The Merchant of Venice (1596)

I had to use a guide to understand the old English. Typical Shakespeare. Don’t really understand the Roman mythology. Wasn’t really funny. Old English again. Humor was different then. ( )

It was okay ( )

Bassanio, a noble but penniless Venetian, asks his wealthy merchant friend Antonio for a loan so that Bassanio can undertake a journey to woo the heiress Portia. Antonio, whose money is invested in foreign ventures, borrows the sum from Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, on the condition that, if the loan cannot be repaid in time, Antonio will forfeit a pound of flesh. Antonio is reluctant to do business with Shylock. ( )

Hmmmm I'm just now seeing a theme of faithfulness and faithlessness in these Shakespeare plays. I feel a paper coming on.... ( )

And so ends my Year of Shakespeare. My roommates and I have, from April 2020 - April 2021, read aloud all of Shakespeare's plays (including Edward III, Pericles, and Two Noble Kinsmen, and excluding the contested Double Falsehood and Sir Thomas More, though those may be yet to come). What a ride. Honestly, I would recommend it to anyone for whom the idea holds some interest. There's a lot of underappreciated Shakespeare (though that seems like an oxymoron), some of which I'd read before but lots of which I hadn't. Stand-outs in the "unsung" crowd were Coriolanus, Two Noble Kinsmen, Troilus and Cressida, Henry IV Part 2, Antony and Cleopatra, and to a lesser extent Henry VI Part 3, King John, Edward III and Pericles.

But none of this has been about Merchant of Venice. So here goes-- mostly I don't quite know what to think about the play, but I'll take a stab at it. It seems to me that the main thrust of the play is that every person in it turns all of their personal relationships (with the possible exception of the relationship between Launcelot Gobbo and Old Gobbo) into monetary transactions-- not just employing each other, but buying each other's love, stealing from each other, praising beauty in terms of gold and jewels. Marriages especially are wealth contracts. Every character is turned into a merchant of affection. And then Shylock is the one among them who makes the natural extension of that paradigm and wants to turn a monetary transaction into one of flesh, literally, for which attempt he is completely undone and destroyed. Not that you SHOULD be able to cut a pound of flesh out of someone who owes you money. Just that Shylock's claim literalizes, and thereby exposes, the terrible and depressing way in which everybody is behaving. That's my interpretation, anyway. Oh and then Act 5 happens because Shakespeare remembered he was supposed to be writing a comedy.

In an ideal performance of Merchant of Venice, Shylock's "You have among you many a purchased slave" speech should be the center of the whole play. ( )