Responses to Tweethis and ROUGH

Well posting my tweethis on facebook was extremely helpful. A former classmate mentioned some ideas that expanded my view on the whole question I am addressing and provided new avenues for application both within and without the play. My thesis revolves around something of a moral question actually so I got a lot of personal responses to that question that weren't really particularly helpful since they didn't relate to the applications in the text, but they did make me think, and there might be new perspectives which will help me adjust the way I look at the play. My mom actually posted a link to a talk by President Monson which related to that moral question. I've added it to the list of articles I am still planning on reading, so it may come in handy, but we'll see. Overall, I'd say this was not only helpful but definitely encouraging. Success.

And here is my current draft of the real deal. It's mostly introductory material and the beginnings of my proof. (Also, do you think it would be better and more specific if I turned this into a reading of Shylock rather than a reading of the whole play?)

The reason I did not post this earlier is because about a third of the way writing through my first draft I decided to change the focus of my essay radically. And then, of course, there were the polls to stare at...If you've seen my previous theses and thoughts, you can see that although I'm still working within the same theme, my actual argument is fairly new here. I'm still working on weeding it to get rid of the stuff from before that is less applicable now. Bolded portions are main points, so you can scan this and still get a pretty good idea of the content:

William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is among his most popularly performed plays. However, it is also perhaps his most censored play. Anti-Semitic sentiments as well as discrimination against Africans and other groups are foregrounded in the story and language of the play, and for that reason it is often considered inappropriate to perform or read, in schools and otherwise.

The racism in the play has also been the topic of much study and discussion among Shakespeare scholars. Anyone who has anything to say about The Merchant of Venice can hardly do so without addressing the issue. And indeed racism and prejudice are prevalent throughout the text; Mika Nyoni notes in “The Culture of Othering: An Interrogation of Shakespeare's Handling of Race and Ethnicity in The Merchant of Venice and Othello” that Shylock’s ethnicity is mentioned twenty-three times in the court scene alone (Act IV Scene 1). Throughout the entire play, he is spoken of or to in the most degrading terms. Modern readers typically feel squeamish reading this play, and schools often exclude it from their curriculums for this reason. Similarly, when Portia is faced with a Moroccan suitor, she detests him seemingly on the sole basis of his “complexion” (II.7.87). Nyoni concludes, based on these and other proofs, that “she is blatantly racist and so was her creator, Shakespeare” (The Culture of Othering).

However, as Sergio Nunes Melo asserts in his “Deconstructing the Transhistorical in Contemporary Productions of 'The Merchant of Venice,’” “it is also important to recognize the extent to which Merchant’s anti-Semitism is a construct because this topic has bearings on the play’s transhistorical dimension.” Our knowledge of the era in which this play was first performed tells us already that a generic English audience would have been cruelly prejudiced against Jews—Lawrence Danson explains in his historical notes “Jews in England and Venice” that “for most Englishmen, Jews existed more as a nasty rumor or an ethnic joke than as ordinary people” (112). The only real, relevant questions, then, concerning modern study and performance of Merchant, are those that can be applied not only specifically to the common prejudices of Shakespeare’s time, but to audiences and readers of today, or throughout history.

Indeed while racism and prejudice are foregrounded as major themes of The Merchant of Venice, a more relevant reading calls attention not only to their presence or absence, but an exploration of the roots of racism itself, as the text repeatedly asks the question: can one be effectively judged based on religion, race, gender, or other stereotyped categories? While the debate rages over whether to read Merchant as an anti-Semitic text or not, we will focus on this underlying question, because let’s face it—“ whether we read the Jew as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ we cannot avoid the ‘us’ and ‘them’” (O’rourke), and those are terms that any generation can understand.

To begin with, of course, there is Shylock. As Danson summarizes in his “Shylock on Stage,” Shylock’s character has undergone many different interpretations—from a comical stock character, to a serious villain, to an object of pity (). To anyone hoping to come to a conclusion about the historical racism of the text, this would present a problem. Yet, as mentioned above, no matter who Shylock is in a given production, he is unavoidably a Jew, and thus subject to discrimination—whether that is comical, frightening, or sad makes little difference in that respect.

So, then, what does it mean that Shylock is a Jew? Although in today’s age of anti-racism we squirm to read Antonio and the other Christians’ blatant prejudice against him for his Jewishness, he still doesn’t seem to be very concerned with proving to us that he deserves otherwise. And so the questions we must ask the text are: “Are we intended to pity Shylock, or hate him as much as Antonio and Bassanio do?” and then, “Is that because he is a Jew or because of other factors that make him a distinct individual?”

First, should we pity Shylock? While Shylock’s thirst for revenge is hard to overlook, Nyoni suggests that the reason he prefers seeing Antonio suffer to any kind of financial compensation is because of his desire for “human dignity.” He goes on to explain: “It seems Shylock stomachs all the insults stoically. If one gets so much in terms of insults and his heart hardens as a result can we really blame him? If he gets an opportunity to revenge and seizes that opportunity, bizarre as it might seem, do we not or should we not at least understand where he is coming from especially when the perpetrator threatens to heap even more insults?” (The Culture of Othering).  Indeed Shylock’s revenge may seem to be less villainous when we remember all the insult he is seeking to revenge himself of.

When Antonio attempts to obtain mercy from him, he replies “Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a cause,/But since I am a dog, beware my fangs” (3.3.7/8). Shylock here directly addresses the difference between racial judgment and personal judgment. His claim here is that he had been called a dog because of his ethnicity, and this is no “cause.” But his second claim, that he is in fact a dog, complicates this. Our understanding of this statement changes depending on what we assume Shylock means when he says “dog.” Firstly, “dog” in this statement could be referring directly to Shylock’s Jewishness; at this point he is all too aware that to Antonio, “Jew” and “dog” are synonymous, and he is simply using the same terminology—although to him, of course, the imitation would be ironic. In this case, Shakespeare would be suggesting that race is, in fact, a justifiable avenue for judgment, as Shylock claims that Antonio ought to “beware [his] fangs” because he is what he said he is—a Jew.

However, another reading is available to us: Shylock may be implying not that he is a dog by nature, but that he has been turned into a dog by being treated like one so much...