have we had more than our pound of flesh?

To stage or not to stage, that is the question. Is it time to draw a veil over The Merchant of Venice? Shakespeare's romantic drama - part of this coming season of plays at Sam Wanamaker's Globe Theatre which will also include Shakespeare's As You Like It, Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters and Dekker & Middleton's The Honest Whore - is once again set to take the stage and with it the uncomfortable image of

Shylock the Jew exacting his pound of flesh.

Directed by Richard Olivier whose Henry V was one of the successes of the Globe's first season and with German actor Norbert Kentrup playing

Shylock (the quirky but

specified choice of a dying Wanamaker), the planned

production has come, however, at a time of mounting unease about the continued

presence of The Merchant in the repertoire.

Is the play just too unpleasant, too dangerous? Is it time it was censored? In the light of the history of the twentieth century and the Holocaust, the play, say its critics, is anti-semitic, the image of Shylock placing the knife to the heart of Antonio endorsing every negative stereotype.

Imagine, they argue, a play that presented an Afro-Caribbean or Indo-Asian in a similar light? The howls of

discontent would be long and agonised. Think of Salman Rushdie and the Satanic Verses. As if to underline the dilemma, the Jewish Chronicle's respected theatre critic, David Nathan, wrote after seeing Gregory Doran's RSC production in Stratford last year: ''actors and directors should be in no doubt that, to a large number of Jews, probably the majority, and not a few Christians, it is deeply offensive, no matter how it is done.''

To their great credit, the Globe have not let Nathan's remarks go unheeded. Since their announcement, Patrick Spottiswoode, the Globe's

energetic Educational Director has run a whole conglomerate of lectures, seminars and staged readings of Elizabethan/ Jacobean plays on similar themes to debate around

the subject.

American scholar James Shapiro, this year's Globe Fellow (his book, Shakespeare and the Jews, Columbia University Press, #14 has just been published here in paperback) has led the way. For example, he argues that the play, uncomfortable though it is, is an important barometer on society's sense of community and exclusion. (Shapiro had argued forcefully at a previous evening's lecture that the

Merchant should be seen in the light of two things: one, the Elizabethan preoccupation with national identity and identifying a sense of their own Englishness from that which was ''other'', and secondly their obsession with the idea of the ''alien'' of which the Jew was simply a formidably potent expression. Elizabethan

England, said Shapiro, was extremely xenophobic and there had been riots against ''aliens'' taking Englishmen's food and jobs. Sound familiar?)

Shapiro calls the Globe's decision to stage The Merchant ''brave''. A local teacher and head of drama - one of over 30 Southwark schools involved in the Globe's educational

programme as well as many linked up overseas through the Internet - argued at a recent Globe press conference that one of the reasons she finds the Merchant project so

compelling is that in a school of high ethnic diversity, the Merchant offers a way for teachers to discuss general ideas of racism. ''We have many pupils for whom the idea of social alienation is no

academic matter but pressingly personal,'' she concluded.

But is that sufficient grounds or as director, Olivier put it, its importance in global terms as a means of airing racial

prejudice, sufficient to justify its continued staging?

Many may well side with Nathan's reservations,

particularly in the light of the bear-pit like atmosphere in the Globe where, as we saw last year with Henry V, the mere entry of French characters can send some members of the audience into paroxysms of not entirely benign booing. The Globe encourages that kind of free expression of emotion.

They may well find

Shylock's entrance triggering similar frank, not to say,

bigoted reactions.

If, as Shakespeare always intended, the function of

theatre is to put a mirror up to nature, paradoxically, we may well be in for some nasty - but one might argue - very important, very necessary reflections.

n Previews for The Merchant of Venice start at the Globe from May 20.