by Hannah Kalbrener ’26
I attended the “Venetian Mosaics: Festivity and Fracture in Two Productions of The Merchant of Venice in the City of Astraea” Humanities Arts Interest Group (HAIG) event given by Dr. Stavreva and Dr. Sokolova. I’m an English major at Cornell and part of the reason I chose to go to this event was because it was being given by my advisor, Dr. Stavreva.
It was an interesting presentation where they talked about The Merchant of Venice, a play by Shakespeare. One Production of the play, which has Jewish characters and antisemitic sentiments woven throughout, was created by Max Reinhardt, a Jewish man, in the 1930s. It was performed alongside a canal and gondola repair shop bringing to the forefront of the play the venetian landscape and culture and discussing the relationships between Venice, the city of Astraea, Jewish people, and The Merchant of Venice. The other production they looked at was performed around 2016 in the square of a Jewish ghetto in Venice. The ghetto in question no longer has any Jewish residents and the play used its location to educate people about Judaism. It also had the unique effect of layering the audience: you had not just the main audience watching the play, but also the residents, for whom the performance became a part of their daily lives, watching the play and the audience at their leisure.
The same day that I attended Venetian Mosaics, I also did a reading—“The Sexual Politics of Textual Transmission” by Valerie Wayne—for the class I was taking, The Global Eighteenth Century, taught by Professor Sagal. The text looked at the women present in both the process of editing texts to be printed as well as the women present in the writings themselves, the erasure of the role they played as well as that of the literary importance they held. It struck me and informed and colored my interpretation of the presentation.
Dr. Stavreva and Dr. Sokolova’s wealth of knowledge on the two productions of The Merchant of Venice, along with the interaction between the producers of those productions and the original production by Shakespeare, were transformed for me into a form of and way of looking at literary citizenship. The presentation specifically focused on how the producers and creators of these specific productions of the play made their decisions about how characters would be dressed, the location of the performance, the props and set design, the seating of the audience, and how all these things were informed by cultural, societal, and political circumstances. We don’t necessarily think about all the work and choices that have gone into the making of something like a play or a book, but their role is vital in how the story is informed by these choices and how the audience will perceive the story.
To me, these things inform my idea of literary citizenship because of the editing process that happens in the production of a play, and in the inherent dialogue between audience and performer. The idea of editing as literary citizenship is, although unnamed, quite present in the article I read; Wayne discusses the way that the scholarly editing of a text is informed by the editor’s beliefs, culture, and societal role and can be politically motivated. She specifically talks about The Tempest, where a man finds himself on an island inhabited by a man and his daughter. The excerpt of the play Wayne shares is this:
Let me live here ever!
So rare a wondered father and a wise
Makes this place paradise!
The leading man is here talking about his marriage to the daughter. Wayne interrogates the editing of this play throughout the history of its written form. Specifically this set of lines
because there has been much contention about whether the word choice was originally “wise” or “wife.”
In the late 18th to early 19th centuries, the long s was used in place of the lowercase s and looked like an f. For this reason the true identity of the word in this play is unknown because if it were an f, and as Jeanne Addison Roberts posits, the crossbar may have been broken by continual use. The interest here, for me and for Wayne, however, is less in the truth and more in which word an editor decides to print because this choice changes the sense of the excerpt radically.
If the chosen word is wise, then the groom is excited not by his new wife but by his new connection to his father-in-law, and this male-bond is what “makes this place a paradise.” But if the word is wife, then the groom expresses his joy for both his new wife and his new relationship with his father-in-law and both of these things are what make paradise. One version centers completely on the bonding of these two men and completely erases the woman in the situation. The other places the wife and male-bond on the same level. Which word is chosen by the editor in this instance changes the character, the moral, and the ending of the play.
I think this is great example of the necessity of literary citizenship and understanding it, because the choices you make—whether they’re the stories you write, the books you choose to analyze, the articles you read and cite, or the events you go to—have repercussions not only on minority groups (the erasure of women’s work in the publishing industry and the erasure of women in print, and that of people of color, of queer people, or disabled people), but also on the general knowledge of everyone. This is because the editors, the publishers, the scholars make the decisions of what is “canonized”: what is good writing, what is necessary for students to be taught.
If literary citizenship means taking an active role in, and understanding of, the literary world in all its facets and issues, then understanding and/or taking a role in the new production of plays, the editing of texts, and the analysis of these things (which I would say includes public book talks and readings) is key to being a good literary citizen. We must understand and recognize the frames and devices we view stories through because they inform our interpretations of them.
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