& Society’s Dangerous Obsession with Celebrity Culture
The Merchant of Venice, the Seven Deadly Sins,
& Society’s Dangerous Obsession with Celebrity Culture
Shakespeare’s play about love, lust and greed is a searing critique of humankind’s attraction towards the Seven Deadly Sins, as set out in Christian doctrine.
The recent defamation trial between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp exposed to the world some of the worst excesses of Hollywood greed. But it should also give us great pause individually, and as a society, for our obsession with celebrity, and some of the misogynistic bile that was spewed forth by a public keen to excuse Depp, the piratical rogue, and cruelly lambast Heard with the zealousness of a Monty Python-esque witch trial.
Whatever your opinion of Heard through this process, Depp lost the UK version of this trial. That means that a UK court did not find there was sufficient evidence to suggest that Heard’s claims to have been the victim of physical and verbal assaults within their tumultuous relationship were false. That is serious stuff. (This article explains some of the key differences between UK and US defamation laws.) Neither of the protagonists in the trial, Heard or Depp, came out of this well. Their legal fees are in the millions; embarrassing details of their private lives and excesses have been laid bare for all and sundry to pick over; and, presumably, both their future careers and personal credibility will suffer through this process.
Most crucially, though, as cutting, provocative, and occasionally funny, as some of the tidal waves of Tik Toks, memes and gifs produced over the last month might have been, the crude characterisation of Heard as a fame-seeking, deceitful and violent liar, seriously compromises the chances of others who are the victims of bullying or physically violent partners to have the bravery to stand up in the future, as well as prejudicially influencing their chances of being believed.
As the trial ran concurrently to our Y9 study of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, it offered us a very good opportunity to understand some key elements of how the legal system functions; the key plot device centres around Shylock’s drawing up the macabre terms of a bond with the anti-semitic Antonio- that being an agreement he may cut a pound of Antonio’s flesh from wherever Shylock choose should he renege on payment. That insistence on the precise terms of the bond proves to be his downfall, though, as he is bamboozled by the cunning logic of a Venetian legal team, who first seem to cede to his terms, to exact “a pound of flesh” as it is written in the terms, but then make the impossible demand that he do this without shedding one drop of Antonio’s blood (“..a pound of flesh, and nothing more.”) It seems it pays to have the right lawyers behind you.
In our current time of rising inflation, food shortages, the Ukraine Crisis… amongst a world still reeling from the ravages of the pandemic, the exorbitant legal fees incurred by both Heard and Depp are wince-inducing, not to mention the distraction this spectacle took away from other far more critical matters. Estimates suggest Depp’s legal team were assembled for $5.5USD million. Amber Heard’s approximately $2million. So, it might be said that in some instances, justice is predicated not just on your right to a fair trial, but by the lawyers you can afford.
The Merchant of Venice is set in two very distinct locations, Portia’s home of Belmont, and the streets and courts of Venice. Even the illusory space of Belmont- which on the surface is a place of enchantment and dreams- is a realm where Shakespeare offers us a cynical reflection of the proud, vain and arrogant aspects of our human nature: The English duke who arrives to woo Portia is drunk upon arrival; the Moroccan Prince is a preening boaster who is beguiled by the golden casket, rather than seeking true love; while the Duke of Arragon is more in love with his own reflection than anything else…
Originating in Christian theology, the seven deadly sins are pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, sloth, and wrath. Pride is sometimes referred to as vanity or vainglory, greed as avarice or covetousness, and wrath as anger. Gluttony covers self-indulgent excess more generally, including drunkenness.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/religion/the-seven-deadly-sins
But the play’s most dramatic and memorable tragic monologues are based in the dark heart of Venice’s Jewish ghetto, or in the trading square of the Rialto where deals are done and gossiping stories of Shylock’s decline are gleefully relayed by Bassanio’s cronies, Salarino and Salerio.
There’s a modern parallel to the divisive, emotionally-driven way that social media can see people’s reputations shredded in microseconds by a “like” or “retweet”- without a sufficient analysis of the facts- and their subsequent fates begin to trend in the court of public opinion. The pervasive nature of technology was also laid bare with clips from the trial showing the violent mood swings, accusations, threats and slammed doors in the Heard and Depp penthouse.
This was a relationship so utterly broken that the two participants had taken to covertly filming each other. Hopefully, this extreme example can give our Y9s some pause for thought when they think about using their phones to either record a bullying incident, or, sending a cruel and thoughtless message in the heat of the moment.
Hopefully, Y9s, you might recognise through the terrible example played out before you in the trial the power of language, and its ability to cause lasting harm, not just to the intended victim but, ultimately to the sendee too.
Be careful, and sleep on it before hitting send is some advice there.
And if we see someone being the victim of this kind of hate-filled nonsense, hopefully you might have the integrity to ask that person to stop, rather than mawkishly watch the spectacle unfold with the relish of Elizabethan patrons of a bear baiting pit (one such could be found just a few hundred yards along the South Bank of the Thames from the Globe Theatre, where this play was first performed).
At the end, Shylock is utterly destroyed. He has lost his daughter, his estate divided between the State and Antonio, (who bequeaths it to Lorenzo, the Christian husband Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, eloped with)… and perhaps most tragically of all, his Jewish religion, as he is forced to renounce his faith by Antonio.
Shylock at the close of the play has been utterly overwhelmed by the conspiring powerful forces of politics and religion. Yet he was cast throughout the play as a cruel, callous man who treats his daughter in a possessive, overbearing manner, and exploits and berates his servant, Lancelot.
In him, Shakespeare presents us with a complicated protagonist, but this could also be a very clever piece of engineering from his perspective: sadly, anti-semitic beliefs would have been very much a cultural norm of Elizabethan society. Indeed, Jewish people had been expelled from Britain two centuries earlier; so, Shakespeare was doing something very radical and progressive by making Shylock the most compelling central figure of this tragedy.
He is far more arresting in his moments of raw indignation at his treatment by the Christian Venetians- “If you cut me, do I not bleed?”– than his counterpart, Antonio, who is self-indulgent, vain, as well as clearly prejudiced. His protege, Bassanio, is merely foppish incomparison.
By compelling his largely Anglican Christian audience to sympathise with a figure who represented a religious group then much-maligned in society, Shakespeare achieves something culturally important then, and still pertinent now, as the dark spectre of anti-semitism and fascist thought has arisen across parts of Europe and been thrown into sharp relief by the comments made about Ukraine’s Jewish President Zelensky by the Russian Foreign Minister at the beginning of the Ukraine Crisis.
Surely even Shakespeare’s genius could not have predicted the awful fate of the Jewish people during the period of the Nazi Holocaust- 6 million people annhilated in the notorious death camps that spread across Poland and Germany in the Second World War. But the casual racism in the streets, and the trashing of Jewish businesses- such as happened in Kristallnacht in 1938- would have been well within the realm of Shakespeare’s imagination, and his theatre going public.
In these very trying times, Shakespeare urges us to choose kindness over cruelty. Whether it be anti-semitism, homophobia, mysogyny or bullying, exposure to literature can evoke in us deep feelings of empathy and understanding for others. The echoes of these universal themes can be seen in the world around us. And after the passing of 400yrs, Shakespeare’s message of compassion is as pertinent as ever.
Works Cited
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/zelensky-jewish-hitler-lavrov-russia-b2069625.html
https://mashable.com/article/depp-heard-verdict
https://www.newsweek.com/price-johnny-depp-amber-heard-lawyers-trial-1710442
Sustainability, Human Technologies and Theory of Knowledge 