BFI

This short sequence, comprising the whole of Act 3 Scene 1 of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, has negligible artistic merit (all the evidence suggests that director Widgey R. Newman merely pointed his immobile camera at an existing stage production), but it has a small place in British and indeed world cinema history for containing the earliest surviving example of Shakespeare's words being uttered in a synchronised sound film.

It also provides a revealing snapshot of acting styles of a century earlier. Lewis Casson (1875-1969) was a stage legend of the time (he would eventually be knighted for services to the theatre), and also the husband of Sybil Thorndike, who had played Portia in a silent film version of the play (d. Challis N. Sanderson, 1922).

If it's hard to see where Casson's reputation comes from on the basis of this eye-rolling, hand-waving, overwhelmingly histrionic Shylock, this is because it represents a largely defunct theatrical tradition. The body language of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in King John (d. William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson), 1899), Sir Frank Benson in Richard III (d. Benson, 1911) or Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson in Hamlet (d. Hay Plumb, 1913) suggests that their vocal rendition would have been very similar, and no doubt just as eccentric to modern ears.

Michael Brooke

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