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Through the years, The Merchant of Venice has been one of William Shakespeare’s most
popular and most frequently performed plays. The work has an interesting and fast-moving plot,
and it evokes an idyllic, uncorrupted world reminiscent of folktale and romance. From the
opening description of Antonio’s nameless sadness, the world is bathed in light and music. The
insistently improbable plot is complicated only by the evil influence of Shylock, and he is
disposed of by the end of act 4. However, Shakespeare uses this fragile vehicle to make
significant points about justice, mercy, and friendship, three typical Renaissance virtues.
Although some critics suggest that the play contains all of the elements of tragedy only to be
rescued by a comic resolution, the tone of the whole play creates a benevolent world in which,
despite some opposition, things will always work out for the best.
The story, based on ancient tales that could have been drawn from many sources, is actually two
stories in one—the casket plot, involving the choice by the suitor and his reward with Portia, and
the bond plot, involving the loan and the attempt to exact a pound of flesh. Shakespeare’s genius
is revealed in the way he combines the two. Although they intersect from the start in the
character of Bassanio, who occasions Antonio’s debt and is a suitor, they fully coalesce when
Portia comes to Venice in disguise to make her plea and judgment for Antonio. At that point, the
bond plot is unraveled by the casket heroine, after which the fifth act brings the celebratory
outsider, the anomaly in this felicitous world. Controversy rages over just what kind of villain
Shylock is and just how villainous Shakespeare intended him to be. The matter is complicated by
the desire to absolve Shakespeare of the common medieval and Renaissance vice of anti-
Semitism. Some commentators argued that in Shylock Shakespeare takes the stock character of
the Jew—as personified in Christopher Marlowe’s Barabas in his The Jew of Malta (1589)—and
fleshes him out with complicating human characteristics. Some went so far as to argue that, even
in his villainy, Shylock is presented as a victim of the Christian society, the grotesque product of
hatred and ostracism. Regardless of Shakespeare’s personal views, the fact remains that, in his
The more significant dramatic question is just what sort of character Shylock is and what sort of
role he is being called upon to play. Certainly he is an outsider in both appearance and action, a
stranger to the light and gracious world of Venice and Belmont. His language is full of stridency
and materialism, which isolates him from the other characters. He has no part in the network of
beautiful friendships that unites the others. He is not wholly a comic character, for despite often
appearing ridiculous, he poses too much of a threat to be dismissed lightly. However, he is too
ineffectual and grotesque to be a villain as cold and terrifying as Iago or Edmund, or one as
engaging as Richard III. He is a malevolent force, who is finally overcome by the more generous
world in which he lives. That he is treated so harshly by the Christians is the kind of irony that
ultimately protects Shakespeare from charges of mindless anti-Semitism. Still, on the level of the
romantic plot, he is also the serpent in the garden, deserving summary expulsion and the forced
common civilization of Venice. As they come into conflict with Shylock and form relationships
with one another, they act out the ideals and commonplaces of high Renaissance culture.
Antonio, in his small but pivotal role, is afflicted with a fashionable melancholy and a gift for
friendship. It is his casually generous act of friendship that sets the bond plot in motion. Bassanio
frequently comments on friendship and knows how to accept generosity gracefully, but Bassanio
is not only a model Renaissance friend but also a model Renaissance lover. He is quite frankly as
interested in Portia’s money as in her wit and beauty; he unself-consciously represents a cultural
integration of love and gain quite different from Shylock’s materialism. When he chooses the
leaden casket, he does so for precisely the right traditional reason—a distrust of appearances, a
recognition that the reality does not always correspond. Of course, his success as suitor is never
really in doubt but is choreographed like a ballet. In any case, it is always the third suitor who is
the successful one in folktales. What the ballet provides is another opportunity for the expression
Portia, too, is a heroine of her culture. She is not only an object of love but also a witty and an
intelligent woman whose ingenuity resolves the central dilemma. That she, too, is not what she
seems to be in the trial scene is another example of the dichotomy between familiar appearance
and reality. More important, she has the opportunity to discourse on the nature of mercy as
opposed to strict justice and to give an object lesson that he who lives by the letter of the law will
perish by it.
With Shylock safely, if a bit harshly, out of the way, the last act is an amusing festival of
vindication of cultural values. The characters have had their opportunity to comment on the
proper issues—love, friendship, justice, and the disparity between appearances and reality. Now
all receive their appropriate reward in marriages and reunions or, in the case of Antonio, with the
pleasantly gratuitous recovery of his fortune. There is no more trouble in paradise among the
people of grace.