'Shylock is the characterisation of the ratial feeling
prevalent in the European Society in
Shakesperean era'
explain
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
Twenty years ago, studying The Merchant of Venice at school, I was delighted when my English teacher picked me to perform Shylock. It took me a while to realise that this gender-blind casting (admittedly, it was an all girls’ school) was racially specific, owing nothing to my skill as an actress but rather to the fact that I was one of only a handful of Jewish students in my year. During the trial scene, the instructions were to lick my lips in anticipation at the blood I was about to spill and generally make Shylock as malevolent as possible until we booed him like a pantomime villain. Portia, cross-dressing legal eagle, became our feminist heroine. When Jessica abandoned her father and stole his jewels, the entire class cheered and then, obedient daughters, went home to our parents.
he Merchant of Venice is termed a comedy since it ends in marriage rather than death. Good triumphs over evil (‘mercy’ represented by Christian Portia being good; ‘usury’ represented by the Jewish moneylender Shylock being evil) and everyone who matters lives happily ever after. According to my teacher, this was Shakespeare’s authorial intention, how it was played and received in Elizabethan England, and so this is what we were taught in late 20th-century Manchester. But my family’s attitude to the play was the opposite – ‘that horrible, anti-Semitic play’ they called it, the slights Shylock endured comparable to those many of our friends and relatives had experienced a few decades earlier in Second World War Europe, his forced conversion tragic, too painful to watch in the face of what they’d been through. For my community, the play’s most positive aspect was Shylock’s ‘dignified’ response to those tormenting him: ‘Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?’ (3.1.59–60) became a battle cry against all harms done, the shadows of the Holocaust still so close.
Answer:
Explanation:
Twenty years ago, studying The Merchant of Venice at school, I was delighted when my English teacher picked me to perform Shylock. It took me a while to realise that this gender-blind casting (admittedly, it was an all girls’ school) was racially specific, owing nothing to my skill as an actress but rather to the fact that I was one of only a handful of Jewish students in my year. During the trial scene, the instructions were to lick my lips in anticipation at the blood I was about to spill and generally make Shylock as malevolent as possible until we booed him like a pantomime villain. Portia, cross-dressing legal eagle, became our feminist heroine. When Jessica abandoned her father and stole his jewels, the entire class cheered and then, obedient daughters, went home to our parents.
he Merchant of Venice is termed a comedy since it ends in marriage rather than death. Good triumphs over evil (‘mercy’ represented by Christian Portia being good; ‘usury’ represented by the Jewish moneylender Shylock being evil) and everyone who matters lives happily ever after. According to my teacher, this was Shakespeare’s authorial intention, how it was played and received in Elizabethan England, and so this is what we were taught in late 20th-century Manchester. But my family’s attitude to the play was the opposite – ‘that horrible, anti-Semitic play’ they called it, the slights Shylock endured comparable to those many of our friends and relatives had experienced a few decades earlier in Second World War Europe, his forced conversion tragic, too painful to watch in the face of what they’d been through. For my community, the play’s most positive aspect was Shylock’s ‘dignified’ response to those tormenting him: ‘Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?’ (3.1.59–60) became a battle cry against all harms done, the shadows of the Holocaust still so close
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