Movie Review! The Merchant of Venice

[pargoletta]

While watching this movie, a thought came to my mind, and the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that I'm on to something:

Over the course of centuries, a couple of William Shakespeare's plays have been lost, possibly forever. The Merchant of Venice is one of these lost plays.

Comments

[pargoletta]

Thank you! And good to see you around, too! I thought you'd disappeared sometime while I was away.

I was thinking of the laws of kashrut, yes. Blood is unclean, and there's even a shot of a shochet slaughtering a goat in the ritual way to ensure that all the blood drains right away. Flesh and blood together probably don't enter Shylock's mind all that much.

The other thing that might have been on his mind is the blood libel. He's on shaky enough ground as it is, the last thing he needs is to get home his pound of Antonio's flesh and blood and have the cops come after him with the blood libel on their minds.

[pargoletta]

Shakespeare would not have been aware of the issues to that degree of specificity, though he does know a few things. He knows that Jews don't eat pork, and has Shylock refusing to eat at Bassanio's house because he's afraid that Bassanio will serve him pork (he's probably right -- he does end up at the dinner party after all, and he's the only one not eating). Shakespeare probably never met a real live Jew, as they were banned from England at that time -- even Catholics had a hard time. In standard Elizabethan drama, The Evil Jew was a stock character, and Shakespeare's genius was to take this stock character and make him three-dimensional, a real person with wants and feelings. But that's as far as Shakespeare went