OK, I don’t venture into Pit debates that often and I have a feeling that I’m going to regret this, but I can’t resist Shakespeare threads. I’m going to admit up front that I tend to get a bit defensive about The Merchant of Venice; it’s one of my favorite works to teach precisely because it’s so complicated.
Shakespeare isn’t a moralist. Writing off one of his works because it doesn’t teach good lessons for teenagers is missing the point. He’s a playwright, and one of the reasons why he’s a great playwright is that he writes compelling, tightly balanced conflicts between people of different world-views, since drama is all about conflict. It’s a pretty safe bet that he wanted people to leave the theater arguing about whether Romeo and Juliet were right to defy their parents – with luck, they’d take the argument to the nearest tavern, and the rest of the customers would overhear, and next day there would be more people wanting to see the play. It’s both good theater and good business to write plays that give voice to multiple points of view, and most of the time Shakespeare is so successful at this that it’s hard to tell what he thought about any given character or position.
The Merchant of Venice is one of the best examples of this. Sure, Shylock’s the antagonist and a would-be murderer, but he’s also a complicated, multi-dimensional character who has got a legitimate point. Antonio has made an enemy of Shylock through his anti-Semitism, and then come crawling to him as soon as he needs money. Christian Venice is a society of hypocrites; they own slaves, practice revenge, and depend heavily on the Jewish money-lenders that they also casually abuse. Shylock points all of this stuff out, and nobody denies that he’s telling the truth. (He’s also, incidentally, so much in love with his dead wife that the loss of a ring she gave him absolutely shatters him – a tiny detail that has no bearing on the plot of the play, but which speaks a lot about him as a character, especially in comparison to Bassanio’s and Gratiano’s willingness to give away rings given to them under similar circumstances.)
Is Merchant anti-Semitic? Maybe; it does imply that Christian values are superior to Jewish ones (when the Christian characters actually manage to practice them, which they often don’t), and the happy(ish) ending does involve two out of three Jewish characters converting to Christianity – although Shakespeare doesn’t present Shylock’s forced conversion as unproblematic. I can certainly imagine myself giving an A on an essay to a student who argued that it was an anti-Semitic play, even though I don’t personally agree with this interpretation. But I would also expect the student to grapple seriously with the elements in the play that pull against this reading, to acknowledge the fact that many critics, actors, and audiences have not seen it as anti-Semitic, and to articulate a well-reasoned response to these opposing arguments. Furthermore, I would expect that response to be based on a close, careful reading of the text itself and some knowledge of its historical context, not the fact that there were performances in Nazi Germany (there have, after all, also been performances in Israel, so the stage history doesn’t prove anything by itself).
These are the skills that English literature classes are designed to teach – to pay attention to the details of the text, to pull those details together into a focused interpretation, and to address and respond to potential objections to that interpretation. It’s not about memorization, it’s about close reading and careful argument. As it happens, these are also essential skills for lawyers, which is one of the reasons so many undergraduate English majors end up in law school. (For what it’s worth, I agree that trying to use Merchant to learn about contract law would be exceedingly silly.)
