blog post 15

Francesco Argentina

Ms. Harrison

ELA

1/29/17

Blog post 15

Prompt: Shylock's speech

In the play The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare presents this interesting concept through his writing and through the character Shylock where he gives a very thought provoking speech about Jews and their feelings about the way the Christians look down on them and shines some light on the anti-semitism based society in which Shakespeare lived. This particular speech by Shylock was especially significant during this time because of the effect it had on the audience of Shakespeare's play. I would assume that to the white christian male audience, that the idea of being sympathetic towards the Jews would be absurd and not socially acceptable. For example, another playwright Marlowe, had previously written a play called The Jew of Malta in which the Jewish character was portrayed as a horrible villain with no positive qualities, and this is what the culture thought was acceptable at the time. So for Shakespeare to go and put this speech in his play, it was an incredibly controversial thing that he did and was the first time that this way of thinking rationally about the Jew’s feelings was introduced. From Shakespeare's perspective, he was just thinking about selling tickets and making money, but maybe including this monologue was actually a great business move as it most likely caused a lot of drama in the media, resulting in people going to see his show, because as we all know, controversy is what sells. In conclusion, I think this message was very beneficial to the development of this society in terms of our consideration for other cultures feelings and opinions.