The Merchant of Venice

Shakespeare’s most notoriously antisemitic work. The play is unquestionably bigoted toward Jews, although, to be fair, hardly any of its characters come across as particularly likable. It’s interesting because the plot could have worked perfectly well without the religious conflict. In fact, making Shylock Jewish almost feels like an easy shortcut, because Shakespeare knew his audience would view him as the villain before he had even put much work into his characterization. It seems to be that there would already have been plenty of reason to dislike a man for demanding a literal pound of another person’s flesh without relying on an aversion to his religious affiliation.

But then Shylock at least gets his little speech where he comes across as somewhat sympathetic and suggests that his desire for revenge is largely a response to years of abuse, and it ends up being the Christians who show no mercy. But then the Christians are still the ones to get the jolly, happy ending, and Shylock’s forced conversion to Christianity is shown as some sort of gift rather than the insulting punishment that it is. So I don’t know what Shakespeare was actually going for. But I think the religious conflict ultimately helped make the play more interesting and enduring.

Obviously the whole anti-semitism issue is the biggest subject of modern discussion surrounding this play, but the part that personally intrigued me most was the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio. Like, Antonio has got to be romantically in love with Bassanio, right? Forget all that other lame courting nonsense with the other two couples, Antonio and Bassanio is the real love story. Antonio sacrifices his happiness all for Bassanio. I say this is a tragedy, not a comedy!

I also watched Michael Radford’s 2004 film adaptation starring Al Pacino as Shylock. It stayed mostly faithful to the play, although a decent amount of the text is cut. I thought it did a good job of contextualizing the anti-Jewish sentiment of the period and portraying Shylock’s actions more clearly as an enraged response to ongoing persecution rather than as unprovoked evil.

Book author: William Shakespeare