The headline on Tribune staff reporter Ron Grossman’s recent opinion piece calls Shakespeare a “classic anti-Semite” for his play “The Merchant of Venice” (“A classic anti-Semite? Try William Shakespeare,” Perspective, Jan. 30). Should we then call the Bard anti-Moroccan for “Othello,” anti-Scottish for “Macbeth,” anti-monarchist for “Richard III” or “King Lear”? These plays are not about stereotypes but about people who are unbalanced by circumstance or by nature, and the drama that results from their obsessions.
Shakespeare makes it clear that Shylock is unbalanced by circumstance, not monstrous by nature. The character is a nuanced portrait of a man, already enduring discrimination, who suffers a dual loss: his daughter, the precious continuation of his race, and his money, the only security for a second-class citizen.
During the play Shakespeare explores access to justice for minorities and the struggle between philosophies of justice and of forgiveness.
He portrays the Christian majority as privileged, prejudiced and profligate. He allows Shylock to end as a somewhat sympathetic, deflated, tragic figure, rather than a monster.
In an age not noted for understanding of the other, Shakespeare saw the dramatic potential of oppression and wrote a play that inhabits to a remarkable degree the world of the Jews of his time.
It is a pity to see “The Merchant of Venice” as a portrait of a monster, and not to see its analysis of how a man living in the shadow of privilege and discrimination could become monstrous–a lesson we would do well to understand today.
