The Social Stereotyping Of Jews In The Merchant Of Venice And The Arabian Nights

2016 ◽  
pp. 2519
Author(s):  
مصطفى محمد
Keyword(s):  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Arabian Nights ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Social

Richard Mackenney, Venice as the Polity of Mercy: Guilds, Confraternities, and the Social Order, c. 1250–c. 1650. Toronto Italian Studies. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2019, xiii, 471.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 551-552
Author(s):  
Thomas Willard
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Legal Scholar ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
Italian Studies ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Social ◽  
University Town ◽  
The University

Shakespeare is well known to have set two of his plays in and around Venice: The Merchant of Venice (1596) and The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (1603). The first is often remembered for its famous speech about “the quality of mercy,” delivered by the female lead Portia in the disguise of a legal scholar from the university town of Padua. The speech helps to spare the life of her new husband’s friend and financial backer against the claims of the Jewish moneylender Shylock. The play has raised questions for Shakespearean scholars about the choice of Venice as an open city where merchants of all nations and faiths would meet on the Rialto while the city’s Senate, composed of leading merchants, worked hard to keep it open to all and especially profitable for its merchants. Those who would like to learn more about the city’s development as a center of trade can learn much from Richard Mackenney’s new book.

scholarly journals Eucharistic Love in The Merchant of Venice

2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-116
Author(s):  
Ian McAdam
Keyword(s):  
Saint Paul ◽  
Gender Construction ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Masculine Identity ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Christian Men ◽  
Masculine Gender

The article considers the ambiguous characterizations of The Merchant of Venice in light of Protestant and Catholic interpretations of the Eucharist, and raises implications for masculine gender construction in the opposition between Jewish and Christian cultural and theological perspectives. The argument focuses on the character of Antonio, whose masochistic self-sacrifice distorts Paul’s theology of grace. The homoerotic element in Antonio’s drive toward self-sacrifice is crucial in the play’s disruption of orthodox theological positions, and the waning tradition of homoerotic amity evoked by the playwright is related to the connection between amity and Eucharistic theory suggested in the Catholic Thomas Wright’s commentaries on the Sacrament, contemporaneous with the play. Shylock’s independent masculinity, not his effeminacy, ultimately operates as the real source of anxiety for the play’s Christian men, and the narrowing of Christian atonement to the romantic self-interest and masochism of the repressed Antonio contributes to The Merchant’s key suggestion that masculine identity remains dependent on the necessary and rigorous self-discipline imposed by the “law”—theological, moral, and sexual. The play thus implicitly addresses challenges posed by a theology of grace to the process of masculine self-fashioning in the social context of the Reformation. Cet article examine du Merchant of Venice du point de vue des interprétations protestantes et catholiques de l’Eucharistie, et soulève des questions au niveau de la construction du genre masculin dans l’opposition des perspectives culturelles et théologiques juives et chrétiennes. La discussion se penche en particulier sur le cas du personnage d’Antonio, dont l’auto-sacrifice masochiste offre une image déformée de la théologie de la grâce de saint Paul. L’élément homo-érotique de l’attirance d’Antonio pour ce sacrifice est central dans la rupture avec l’orthodoxie théologique de la pièce. On observe par ailleurs un lien entre la tradition déclinante de l’amitié homo-érotique évoquée par l’auteur de la pièce et le rapport proposé à la même époque entre l’amitié et la théorie eucharistique par le catholique Thomas Wright dans ses commentaires des sacrements. La masculinité indépendante de Shylock, et non son caractère efféminé, devient éventuellement la principale source d’angoisse chez les hommes chrétiens de la pièce. La réduction de l’expiation chrétienne à l’intérêt romantique pour lui-même et le masochisme qu’éprouve un Antonio renfermé contribue à ce que le message du Merchant est sans doute que l’identité masculine demeure dépendante d’une auto-discipline nécessaire et rigoureuse imposée par la « loi », théologique, morale et sexuelle. La pièce traite donc indirectement des défis que pose la théologie de la grâce au processus de l’identification masculine dans le contexte social de la Réforme.

scholarly journals Economic Obsession in Early Literary Imagination: Shakespeare, Jonson and More

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-80
Author(s):  
Francis K. H. So
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Social Economy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Operational Mode ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Social

That revenues, profits, wealth, valuables, properties and various forms of riches can be so attractive to most people is because these resources affect the operational mode of social economy and personal well-being. As a major driving force of social development, the desire to accumulate wealth affords people the prospect of leading a comfortable life. Yet the acquisition of which may bring down other people to become poorer and creating potential social injustice. Three interrelated concepts in money spending: consumption, fear of poverty and social justice/injustice are markedly shown in some of the great minds among English writers. In this article, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Ben Jonson’s Volpone and Thomas More’s Utopia are used to demonstrate the concerns of the early modern English mentality. Some scholars have suggested that the first two playwrights reflected the fear that their London would come to be ruled by corruption, swindling, greediness, vicious competition and unethical business practices. In this pre-capitalist economy, people are seen to adopt unfair competition and reciprocal malice in order to accumulate wealth. Entrepreneurial liberation in economic affairs sets off the dark side of hu manity in which the playwrights were most probably implicated. To counteract this rapacious thinking, Thomas More offers his conception of a wealthy and happy worldly life. Not to attack the self-centered, bene fit gaining intentions, Utopia builds up a society that claims fairness, commonwealth, more obligations than privileges and the wiping away of vanity. Mercantilism is not denied, yet private property is contained. Written earliest among the three works, Utopia anticipates the two plays that dwell on social evils sparked by over concern for personal gains. Generally, the three works lay the foundation of positive and negative aspects of economy in terms of production, marketing, circulation, consumption and services of the English mind of that era. The social mood borders on the financial and political matters of the bourgeois class while providing a mega-worldview as well as micro-worldview of economic concern of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England.

scholarly journals 'Desperately Mortal': Exclusion in Shakespeare's Legal Plays

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 181 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R Morss
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Social ◽  
Measure For Measure ◽  
The Law ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
Key Characters

<p>Shakespeare’s most explicitly ‘legal’ plays are The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure. Both examine the interaction between human desire on one hand and the law on the other. In both plays laws cuts through the social hierarchies, either neutralising or exaggerating them. Key characters find their exclusion nullified by the law, and then discover inclusion is far worse than exclusion.</p>

The Merchants and the Jew of Venice: Wealth’s Communion and an Intruder

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. Barber
Keyword(s):  
Direct Influence ◽  
Large Structure ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Symbolic Action ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Social ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost ◽  
Organic Combination

This chapter examines Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. This play as a whole is not shaped by festivity in the relatively direct way as in Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play's large structure is developed from traditions which are properly theatrical; it is not a theatrical adaptation of a social ritual. And yet analogies to social occasions and rituals prove to be useful in understanding the symbolic action. The chapter pursues such analogies without suggesting, in most cases, that there is a direct influence from the social to the theatrical form. Shakespeare here is working with autonomous mastery, developing a style of comedy that makes a festive form for feeling and awareness out of all the theatrical elements, scene, speech, story, gesture, role which his astonishing art brought into organic combination.

scholarly journals Żydowskie aktorki z Polski w rolach szekspirowskich w teatrze jidysz

2021 ◽  
pp. 343-375
Author(s):  
Agata Dąbrowska
Keyword(s):  
Professional Preparation ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Daily Newspapers ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Yiddish Theater ◽  
Inherent Part

Jewish Actresses From Poland in Shakespearean Roles In the Yiddish Theater The article aims at analyzing the role played by Jewish actresses in the development of the Shakespearean Yiddish theater. The paper includes the profiles of artists coming from Poland and/or working in the Polish lands: Bertha Kalisch, Miriam Orleska, and Ester Goldenberg, who contributed to popularization of Shakespeare’s works among the Jewish community. Moreover, the article illustrates their contribution to the changes in the perception of Jewish theatre from the “jargon drama”enterprise to an ambitious cultural institution with a Shakespearean repertoire. Among those discussed are the characters of Hamlet performed by Kalisch, Portia (The Merchant of Venice) played by Orleska, Jessica (The Merchant of Venice), and Ariel (The Tempest) interpreted by Goldenberg, and their assessment. The reception of these stage creations of Shakespearean heroes is analyzed on the basis of press materials published in daily newspapers and weeklies in Yiddish, Polish, and English. Some academic studies on the premieres of Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest with participation of Jewish female artists have already been conducted, but their authors did not analyze the roles performed by those actresses and did not refer to the sources in Yiddish at all. The article discusses not only the artistic activities of Kalisch, Orleska, and Goldenberg, but also attempts to analyze the reception of the characters created by the latter two artists from the perspective of the social and political relations in the Second Polish Republic. Moreover, efforts were made to show that Jewish actresses, by impersonating heroines and heroes of Shakespeare’s plays, proved with their style of acting, professional preparation, and understanding of the nuances of the performed characters that Yiddish theater definitely deserved to be called a temple of art. Their creations became an inherent part of the history of Jewish, and thus the world’s Shakespearean theater.

Friendly Credit and its Dangers

2021 ◽  
pp. 77-123
Author(s):  
Laura Kolb
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Flexibility ◽  
Over Time

This chapter reads Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness alongside early modern letter-writing manuals. In the early seventeenth century, popular epistolary manuals began to include examples of letters begging for money and letters denying or extending loans. These fictional epistles offer a repository of stock phrases and rhetorical moves useful for eager borrowers and unwilling lenders alike, two positions most of the books’ users would occupy at one point or another over the course of their lives. Letter-writing guides teach their users the necessity of self-contradiction over time: of now adhering to one set of values and practices, now to another. Shakespeare’s and Heywood’s plays analyze their protagonists’ inability to do precisely this. In Merchant and A Woman Killed, tragedy or near-tragedy results from the failure to exercise the social flexibility necessary for balancing the demands of love with those of thrift.

“Which is the Merchant and which is the Jew?” a Žižekian Reading of the Jewish Question in The Merchant of Venice

CLEaR ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-31
Author(s):  
Shih-pei Kuo
Keyword(s):  
Human Factor ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Domino Effect ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Social ◽  
Inherent Vulnerability

Abstract This essay borrows Žižek’s interpretation of racism which combines the Marxist and psychoanalytic perspectives to read Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. I argue that Shylock, the Jewish usurer, embodies both the structural contradiction of capitalism and the social contradiction which characterizes the Venetian setting torn by capitalism and Christianity. As Shylock exposes these contradictions which the Christian Venetians refuse to confront, he is destined to be a scapegoat. From the Marxist point of view, the survival of capitalism relies on incessant production, which also means incessant investment of capital. Therefore, an active financial system is requisite to sustain the prosperity of capitalism. Paradoxically, this necessary condition of capitalism which facilitates the maximum use of cash is also its inherent vulnerability: once the circulation of cash is disrupted, it can lead to the crisis of the overall domino-effect collapse. The usury represented by Shylock indeed reflects such inherent contradiction of capitalism. Also, usury, which excludes any human factor and only engages the direct monetary exchange, also contradicts the Christian orthodox belief of generosity and unrequited devotion. These central Christian values are certainly questioned as Bassanio’s courtship of Portia, based on his disguised wealth, is indistinguishable from a profitable enterprise. From the psychoanalytic point of view, Shylock’s fascination with money and revenge also mirrors the Christians’ clandestine longing for these two forbidden enjoyments. However, what is more puzzling and hostile to the Christians is Shylock’s paranoid insistence on bloody revenge beyond the concern of monetary gains, “che vuoi,” an unexplainable desire of the other. Therefore, Shylock the other must be vanquished, by converting him to Christianity, in other words, by homogenizing him, to disguise the Christians’ problematic of desire.

The Merchant of Venice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Tom Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice
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