“I am not proposing that someone give us The Merchant of Venice as the first anti-Semitic musical comedy.” Thus spake Harold Bloom reassuringly in Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human (177). He waxes uncharacteristically “modern,” moreover, in implicating the moral ambiguities of such an idea for many of us now: “What baffles us is how to stage a romantic comedy that rather blithely includes a forced Jewish conversion to Christianity, on penalty of death” (175). Yet, at the same time, he cannot refrain from dabbling in director's theatre and proffering his comic vision of Shylock:

Andreï Serban's production of the Merchant with Cambridge's American Repertory Theatre and Philadelphia's American Musical Theatre in 1998, the same year in which Bloom's book appeared, was in some sense an answer to the theatre in Bloom's head. The French reprise of 2001–02 at the Comédie- Française leaves little doubt as to Serban's affiliation with Bloom, given the incorporation of translated sections from Shakespeare (including those just quoted) into the Program Dossier under the title, “De l’ironie avant tout.”