The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice has proved to be one of Shakespeare’s most challenging plays to transpose to modern tastes. Bawdy humor and romantic hijinks coexist with difficult questions of tolerance and intolerance, religious law and civil society, justice and mercy. In the role of Shylock—as famous for his merciless insistence that a debt be repaid with “a pound of flesh” as for his trenchant speech that asks “If you prick us, do we not bleed?”—Pryce exacts a highly sympathetic portrayal of the Jewish moneylender, at once a vengeful tyrant and a piteous, persecuted outcast.