Essays on The Merchant of Venice

Few Shakespearean plays have aroused such controversy and debate throughout the centuries, as has The Merchant of Venice. This potentially tragic play masks itself in comedy, giving its audience a glance at the inherent social prejudices of Renaissance Europe. But just at the moment when...

Merchant of Venice is a play written by William Shakespeare in the 1600s. The Merchant of Venice is a play that focuses on love and revenge in a world of religious intolerance between the Christian and Jewish population of Venice. The Merchant of Venice contains...

An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind Here in Canada, we do not have the death penalty as punishment. Our judicial system shows mercy even to the worst of criminals by sparing their lives. Yet even to this day, in some countries...

To Read or Not To Read: Analysis of Discrimination in The Merchant of Venice The Merchant of Venice is a painful read—much more than Shakespeare’s other plays—because it portrays oppression without taking a stance one way or the other. Portia is undermined by societal gender...

Art reflects the social context it was created in, and so can be useful in determining social opinions of different time periods. Live theatre is no different, and the way minority characters were written and portrayed on stage can be valuable to understanding how they...

William Shakespeare includes a Duke to represent the utmost authority figure in many of his plays. In The Comedy of Errors and The Merchant of Venice, both Dukes hold complete control—or, at least, what they perceive to be complete control—over their respective regions. Shakespeare uses...

Enter the Jew. In this way does Shakespeare usher the character Shylock into his play The Merchant of Venice, and here begins the greatest controversy that plagues this work. The Elizabethan era, the time in which Shakespeare lived, was a time brimming with hostility toward...

Despite the lack of a strong paternal figure in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, two separate father-daughter relationships play an integral role in the central plot of the play. The strained relationship of Venetian moneylender Shylock and his daughter Jessica, as well as the nonexistent...

In William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice it is important to notice that the title is not The Tragedy of the Merchant of Venice, but rather, just The Merchant of Venice. Although many people find it a rich tapestry of controversial topics, one must wonder...