Pocket Play Review: The Merchant of Venice in a modern verse translation with the Portland Shakespeare Project

Author Julie Hammonds is on a quest to complete Shakespeare’s canon in calendar year 2025 (or at least to see a lot of Shakespeare). In these pocket play reviews, she records brief impressions of each show she sees.

• The Play: The Merchant of Venice in a modern verse translation by Elise Thoron
• The Company: Portland Shakespeare Project (Oregon)
• The Stage: indoors in a black box theater with stadium seating facing a stage
• Run Dates: July 10–20, 2025
• Memorable for: The accessible storytelling, thanks to strong performances and the modern verse translation
• The Show Must Go On Award goes to Gavin Hoffman as Shylock, a late addition to the cast. He wasn’t off book in the performance I saw, but he built the pages into his performance of a man who often needs to refer to contracts as he speaks.

Pocket Play Review:

I was particularly interested to see this Portland Shakespeare Project production of The Merchant of Venice because they used a modern verse translation of Shakespeare’s text by the playwright and director Elise Thoron, in collaboration with dramaturg Julie Felise Dubiner.

This version is part of the Play On Shakespeare Project, originally commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015 to translate Shakespeare’s plays into modern English. Now a separate entity, the project’s mission is “To enhance the understanding of Shakespeare’s plays in performance for theater professionals, students, teachers, and audiences by engaging with contemporary translations and adaptations.”

Portland Shakespeare’s is the first Play On production for Merchant. You might wonder why a devoted Shakespearean like me would be interested in seeing new versions of Shakespeare’s classic works. I wondered how translation would affect both the story and the storytelling. Sitting in the audience, would I know “that’s not Shakespeare’s text”? Would I feel cheated in some way?

The answer to both questions was a resounding no. The language remained beautifully elevated in a way that felt Shakespearean. And yet, difficult words never interfered with my understanding of the stage action. The actors never stumbled over an obscure word, and neither did my brain as I followed this so-called comedy to its strange conclusion.

I’m not very familiar with Merchant. I’ve only seen it once, in 2009. To prepare for this performance, I reviewed a synopsis. I also listened to a podcast in which Stephen Greenblatt (a distinguished professor at Harvard and author of Will in the World and other books on Shakespeare) discusses several key speeches in the play.

That prep, while helpful, was not required to understand this production. The characters and their motivations, their cruelties and loves and losses were quite clear. It’s not a happy story, of course. Many of the characters are casually racist, and Shylock the money-lender, enraged by his long torment, attempts to extract a pound of flesh from his enemy in a form of legal murder. This is a comedy only in that nobody dies.

The final scene, in which Shylock is forgotten as two sets of lovers quarrel flirtatiously over a ring, leaves a strange impression after so much legal argument and societal disfunction. A day later, I still don’t know what to make of it.

For details of the plot and commentary on the performances, I commend for your attention Linda Ferguson’s thoughtful review of this production of “The Merchant of Venice” at Oregon Artswatch.

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I have seen one other Play On version, Measure for Measure, in a translation by Aditi Brennan Kapil. That’s a challenging play too. As with Merchant, I found the story lines easy to follow and was never jarred by “modern” language. The translation gave me the freedom to encounter the story directly.

Lou Douthit, the Play On Shakespeare Project’s president, wrote, “The typical Shakespeare production follows an odd convention: a contemporary setting with Elizabethan language. What if we flipped that? Contemporary language with an Elizabethan setting. What might we learn about the plays from putting them through that lens?” (Folger Shakespeare’s “Shakespeare and Beyond” Blog, February 2018)

As they explain: “Far from a paraphrasing exercise, each playwright was tasked with matching Shakespeare’s linguistic rigor as they approached the text, preserving rhyme, rhythm, metaphor, meter, imagery, symbolism, rhetoric, and the structure that make Shakespeare’s plays engaging and accessible to today’s audience.”

In sum: I commend Portland Shakespeare Project for taking on Shakespeare’s difficult The Merchant of Venice with the intention of making the story more accessible to the audience.

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