It’s a good thing Shakespeare wasn’t invited to Adelaide Writers’ Week |
It’s a good thing William Shakespeare wasn’t on the guest list of Adelaide Writers’ Week.
A community theatre performance of the Bard’s The Merchant of Venice, scheduled for this month in Sydney, has been postponed in the wake of the mass shooting in Bondi. The play’s key figure, Shylock, is a Jewish moneylender, represented with the antisemitic dramedy typical of Shakespeare’s England. Notwithstanding decades of contortions and reinterpretations to turn Merchant into a satire or a critique of antisemitism, Shylock can’t climb out from under his own history, and nor can old Bill.
Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:
If the former Adelaide Festival board had disinvited him for failing the “social cohesion” test, it’s hard to imagine any participants, let alone nearly all, boycotting Writers’ Week in solidarity with his right to free speech. (It’s also hard to imagine what the theatre group Such Stuff was thinking in putting on Merchant even before Bondi, but without being able to see their presentation of Shylock it would be unfair to speculate.)
The cancellation of Shakespeare is an overdue reminder that neither antisemitism nor its mirror-image, anti-antisemitism, were invented in October 2023. Antisemitism from the far right has older and deeper roots in Australia than any version coming from the far left. Whether in the thickets of Canberra law-making or South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas’ rubber sword chopping a writer out of the Adelaide program “from a place of compassion”, it defies over-simplification and opportunism while holding an irresistible appeal to the over- simplifiers and opportunists. “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose”, says Shakespeare’s merchant Antonio, the antisemitic creation of an antisemitic playwright speaking a truth in the 1500s that the Australian government is struggling to disentangle in 2025.
Old-school white Australian antisemitism lived in comfortable and relaxed ignorance on Sydney’s north shore in the 1980s. Playing the title role, Antonio, in our........