Hijacked by History

Abstract

This article considers Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as a work singularly transformed by the events of the Holocaust, in such a way that stagings of the play are often turned into pretexts for remembrance. It discusses the play as an archive of trauma, and reflects on whether it may provide testimony for the atrocities committed during the war. To this end, the article provides an inquiry into different perspectives of trauma and its representation, relying on Giorgio Agamben’s explorations of the aporia of bearing testimony, and on Shoshana Felman’s notion of testimony as a performative speech act. Finally, this work looks at three different adaptations of Shakespeare’s play in the second half of the 20th century by George Tabori (1914-2007), a Jewish Hungarian playwright and director.