The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0621 Tuesday, 4 July 2006
[1] From: Larry Weiss <
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Date: Monday, 3 Jul 2006 13:58:39 -0400 (EDT)
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0608 The Big Question
[2] From: Maureen Jansen <
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Date: Tuesday, 4 Jul 2006 12:44:09 +1200
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0614 The Big Question
[3] From: David Evett <
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Date: Monday, 3 Jul 2006 20:52:02 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0614 The Big Question
[4] From: Nabie Swaray <
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Date: Monday, 3 Jul 2006 18:51:15 -0700 (PDT)
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0614 The Big Question
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Larry Weiss <
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Date: Monday, 3 Jul 2006 13:58:39 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: 17.0608 The Big Question
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0608 The Big Question
Here I sit in the spacious lobby of the San Pietro villa on the Amalfi
Coast, luxuriating in acres of red and lavender fiori and basking in
sweet Tyrrhenian zephyrs, when I am assaulted by yet another visitation
from the moral relativism fairy.
Surely it must be pixie dust or some equivalent mind altering substance
that can so cause otherwise sensible people to attempt to justify
killing a man by slicing off his left pectoral by equating that with
such enormities as spitting in the street, hurling imprecations and
practicing law without a license. Or take this example from the usually
normal Frank Wigham:
>Is there a nice healthy moral version of "let all of
>his complexion choose me so"?
Before you tar and feather Portia for preferring not to marry a member
of another race, can we be sure that the same brush does not stand ready
to do its office for you. For example, many of the loudest defenders of
Shylock are among the first to condemn Jessica for breaking the taboo
against marrying a non-Jew. Even today, when it seems politically
incorrect for a Caucasian to express a preference not to marry a Negro,
it is still considered respectable for a Jew to insist on marrying only
another Jew. Indeed, many Jews will go so far as to excommunicate one
of their number who marries outside her faith and mourn for her as if
she were dead. When you condemn this insularity as racism then I will
listen patiently while you explain why Portia's preference for a husband
of her own race is reprehensible.
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Maureen Jansen <
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Date: Tuesday, 4 Jul 2006 12:44:09 +1200
Subject: 17.0614 The Big Question
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0614 The Big Question
New to the list, I'm enjoying the debate about Shylock.
Does anyone have any thoughts about the relationship between Shylock and
Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet? Does Shylock bear any of the hallmarks
of the later tragic heroes? I'm not a scholar but I have a similar
sympathy for Shylock as I have with the aforementioned victims of their
own folly, of fate, of their societies. I know that he is not plunged
into self-doubt in the same way as them. However, he does grapple with
his sense of his own identity. He fiercely defends his ethnicity and
religion from the contempt in which Antonio and his ilk hold him. When
he is informed of Jessica's betrayal of him he says: "The curse never
fell upon our nation till now; I never felt it till now". When Portia
orders his wealth to be taken from him, he says, "you take my house when
you do take the prop that doth sustain my house". There are more
poignant statements than these but these words come to mind when I sense
a Shylock who is forced to grapple with a world in which the old
certainties have been removed and he has to fight his way back to some
sort of understanding of himself or the world.
Surely, consciously or unconsciously, Shakespeare is showing us a man
who is as much sinned against as sinning?
Maureen Jansen
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: David Evett <
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Date: Monday, 3 Jul 2006 20:52:02 -0400
Subject: 17.0614 The Big Question
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0614 The Big Question
>I would like to reply to David Evert's comment that Portia's racist
>comment is intended "to show that Portia is a young girl naturally
>swayed by conventional standards of beauty: that she's not wise
>enough to completely discount them. But if even a black man
>chose the right casket he would have proved his essential
>rightness-his fairness-and following the wise command of her
>father, she would have to marry him."
Reasonable members of the list might suppose that this remark came from
me. It did not.
David Evett
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Nabie Swaray <
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Date: Monday, 3 Jul 2006 18:51:15 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: 17.0614 The Big Question
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0614 The Big Question
I share Ms. Barton's opinion of Portia's idea of "Mercy and Justice" as
a cruel irony to the Christian concept of Mercy, Forgiveness and
Justice. Many readers of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" had
grossly misinterpreted the playwright's original intentions. For those
who saw the play as anti-Jewish did so because they failed to see the
play as one of the greatest satirical plays on race and religious
belief. The Christians in this play see Shylock as the devil-incarnate
because of his behavior towards Christians and practicing usury. If ever
there was a play that challenged and mocked at the Christian doctrine of
the "Quality of Mercy and Forgiveness," that play is "The Merchant of
Venice." Kant, in his book: "The Old Saw" asked the question: "if it is
right in theory, shouldn't it be right in practice?" From time
immemorial, Christians like Muslims are quick to say: "I am a Christian"
or "I am a Muslim." But what makes a good Christian and a good Muslim?
Here is another cruel irony: the two greatest and most popular religions
of the world cannot, when the situation called for mercy and
forgiveness, show these sacred religious doctrines to their enemies. The
play is the greatest satire ever written about what is believed and
practiced. The crime and punishment in this play showed how ridiculous
human behavior is. In the New Testament, Christ is reported to have said
to the Jewish elders in the Synagogue when he declared: "The heart of
the Lord is mercy and not sacrifice." When I first read " The Merchant
of Venice," as a young man, I closed the book and shouted with the same
disbelief like George Brack in Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" on the shocking
discovery that Hedda has shot herself on the temple: "What, people do
not do such things!" Hedda like Portia had tried to live according to
the code of social mores that had dictated her behavior since childhood.
But her crime is, she has been living a conventional lie that her father
and society designed for her. When faced with reality, she behaved
exactly like any other human being and not as a saint. Portia also,
surrendered to the dictates of her conventional mores and shows that she
is no different from the other characters who demanded total punishment
and no mercy for Shylock. And yet are these really true Christians?
Radical Muslims behead their captives and regard their act as an act of
sacrifice, and in the process of killing their enemies would shout:
"Alahu-Akbar" or " God is Great." In Islam also, Muslims always refer to
their God or Allah as "The most merciful, the most compassionate and the
most forgiven." But when we reexamine the state of Islam then and now,
and its call for violence against non-Muslims, we would walk away with a
broad satirical laugh about the folly of religion. Let me again Return
to "The Merchant of Venice." Are we to believe that Portia and those who
called themselves Christians really acted as true Christians? There is a
sense of organized hypocrisy which reminds me of the tragic end of the
character Ill in the play "The Visit." His death was almost a public
lynching by those who claimed to be the pillars of society. What is
Justice? Where is Justice? What kind of justice did Shylock receive in
the hands of the so called Christians? Are we to praise such justice as
a sublime concept? Or to quote the very charge that England's first
Jewish Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who once accused Gladstone and
the Whigs when a fellow Jew, who was duly elected to the House of
Commons, of organized hypocrisy, if the candidate is forced to resign
his seat because he chose to take his oath in the Old Testament. This is
an example of religious intolerance and ethnic prejudice. The ending of
the play is a tragi-comedy because for one to be forced to abandon his
religion and accept another religion is spiritual and physical death.
Euripides, in the "Bacchae" also made a mockery of the belief in
traditional gods, in this case, Dionysus. If gods, according to Plato,
are better than human beings, Dionysus' idea of crime and punishment,
who claims to be a god, is really laughable. If the lesson of Euripides'
play is missed by many, Shakespeare, in "The Merchant of Venice" simply
reframed the same questions: What is Justice? What is Mercy? In whose
light should we modeled our behavior? Christians are asked to love their
enemies and neighbors and to also show mercy and forgiveness to those
who persecute them. Did we get any of these in Shakespeare's "The
Merchant of Venice"? Who really need repentance-Shylock or the
Christians? The behavior of Portia and the rest is the most unchristian.
Finally, those who accuse Shakespeare of being anti-Semitic must
rethink their position and reread the play like Nietzsche asks us to
read all great works: "to ruminate over the text as a cow chew the cud."
Nabie Yayah Swaray
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