The Merchant of Venice

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A young member of the Venetian nobility named Bassanio desires marriage to a young wealthy heiress called Portia who resides in Belmont. Not wise with his spending and with no ducats left to fund his courtship of her, he turns to his friend Antonio, a merchant, who agrees to become his guarantor should he manage to secure a loan from a willing party. Bassanio ends up borrowing the required amount from Shylock, a Jewish moneylender who is furious because his daughter Jessica has converted to Christianity and marries Lorenzo, a friend of Antonio and Bassanio. When Shylock fails to collect the amount he has lent to Bassanio due to Antonio’s ships where his wealth is locked in being stranded at sea, he brings the matter to the Venetian court and demands a pound of Antonio’s flesh in lieu of his monetary debt. Conniving to rescue their friends, Portia hatches a plan to outwit the Jew.

Is it just me or is this play anti-Semitic AF? You have a bunch of Christians in Venice borrowing money from a Jew, and then when he begins to collect and they can’t pay, they gang up on him, gaslight him, and even at one point force him to convert to Christianity after turning the tables on him via legal loopholes. Since I am not sure whether my reading is accurate, I grace the halls of the internet to look for feedback and it turns out that I am not the only one after all. After reading some analyses and various opinions, I’ve come to regard The Merchant of Venice as an odd piece of literature, for several reasons.

One possible line of thinking is how to interpret the play. Relying on standards of modernity where we are all primed to be politically correct most of the time, the unabashed racist undertones evident from the characters’ behavior are just off putting, but then again this work was published five centuries ago. This brings us to the debate as to whether this comedy is a veiled affront against those negative cultural traits back in Elizabethan England too sarcastic for the average theatergoer back then to recognize as such or is this a celebration of such bigoted culture, meant to serve as a communal observation of intolerance?

We will never know, since there really is no way of knowing Shakespeare’s authorial intent. From what we know, he was just the 16th century equivalent of your modern day soap opera writer, churning out stories that a broad audience could relate to and would enjoy, which we can argue to be reflective of their shared values. But then again, as with any form of art, there is a thin line between giving the masses what they want and incorporating a critique of it embedded in the very same work. Perhaps The Merchant of Venice is both, but all of these are modern day interpretations informed by centuries of progress in the history of mankind. Or simply put, maybe they were really just racists after all.

There seems to be no character you can sympathize with in this play. All of them are opportunistic douchebags you wouldn’t want to mingle with in real life. The Jew is painted as the obvious antagonist, so it is just so weird when he ends up being the victim in the eyes of many a modern reader. As a greedy moneylender profiting from capital via greedy interest rates, one can only hate such a character, arguably the prototype of the predatory banking industry doing the same shit to us in modernity. But then again, such is a two-way transaction, and nobody is really forcing anyone to partake in such a deal. Malicious intent to defraud one party is present, in short.

This has only been my second Shakespeare reading experience. So far, I like Hamlet way better because of its theme which can be interpreted as a descent to madness as well as the burden of a guilty mind. The Merchant of Venice doesn’t have much going for it, to be honest. If anything, it can just be viewed as a fossilized case study on bigotry, a quintessential us-versus-them narrative based on religion that gives us a glimpse of how society used to be back then.