Talk:Shylock/Archive 1

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==Untitled==
Elements of the Character
"While Shakespeare almost certainly intended Shylock to be an anti-semitic caricature" ???

I don't think Shakespeare meant any character to be a caricature, and Shylock in particular is portrayed much more sympathetically than his contemporaries would have. This section needs to be rewritten.

No character a caricature? In the same play, Merchant of Venice, what are the Prince of Morocco and the other foreign suitors for Portia's hand if not caricatures?

They're not charicatures, just small parts. ThePeg

Whatever Shakespeare intended, he created the most powerful negative stereotype of a Jew in literature. The picture of the money-lending Jew with his knife, poised to gouge out the heart of the noble Christian Antonio, has been used with great effect by anti-Semites ever since. (See for example, John Gross 'Shylock His Legend and Legacy,' Leslie Fiedler's 1940s article in Commentary, "What shall we do about Fagin?' etc.)British Labour Party hacks briefly used "Shylock" in 2005 as a way to attack the Conservative leader Michael Howard, of Jewish descent, and promptly denied any anti-Semitic intent. (See BBC News Online) The biggest problem with Shylock is that his bloodthirsty hatred of Christians viscerally connects with fear and hatred of Jews in medieval Europe, where they were periodically accused of killing Christian children and even of using the victim's blood in Passover matzos, as a prelude to pogroms. (See Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, Malamud's The Fixer, etc.) Liberals see the play as a plea for tolerance, which it is at one level: the jew-baiting by the Christian majority and the forced conversion leave a modern audience uncomfortable. But by making the Jew a compelling bogeyman, Shakespeare did generations of Jews no favors.

[[Isaac Asimov]] in his Guide to Shakespeare points out that the name "Shylock" is totally fictitious and has never been used by a real person. Das Baz, 7 April 2006, 10:26 AM.


'''Why I think Shylock is intended to be good'''

A) The Jew, in Shakespeare's time, was like the witch in Grimm fairy tales. They were the stereotypical bad guys. However, Shakespeare makes Shylock an actual person, whose motives are not that he is Jewish, but that others have been so horrible to hime on account of he's Jewish. It would be as if the witch in Hansel and Gretel had a backstory, and a reason for putting the pair in the oven other than the obvious argument that she's the witch. Shylock has a dead wife whom he loved, a daughter who hates him, and lives in a Jew-hating society
B) Portia's famous Mercy Speech is all about how the merciful are divine. However, right ater the speech, they expend no mercy upon Shylock, making him give up his money, his business, and his faith. This subtly shows, to me, that the true villains are the conventional "good guys", Antonio, Portia and the like. They are all extremely hypocritical, and hypocracy was not a very good trait to have in Shakespeare's time (though ironically pretty much everyone was hypocritical.)

That's my two cents.

--[[User:Kamikazetomato|Kamikazetomato]] 04:26, 31 July 2006 (UTC)