Merchant of Venice

[ficwize]

I just saw the Merchant of Venice for the first time. (Yes, I am also shocked by the lack of education here.) I have a mix of reactions. All I knew of the play before was the "Has not a Jew..." speech which seems to be quite progressive for Shakespeare's time. Then I saw it in context and I... don't know anymore. Was it a mockery? Was it intended to be sympathetic? Or was Shylock supposed to be a simple villian, which he does not come across as.

Also, is it my slash glasses, or were Antonio and Bassanio supposed to read like a romantic couple?

Finally, I cried in the court scene. I also got heart palpitations and freaked out a bit when I though it might go badly...

I will be adding this to my Yuletide list this year.

Comments

[bitterfic.livejournal.com]

I read Merchant of Venice as a high school student and in college but I just watched the Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons film version last month, excellent movie and yes, there was definately a whole lot of Antonio/Bassanio going on. I was really disturbed by the Antisemitism present in the text. The contemporary filmmaker challenged it but I thought it was very much written into the play which disappoints me as I generally adore Shakespeare.

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

were Antonio and Bassanio supposed to read like a romantic couple?

My professor back in college certainly thought so. He went on for a while about how homoerotic relationships were kind of an open and accepted secret in Venice of the time period. Though I have no idea if he was talking out of his hat or not, not being an Italian history buff....

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

I think people have trying to figure out what Shylock was suppose to read as since Shakespeare wrote him.

i thought that Antonio and Bassanio read that way too...and their ladies did too (and were more badass about it too.)

[bookaddict43.livejournal.com]

Oh yes Antonio and Bassanio *nods*. Even my high school teacher (a nun) allowed that they may have had "an unusual" relationship :)

I'm never sure about Shylock. Of course Shakespeare was writing for his (then) audience, and Jews were often portrayed as morally ambiguous. I've always thought the speech was his way of softening that. But, I think, like in all literature, people can interpret his speech anyway they wish and do so :D

[pargoletta.livejournal.com]

Shylock was a very progressive character for English theater of the time. Remember, there were almost no Jews in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, since they'd all been expelled in the 13th century. They were portrayed on stage as stock villains, as sort of generic Evil Others. If you needed an Outsider to kidnap children, plot, extort money, or do other nasty things to your characters, you made that Outsider character a Jew, and everyone got the point, even the groundlings.

Shylock is shown to have feelings, reactions, love his daughter, be somewhat justified in his actions, even if he goes too far. That would have been an astounding humanization of a stock villain at the time (1596, I think, or thereabouts). The modern equivalent would probably be if a U.S. filmmaker gave the same sort of treatment to a character who's a member of Al Qaeda.

The actual Jews who actually lived in actual cities in Italy at that time experienced wildly varying treatment depending on where they lived, and how the ruler of that particular city felt about them. Venice was busy locking them up in ghettos, while in Mantua, they were serving as court physicians and musicians. Go figure.

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

What production did you see? I tend to be of the school that Shylock is a racist stereotype who gets more sympathy than you would normally expect (especially compared to other racist stereotypes of the same time and place) because sympathy is what Shakespeare specializes in. But Shylock is still a villain, and it's not entirely because he's a Jew. He's a bad person who does bad things, and . . .well, the bad things he does are linked to his Jewishness but they're not JUST his Jewishness. I mean, I don't know if that makes the text less offensive, but I think people who want to make Shylock out to be a tragic hero have to kind of ignore the part where he tries to use the law to commit murder.

And yeah, Antonio/Bassanio is basically canon, and not just in the way slashers always say that. I think the relationship was deliberately implied by the text.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Simplified, I think Shylock is a racist stereotype written as a human being with actual understandable motivations because Shakespeare was a genius and fleshes out his stereotypes that way. But he was writing in a context where the audience simply LOVED their Jewish villains - an earlier stage hit had been Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, the main character of which betrays, poisons and pimps, every antisemetic stereotype in the book - and where the people cheered the execution of Elizabeth I.'s Jewish court physician on what was almost certainly a trumped up charge, only a few months before Merchant of Venice was first staged. In short, my own guess is that Burbage & Co. concluded this was the hour for a play with a Jewish villain for people to hiss at, surefire cash in the box office, and asked Will S. to write one. He made Shylock something more complex because of his writerly skills, not because Shylock was actually intended as something to COUNTER that stereotype, let alone as a genuine plea for tolerance.

The film version you saw is interesting but suffers a bit, imo, from the director wanting to have his cake and eat it. I've written a post about it here.