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What You’ll Love about… The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice shows how friendship, fatherhood, and community intersect in interesting ways.
The Merchant of Venice is most interesting when it demonstrates the antisocial tendencies of friendship, courtship, family, and community. It might seem like an oxymoron: antisocial community. But we all know that communities can be ruthless in snubbing or ostracizing members for a whole host of reasons. Communities often restrict themselves to people of certain religions, races, incomes, ages, political allegiances, sports team loyalties, etc., and even if they aren’t busy excluding people along these lines, rancor can develop among neighbors for more idiosyncratic reasons that inevitably arise when people live near each other.
The most notable feature of The Merchant of Venice is its depiction Shylock, who is Jewish. I’m afraid the play reflects the prejudices of its original audience. Stereotypes were all Shakespeare’s audience were likely to know about Jews, because they probably would never have met one. They certainly wouldn’t have had Jewish neighbors, because King Edward I expelled all Jews from England in 1290, and it wasn’t until 1657, well after Shakespeare’s death in 1616, that Jews were once again permitted to reside in…
