coming to whom, Portia. And the first one is Morocco, she talks about his burnish skin and people of that complexion not appealing to her. So you know that she's bigoted. And then she's a trickster, even the bit about the ring. So Portia I think is the less likable of the two. There's so much about Shylock, yes he's wetting his knife to cut his pound of flesh. But when he talks before that he's told that his daughter who has eloped with Lorenzo has sold the turquoise ring for a monkey. And he says it was the ring I had of Leia, his wife, she gave it to me before we were married. And that, you can say, you can interpret that as the turning point for Shylock. That he wasn't mentally competent when he's insisting on the pound of flesh, but his despair and his rage. I think when he exits he said his line is I am not well. You can understand that Shylock's insistence on the pound of flesh that way. That's great. Henry Irving said at one point who was really the first of the great Shakespeare actors that played Shylock as a man of great dignity, the dignified. But he says that Shylock is at least honest in his vices. And the Christians are hypocrites in their virtues, which is a very nice, elegant formulation. When you have done two, I don't know whether the technical term is moot courts or not, but the year before last in Venice, you presided in the squalo over a very distinguished group of lawyers pleading for Antonio, Shylock and Portia. And then this past year you did it again as brilliantly, but somewhat differently in your rulings at the Library of Congress. And at that second event, one of the things that struck me very powerfully were your insights about the status of the alien in the play. That when Portia, my memory is not as strong as yours, so I'll read the lines. It's not that I don't teach this every year, I'm just not Supreme Court justice material. Portia says to Shylock, Terry Jew, the law hath yet another hold on you. It is enacted in the laws of Venice. If it be proved against an alien that by direct or indirect attempts he seeks the life of any citizen, that party against the witchy death-con tribe shall seize one half his goods, the other half comes to the privy coffer of the state. And I'm very interested about your insights into, at this moment historically, into what this play might be saying about the status of the alien. And the alien is... In this case, it's Shylock. But Portia, in a way, should have understood that status. Portia is a woman pretending to be a man, pretending to be a lawyer or judge at a time when she could not be or a judge. So, in a sense, she is an outsider too, and that's why it's so remarkable that she should do this to Shylock. She should have experienced otherness herself. What do you think she can't see that? Is it just her personality prevents her from that? Or her anxiety about seeing her husband in a room with another man attracted to him, perhaps? Yes, I think that is part of it. The Antonio-Basanio relationship. One of the things that always interests me about that court scene, I'm curious, your response to this, is she's assured Shylock that he can press the suit without the law having any hold over him. That's legitimate to go forth the suit. In the lines Jim just read, it's hold on the law hath yet another hold on you. And this is an aspect of the law that Shylock's unaware of, has never been told about. She has assured him he's not liable in any way from the law. And it wonders if Shylock had known that bit of law if he would have, first of all, entered into the bond in the first place or pressed the suit. In your trickster sense of, Portia seems to extend actually into the courtroom itself. It's an odd moment. That's the second time the first is the legalism of the law. You can't cut even a jot of blood. But then suddenly the law hath yet another hold on you. What do you think is happening there? Why suddenly does this hitherto unmentioned law suddenly show up? Certainly in odd terms Shylock was denied due process. The first thing that somebody who is suspected of criminal activity has a right to notice of what the charges are and an opportunity to defend against them. There was no notice. I wonder about that switch because Shakespeare knew a lot about the law. That's evident from his plays. And yet Shylock is bringing a civil case. He's suing on a contract for specific enforcement. And then it gets turned into a criminal case against him. Now that seems really interesting to me, that switch. And there's that moment when she asks for mercy, but she doesn't ask mercy from the court. She asks mercy from Shylock, which is an odd thing. So it's a criminal case and then suddenly it ends up with in this kind of equity world and then ultimately to the criminal case. So when you say that, obviously Shakespeare does know a lot about the law. He always thinks about it, words like equity appear regularly in the plays. In fact, mercy appears in every play, but Julia Caesar, which is always interesting to make of that fact. How do you account for how much he knew about the law, just as a practical man in London? Why does he seem to know so much about the law? Perhaps he was a lawyer. And that's what makes this change so interesting there is such a thing in the civil law world of a person bringing a civil claim on the tales of the prosecutor. The prosecutor is prosecuting somebody, let's say, for assault. And then the person who is assaulted joins in the prosecution to get damages. But this is a proceeding that starts out civil. And I think that that is unknown in the legal world, that you can transform a civil proceeding into criminal prosecution. I mean one of the things that does interest me of this way, it's a play obviously where this is so much embedded in this language of the law and I suggest that he might have been a lawyer, he might have been reasonable. There's missing seven years in Shakespeare's biography, maybe. And English law is so interesting because there are all these overlapping layers of jurisdiction. It's one of the, at Shakespeare's time, there are these different courts. The American system, where Justice Ginsburg is at the height of it obviously, of hierarchical, it's not the way the English legal system worked. And yet there was this principle of equity, that was the word that was usually used. And the Chancellery courts actually are sometimes instructed to say, well it doesn't matter what the legal issue is, that you have to proceed on the grounds of reasonableness and justice. There was a way in which you could sort of override the legalism, that's the basis of the claim that finally Portia uses to prevent what would really be a murder. The United States had inherited from England that division between law and equity. And the merger wasn't until the 20th, in the 20th century. Because it became the same court, but it was an equity side and a law side. So that's already been written in. And it is interesting in the English system that this sort of equity provision in the two revolutionary moments in Britain in the 1640s and in 1688, that's the one piece of the legal system that carries over. People recognize the humane, logical quality of this. The quality of mercy in these cases hasn't been constrained, but it certainly is here in this play. I would ask a version of that question in a slightly different way. Conceding that Shakespeare was interested in the law and that legal issues appear in many of the plays, what to your mind doesn't he understand at a deep level about the law? Shakespeare were your clerk. What would you have taught him? Well, I would have taught him first of all that this idea of turning a civil case into a criminal prosecution is. Do you think there are other things that at a deep level he doesn't grasp about law or is law one of those? I think that Henry, the Dick the Butcher scene, shows how much he does understand about the law and the law's importance as society needs a ruler of law. I want to go back to your initial point that no speech should be censored, but of course even in our country there is speech that's prohibited. There's probably never been a culture that has absolutely no prohibitions on speech. The famous you can't yell fire in a crowded room and we have both on college campuses and sometimes in other public spaces regulations about what gets often called hate speech. Is there any part of Merchant of Venice? If there's time for other speech, but in the case of fire in a theater or stirring the troops to go out and kill Jews, there's no time for a reasoned response. But if there is time, one of the most famous free speeches, Terminella, involved, and even a couple of the leading cases involved virulent anti-semitic speech. I like the temporal distinction though that if there's time for more speech, then it would be permissible and if it activates a whole set of responses. If there's an immediate danger, then there's no time. Do you think there is a difference? I'm fascinated in the way you were telling me before that there have been moot court discussions of various Shakespearean scenes, not just Merchant of Venice, but you told me, Justice was telling me about a moot court where they were deciding whether Hamlet had the mental capacity to be tried for the murder of Polonius, which I liked, and even the witches in Macbeth, the question was about the trial for those. I'm curious what the status is. I guess that would be the word of the Shakespearean play in these discussions. As a space for thinking through legal concerns, why is this useful rather than using actual cases for moot court? Isn't it fiction? It's sometimes quite extreme in its characterization. Is this a serious project in legal education? It's serious for the Lawyers Committee for the Shakespeare Theatre. They designed the moot court and as you mentioned, the most recent one was the trial of the witches for complicity in the murder of Duncan. Did they get off? Yes. Because they equivocated or because... They were just an excuse for what his ambition drove him to do. One thing that's interesting, may reading court decisions and all of becoming important parts of our lived experience, one of the principles that some of your colleagues invoke regularly is what gets called original intent. What do you think about that both as a legal principle and maybe Jim too could join in thinking as a principle of literary criticism? Are we bound to read Shakespeare in terms of what we can learn about what might have been his original intent? What do you think of it as a legal principle, if constitutionally? It's not it. You have 20 seconds. One thing, it's guesswork on the part of who knows what James Madison would have thought about, but we do know that there were certain values and one of them was free speech and other freedom of religion. No unreasonable searches and seizures. Those are values that have staying power. How they apply to today's situation is different from... Well, to take one example, libel law was certainly actions for libel at the time of the founders. And yet we had this case of times against Sullivan when it became clear that these libel suits could bankrupt the press. And so now we still have libel suits, but they're very hard. It's very hard to make out such a case. You have to prove actual malice. So that's for another thing, the framers of the Constitution, they gave the world something wonderful in the Constitution. They start out with the people of the United States of who were we, the people. I would not have been there. People were held in human bondage. Native Americans, they were excluded. So to me, the genius of the Constitution is that over the course of our history, that notion of who counts among we the people has expanded. Now that seems really important. One of the things I always tell my students is whenever you see the word people in an argument, the people think the people say we the people, it means something other than the people. I should take my favorite clause of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment. No state shall deny to any person the equal protection of the laws. 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. If you would ask the members of Congress at the time or the ratifiers in the states, well, women are people. So that must mean that women have the most basic right of citizenship, the right to vote. It took a long time until 1920. The same problem exists in the world in which David and I live and work, which is we're constantly asked by students or general public, well, was Shakespeare anti-Semitic or was he phylo-Semitic? Was Shakespeare sympathetic to Caliban at the end? Were his intentions in writing Hamlet this or that? And I think there are quite a few Shakespeareans, many who've taught for a very long time, who come to believe from the years of teaching and reading and studying these plays, that they can access Shakespeare's original intent. Although they might not use that vocabulary, I think that's true. And I think it's a great danger to how we read and teach and stage Shakespeare today. I think the other part of that is we also use Shakespeare somewhat instrumentally as both the voice and the guarantor of what we take to be our best instincts. And it's a lovely thought, but I'm not sure it's always true. And I think even in Merchant of Ennis, not that with the justice, I think I cannot think of any context in which I would want it censored, but there's a way in which it seems to be at this moment in our history we want this to be more inclusive, more cosmopolitan in some way than I think the play actually initially could have been understood. And as you say, we often don't know what either the framers were actually thinking or what Shakespeare is thinking, but in many ways it is a play that one could say by some definition is anti-Semitic. It assumes Judaism as a secondary, if not even inferior form of faith in a culture that believes there are two versions of what a Jew is in Christian Europe. One sort of super-sessional, it's kind of the beginning of, you find lots of people saying things like Jews are children that will eventually grow up to be proper Christians or Jews are first drafts, that's another version of a certain kind of ethical being. But at the end of the play, Shylock's gone. He's not there in the fifth act. Jessica can be allowed in, but only by converting and marrying a Christian. Half of Shylock's money, maybe all, depending how you read this, he's either gone to the state or to a son-in-law he can't like very much. So I'm just curious not whether this is an argument for censoring the play, is there, do you feel there is something anti-Semitic about this play that at least should make us worry? Compared to what? Compared to the Jew of Malta? Excellent answer. Compared to the Jew of Malta, which is different than the Jew of Malta. Yes. I mean there's a way in which there's a recognition of humanity. Yes. Compared to what? The answer is an excellent one. And compared to the merchant of Venice in Vienna in 1943. I mean that plays also malleable in some way that you can kind of make them be many different things. No, I've written a book on Shakespeare and the Jews and I've thought long and hard about this. And one of the things that I found very exciting seeing the production that you're about to see today in Venice in the ghetto, which was under Shaul Basi's brilliant, brilliant leadership and David Castan and others helping to create the possibility of this production. Every time that play takes place, where it is staged, by whom it is staged, how it is imagined is different. And when Israel was not yet created in the 1930s, Jewish settlers in Israel, intellectuals, many of them from Europe, debated whether the play should be banned in Israel. And it was a long discussion in many of the leading Hebrew journals of the time. And in the end it was decided not to ban the play from Israel in a way that Wagner's music had been banned from Israel. And yet when the Royal Shakespeare Company came to Israel, I think Barry Kyle was directing it in 1988, the Jewish actors asked him to leave out the conversion of Shylock at the end. So what is it when in Germany you're leaving out the intermarriage, in Israel you're leaving out the conversion? We always call it the Merchant of Venice, but it is a very malleable thing as you say. I guess to turn it into a question for Justice Ginsburg, does this play give you pleasure or is it a disturbing experience when you sit in the theater and watch the Merchant of Venice? I wonder why it's labeled a comedy. Even the parts when Lorenzo and Jessica on such a night, all of the lovers came to a terrible end. I suppose if you just had the very last scene it would be kind of comedy then. But the rest of it is not very funny. It is interesting that actually what it's called generically shifts around a lot. I mean when the book is first registered in the stationers transcripts, which are sort of the version of copyright, which didn't belong to authors, belong to publishers, it's just called the Book of the Merchant of Venice, otherwise called the Jew of Venice. And that's the first time it ever is referred to. The Merchant is Antonio. But the Merchant is Antonio and that's the other issue. And even the play itself is sort of aware of that, which is the Merchant here and which is the Jew. Try explaining that to my students who come in assuming that Shylock is that merchant. And then when it is first published, that first publication of 1600, it's called the Most Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice. History and story are essentially the same word. Story is just an aphetic form of history. But then there's a subtitle with the extreme cruelty of Shylock the Jew toward the said merchant. So that title pageant makes it very clear which is the merchant and which is the Jew. But when the folio came into being in 1623 and they had to decide which pigeonhole to shove the play into, it turned out to be comedy. And it's just ninth in the plays, ninth in the list of comedies in the folio, precisely because, as the justice says, there's a marriage at the end, however bizarrely it's introduced with those classical images on such a night. You're a much better reader than any of my students, I have to say. One curious thing is what is the meaning of the conversion? Is that kind of a mercy because here's this Jew who will be damned, who will never go to heaven unless he becomes a Christian? I think that's really one of the crucial questions and I think that is the right answer. I mean there was a theological concept that had been circulating in Europe really since about the 6th century. And the way it was usually described was charitable hatred. And Luther writes about this a lot also. But charitable hatred was, and its best version is, hate the sin, love the sinner. In its worst version it was something like this that says the only way you can be saved is to convert. But then the problem is because what is a forced conversion? How does that even work as a principle? How do you force somebody to convert? And no one in all the source materials that Shakespeare drew on ever had a forced conversion of Shiloh. So what does it say about Shakespeare that he would add that dark twist to this so-called comedy? It's the only one. I mean no one, there are many sources for this play and he introduces the forced conversion that wasn't there before. I think it may have something to do with Shakespeare's just relentless need to pun on the word will. I mean both of us have written books with will in the title. But there is a way in which thou will turn Christian. And there's a way in which that's the issue. Do you will your conversion or is it a gift of grace or is it, if it's forced, isn't it just external? What could that possibly mean at a moment as you know well where various people are performing outwardly certain kinds of religion? Elizabeth once said, I think probably Francis Bacon wrote the words. But she's trying to keep Britain whole. Mainly the issues are mainly between Protestants and Catholics. And she says, we do not make windows into men's hearts. It's kind of a wonderful image. We do not make windows into men's hearts. And all she really wants anyone to do is just show up in church on Sunday and perform the things you are supposed to perform. You know you think what is it that Venice imagined Shylock would do to force a conversion. So the people of so-called of the spirit there you shall see the difference of our spirits as the do. So the people of the spirit, this Christian community in fact turn into literalists like everybody else and say well you will perform this conversion. But I like your reading that you know that once he says I am content. Then he says I am not well. Yes. I'll be thinking about that. Professor Castan, Justice Stevens. Justice Stevens was who we were talking about beforehand. I should say. Justice Stevens did not believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. And we were in the green room discussing my correspondence with him on the subject. And happily Justice Ginsburg not only believes that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare but can take to school two Shakespeareans. And we'll take back into our classrooms at Yale and Columbia your insights and your brilliance. I'm very grateful every time I hear you talk about this play. And one of the reasons that I was excited about being here was once more to ask you hard questions and to take away some wisdom. So I'm grateful for that. I'm very grateful you're still on the court. Good evening everyone. I'd just like to thank one more time Justice Ginsburg, Professors Castan and Shapiro. It's a privilege to have you here and to hear what I think was a very illuminating and quite lovely discussion just now. Looking over what's been written about this play recently, it occurs to me that we are these days in quite a bit of agreement about the play, surprisingly. And especially about its capacity to remind us to think critically about otherness and prejudice in our societies and to find ways to ameliorate the traumas great and small that so often attend racial, religious and ethnic difference. As Stephen Greenblatt has put it recently, what Shakespeare bequeathed to us offers possibilities of escape from the mental ghettos most of us inhabit. Most of us. I'm sure that Greenblatt is only giving his readers the benefit of the doubt. And yet the phrase does give us the dangerous opportunity to see ourselves as comfortably in the minority of those who have escaped these ghettos of the mind or are at least on our way to escaping. It's a strange thing to be in firm agreement about the limits of our understanding. To be certain about ambiguity, though that is of course a certainty, we scholars in particular prize and teach. But it is also important, I think, to allow a text like the Merchant of Venice to genuinely unsettle us in the words of one of my students just last week to freak us out. How sure are we that we know the nature of the human virtues that a play like Merchant kindles in us? How sure are we that the openness it asks of us is in fact what we owe to others? How sure are we even of ambiguity? More than anywhere else that I've taught, Montclair has taught me that this kind of unsettling comes most often from students. And we are lucky to have here tonight two of the best, whom Naomi and I have had the privilege of teaching in our Shakespeare classes here. Allison Gormley and Gustavo Vasquez. Their questions are about conversion and assimilation, which have already come up, and about the resistance to these conversion and assimilation. They are not easy issues by any standard, and that is exactly what we hope for most from our best students. So Gustavo, would you start? I was very excited to hear Justice Ginsburg bring up Morocco. Because when I read this play for this particular round table, I focused on the racial overtones, especially towards Morocco. And when he first meets Portia, he is super conscious about his complexion. He even goes on and tells her, I would not change this hue except to stay your thoughts. So with that being said, to me that immediately struck as a term acting way, that's usually used towards people of color. So do you see the play, especially in this relationship with Portia and Morocco, as the power of assimilation or the resistance to assimilation? No, Morocco doesn't get to assimilate because he picks the wrong casket that he goes back to Morocco. But I think that is a tip-off about Portia, her reaction to him. One of the many puzzling things about the merchant is why she is an amateur Bassanio, who is me. I guess he's a happy-go-lucky character, but doesn't seem to have much weight. And she is attractive to him, Portia is attractive to Bassanio, for one thing, because Portia is a very rich woman. I would only add to that, that I grew up in a world in which the conversation about this play was about, is it anti-Semitic or not? And in my own classroom and reading the work of David Castan and Stephen Greenblatt and others, nowadays we talk about this play in very different ways. It's a play about intolerance, intolerance to those who have a different religion. And Prince of Morocco is not only a dark-skinned or black man, but he's also a Muslim. And he's dismissed by Portia with the words, let all of his complexion win me so. And if you look at your edition, go home to your editions that you studied in college. And odds are, the Shakespeare editor, probably somebody known to us, gentlemen who taught both of us, writes the word complexion doesn't really mean skin color, it means temperament. And then about two pages later, it so clearly means skin color. So there are ways in which we don't offer legal rulings, but we do offer editorial rulings that shape the lives and responses of students. And we have an obligation to search for the truth of that and to change the story we're telling. The only thing I would add to that is there is another play where, of course, Morocco does marry the white woman, and that's called A Fellow, and unfortunately it ends really badly. And they're the two plays which have Venice in the title. And I think that matters because Venice had a self-image of itself as the most cosmopolitan of European cities. And in fact, probably the only other city on the globe on the earth that had anything like that cosmopolitan fantasy was Aleppo, which has a very different history right now, which was a rather similar kind of city. But I think in part this is a play that exposes that fantasy of cosmopolitanism. It works as long as it works, as long as you don't marry a black man or you don't marry a Jew. I do think there's a way in which there's a kind of critique of the fantasy of cosmopolitanism and the comedy of Merchant of Venice is in a sense that white Christian communities in its own slightly self-satisfied version of what it thinks it is, and yet those two plays really raise the question you brilliantly posed. You mentioned that Venice was a cosmopolitan place. There were restrictions on Jews, but they let Jews live there and engage in certain occupations. In 1290, the Jews were expelled from England. So how many Jews would even have been known to Shakespeare? That is a very good question that took me about seven years of my life to answer, and the answer is not many. There was a converts house in Holborn where Shakespeare had he desired, could have walked up and spoken to a man who was born Yehuda Menda, who was converted by John Fox to Nathaniel Menda. But we might think of the usefulness of thinking of Jew as a complicated entity in Shakespeare. Are Jews a nation? Are Jews a people? Are Jews the member of a religious community? If they convert to Christianity and they are racially other, which many believed in the 16th century, would they retain their racial tape? Some Elizabethan dramatist, Thomas Decker, is one of them, talked, and Marla was another, who joke about the stink of the Jews. Well, if they convert, did they lose that stink or is that... So all the contradictions about the categories we use to define and describe other human beings coalesce uncomfortably in the Jews. It's not worth mentioning Justice Ginsburg's recollection of 1290 as the date when the Jews are expelled from England. It is the first European country to expel its Jewish population. It's just a random fact. Well, this is, the Spanish came late to it. That's right, came late, came late to intolerance. Allison, would you like to ask your question? Hi, it's an honor to hear you all speak, and I actually started answering my question. I was really interested in the trial scene, particularly in terms of Shylock's conversion to Christianity and even Jessica's conversion to a Christian. This play really reminded me of the scapegoat by Rene Girard, and one of his main arguments is that the scapegoated people, the minority, the other that Dr. Liebler was talking about before, they aren't persecuted in terms of their crimes against society because they're different, but because they are insisting that they are the same. And this is particularly notable in the half-not-a-Jew eyes speech that Shylock gives. So I'm wondering in terms of that, and you were talking about the ethnicity of Jews before, why would Antonio and the Christians in the play, with this idea in mind, still want to convert Shylock and convert Jessica if that was their initial crime that they were trying to be similar? That is a really, really good question. Good students are such a delight. I'm tempted to use that teacher's slate of hand. I'm so sorry our time will address that next semester. But I can offer a provisional response, and English colleagues up here can get the last word in today. Those are the questions that keep me not only up at night, but wrestling with Shakespeare for my career, for my life, for my entity, because there are no easy questions to that. I wrestle with the question of whether conversion is even a possibility. When you convert, do you lose something? Do you gain something? Do you retain something? And those are questions that are deeply embedded and left unanswered in the play. To put that another way, Shakespeare forces us to ask questions. His plays don't yield easy answers, and I'd be skeptical of any answer that a professor gave me to such a good question. And I'm not even going to try. Take it away, Justice. You get the last word. Jessica is very happy about, I mean, she's going to be saved because she married a Christian. Well, history teaches us that maybe she isn't going to be saved. We think of all the Jews who converted who were considered by Nazi Germany to remain Jews. So Mendelssohn, for example, his family converted before he was born, and yet he remained a Jew. That's right. There's something intractable about it in the way communities view this. In one way, it always seems to me Jessica can be welcomed into this Christian community more easily than Shylock, and it's simply because she's a woman. And so therefore, you know, one mark of Judaism, the circumcision, doesn't apply to her. It's just a sort of physically easier accommodation. But she's also silenced for the last three months. But she doesn't say anything. And then again, the question of the malleability of the production. I mean, you and I both have seen many where this is true, but one that Murray did, Murray Abraham, where the actor's playing Jessica, at the end, at one point Shylock throws off his yarmulke at the end of Act 4 and just at the edge of the stage. And then at the very end of the play in this production, there's nothing textual that indicates this, the director's insight. As the couples go off, coupled off, Narissa and Graschiano, Bassanio and Portia, Antonio always awkwardly by himself. But then Jessica goes off with Lorenzo and then runs back just to pick up the amica and the sense of loss, the sadness there. There's not a line in the play that makes that necessary. There's not a line in the play that even makes that reasonable. But there's, you know, it is an action that makes sense in all of our lived experience of the kinds of things you two both brilliantly spoke about. The questions confirm just what a great job Moncler is doing. And I'd like to thank Moncler. I'd like to thank the organizers of this event. But mostly I'd like to thank Justice Ginsburg for being here and sharing her wisdom with us. Thank you so much. I can't, but you both have to go back. We'll stay for the reception. Thank you all very, very much. It is such an honor. Thank you very much. And please join us. We're having a little party in the lobby. You're all invited. And there's a play at eight o'clock. Rialto.