The Merchant of Venice is said to be a story of averted threats ending in happiness. Elaborate on your views.

Calling The Merchant of Venice a play about averted threats ending in happiness is a description that in some ways, but not all, sums up the play.
The main crises averted are, first, the threat that Portia might be married to a man she despises, and second, that Antonio will have to allow Shylock to cut a pound of flesh from his heart. In both cases, a heart would be cut out—Portia's metaphorically (by being denied marriage to the man she loves and respects) and Antonio's literally. Married to the wrong man, Portia would experience a form of death; Antonio would experience a literal death without his heart. The two crises, as we can see, are thematically linked.
Portia's is averted not through her agency, but through either good fortune or Bassanio's wisdom in selecting the correct casket. Her fate is caught up in a legal system that allows a father to sacrifice his daughter to his whims.
Antonio is also caught in a cruel legal system, dependent on Portia's mind and skills to set him free. Luckily, her skill as a lawyer and orator averts his crisis, even if she has to disguise herself as a man to be allowed to speak.
Shylock is not so lucky, as circumstances face him with crises he cannot avert, such as the elopement of his beloved daughter Jessica with a Christian man and the dire consequences of having gone to court confident he was in the right, only to have the tables turn on him. There is a happy ending for those in the dominant group in this society, but not for the Jewish man.


The Merchant of Venice does indeed end in happiness after the aversion of an number of threats, but only for the play's Christian characters. Antonio has been spared the necessity of giving a pound of flesh to Shylock, thus avoiding certain death; Portia has avoided the unwanted attentions of a couple of gold-digging suitors thanks to the cleverly-devised casket test; and Bassanio has finally ended the threat of debt hanging over his head by marrying the wealthy Portia. All in all, the play's Christian characters have done very nicely. All's well that ends well.
The same, however, cannot be said for Shylock. As well as missing out on his chance of taking revenge, he has been forced to convert to Christianity. Shylock cordially loathes Christians for the anti-Semitic prejudice that he—as with all other Jews in Venice—is forced to endure on a daily basis. Christianity is a threat to him and everything he holds dear. To be forced, then, to convert to what he regards as such a pernicious creed is about as far from a happy ending for him as it's possible to get.


The Merchant of Venice seems to have a happy ending for most of its characters. The threat to Antonio has been lifted, and the couples celebrate happily in the close of the play after the action in the courtroom has ended. The one person, of course, for whom things do not turn out well is Shylock.
From Shakespeare's own time (and before) until well into the twentieth century, anti-Semitism was so rampant that audiences, readers, teachers, and critics tended to have little or no sympathy for Shylock. Although Shylock's "pound of flesh" requirement is obviously a grisly and sadistic idea, Shakespeare's depiction of Shylock in other respects would seem calculated to engender some understanding of a man victimized by his outsider status. We are told that Antonio has spat upon Shylock "many a time and oft in the Rialto" and that Shylock has "borne it with a patient shrug / For patience is the badge of all our tribe." In his soliloquy "I am a Jew," Shylock expresses a basic truth about the cruelty and injustice of religious and ethnic bigotry. It is difficult, in this context, to view the conclusion of the play as "happy" by anyone with our own time's (hopefully) humane and enlightened standards.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How does Bilbo show leadership and courage in The Hobbit?

Bilbo’s increase in confidence and courage is the defining aspect of his character arc. At the beginning of the novel, he is shut away content in his Hobbit hole, happy to remain separate and coddled from the rest of the world. In the movie, Bilbo chooses to join the dwarves on their quest out of a sense for adventure. In the book, however, Bilbo wants nothing to do with them and only joins because he had been duped into signing a contract. Despite being on the adventure somewhat against his will, Bilbo still proves himself time and again, saving the dwarves from the spiders, the trolls, and a number of other dangers they encounter along the way. Bilbo’s character arc has even been cited as a sort of Christian metaphor for the growth of the soul, though how much Tolkien intended on this front is up for debate. From a thematic standpoint, the ring of invisibility also plays into Bilbo’s brand of bravery. If Hobbits are the overlooked creatures of Middle Earth, then it is noteworthy that...
Read more

In “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes that the “lesson” of her story is that “it is distinctly possible to remain too long at the fair.” What does she mean? How does the final section of the essay portray how she came to this understanding, her feelings about it, and the consequences of it?

In this classic essay, Didion describes moving to New York City from her native Sacramento at the age of twenty-one, and, as she freely admits, a somewhat naive twenty-one, her mind, "programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard about New York," with the typical feeling, at that age, that, "nothing like this...has ever happened to anyone before." Intending to stay for only six months, she falls in love with the city. As she says, "I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again." This initial love led her to prolong her residency, since, "I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month." But as the next years roll past, and the "new faces" she encounters...
Read more

Why does the poet say "all the men and women merely players"?

It's one of the most famous lines in literature: All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players . . . This famous saying comes from Shakespeare's play As You Like It, and it's spoken by Jacques. What he's saying here is that simply going about our daily lives is a type of performance. Just like actors on a stage, we all have roles to perform: Daughter. Student. Sister. Captain of the soccer team. The fact that Shakespeare writes that men and women are merely players suggests that the roles are preordained and that a person's choice in being a mother, for example, or a doctor or starting point guard for the Brooklyn Nets is out of their hands. What roles a person performs over the course of their lifetime is up to fate. The notion that "all the world's a stage" has entered pop culture, but within the context of the play, this idea does not sit well with Jacques. He's a pessimist, and the idea that everything is up to fate makes...
Read more