Question

Imagine that you are in the place of Shylock’s character in the play ‘The Merchant of Venice’. Explain your actions throughout the play.​

Answer 1

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Portia enters, disguised as Balthasar. The duke greets her and asks whether she is familiar with the circumstances of the case. Portia answers that she knows the case well, and the duke calls Shylock and Antonio before her. Portia asks Antonio if he admits to owing Shylock money. When Antonio answers yes, Portia concludes that the Jew must be merciful. Shylock asks why he must show mercy, and, in one of the play’s most famous speeches, Portia responds that “[t]he quality of mercy is not strained,” but is a blessing to both those who provide and those who receive it (IV.i.179). Because mercy is an attribute of God, Portia reasons, humans approach the divine when they exercise it. Shylock brushes aside her pretty speech, however, by reiterating his demands for justice and revenge.

Portia asks whether Antonio is able to pay the money, and Bassanio offers Shylock twice the sum owed. If need be, Bassanio says, he is willing to pay the bond ten times over, or with his own life. Bassanio begs the court to bend the law slightly in order to exonerate Antonio, reasoning that such a small infraction is a little wrong for a great right. Portia replies, however, that the law shall not be broken—the decrees of Venice must stand. Shylock joyfully extols Portia’s wisdom, and gives her the bond for inspection. She looks it over, declares it legal and binding, and bids Shylock to be merciful. Shylock remains deaf to reason, however, and Portia tells Antonio to prepare himself for the knife. She orders Shylock to have a surgeon on hand to prevent the merchant from bleeding to death, but Shylock refuses because the bond stipulates no such safeguard.

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Answer 2

Explanation:

The plot of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ by William Shakespeare concerns a Christian merchant in Venice of the 1500s who must default on a large loan provided by a Jewish moneylender. The Jew is named ‘Shylock.’ The Christian hero and his friends regularly insult Shylock. The contract says that if the Christian defaults he must pay with a pound of flesh. The Jew demands payment as written. In the end Shylock is denied the right to take the life of the Christian. He is humiliated. His daughter is married to a Christian. The young couple take what remains of his fortune. Shylock is impoverished and forced, on pain of death, to convert to Christianity. The treatment of Shylock by his Christian adversaries is presented as self-obvious and proper though some ambivalence remains.

Previously there had been a TRUE report from Italy (reported by the historian, Cecil Roth) in which a Christian demanded a pound of flesh as payment of a debt from a Jew. This case of Christian vindictiveness may have been transformed into a tale illustrating alleged Jewish rapacity. The transformation from victim to culprit would have already taken place in literary sources before reaching Shakespeare. He may well have believed it. Shakespeare may have been dealing with what hemistakenly understood to have been an historical event.