English 345.01 Study/Discussion Questions

Stephan Flores and Alli Machlis (we drew these up separately, so there's some overlap--Alli's questions appear after mine)

The Merchant of Venice

 

1. Draw a set of concentric circles on a piece of paper to represent society in play, and place the main characters to show the relationship of each to the mainstream society in the center. Explain your choices in positioning each character (as ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’). What are the relationships between specific characters? Explore the perspective or understanding of a particular character.

 

2. Group activity: identify a pair of characters who have something in common. One student will play each character, and the third will interview the characters. Together compose a series of questions for the interviewer to pose, designed to explore, compare, and contrast what the two characters have in common. The characters players will answer primarily without a script. If the group has four students, students can plan to rotate roles.

 

3. Katherine Eisaman Maus poses a series of opening questions about the play:

            a. What is the play’s representation or stance regarding anti-Semitism? Note that Jews had been deported from England in the Middle Ages, and were still depicted in highly negative ways in contemporary writings and literature.

            b. Does Portia represent "womanly virtue" or is she a manipulative virago?

            c. What are the obligations of majority cultures to minorities in their midst? Do the play's characters favor their own "kind?"

            d. Are there universally shared human characteristics, and if so, do they outweigh religious and cultural differences, or are such differences decisive? (Norton ed. p.1081)

 

4. Venice is represented as a cosmopolitan marketplace and community where trade among nations and different cultures thrives. Explore the significance and effects of the play’s setting in relation to such social and economic relations. As Maus notes, Shakespeare juxtaposes social relations based on similarity with social relations based on economic interest, but the Christian merchant-adventurers tend to take risks in their getting and spending, and their "generosity, grace, and self-assurance have a disconcerting racist tinge" (1083).

 

5. Shylock is portrayed largely in terms of his isolation (from daughter, servant, larger social groups). What produces such isolation and what meanings does his separateness convey? Does he identify with particular people or values that contrast with his apparent isolation?

 

6. Maus also notes that the Christians’ magnificent improvidence is a distinctively aristocratic attitude of professed unconcern with monetary expenditure. It may also be linked to a Christian outlook of belief in divine grace and a willingness to risk all to be saved or to be charitable, in contrast to the emphasis within Judaism on justice and respect for adhering to the letter of the law, even as it applies to or privileges economic relations in Shylock's primary view. Despite the initial "pound of flesh" bargain, however, Shylock is not only concerned with monetary matters. Explore consistencies and inconsistencies or contradictions within the different social groups and in characters' speech and behavior.

 

7. Maus notes that such inconsistencies "haunt the play’s friendships and marriages" (1086). Marriage is a hybrid social relation that is associated with love, with reproduction, and with property relations. She notes that the language of Bassanio's courtship and attraction to Portia is full of the metaphors of commerce and exchange. For example, examine the casket test scene with such considerations in mind (3.2).

 

8. Consider the extent to which Portia's cross-dressed disguise (as the young lawyer, Balthasar, 4.1.162 ff.) offers greater liberty of action for her, and note how it may coincide with the presence of a "scapegoat" outsider figure such as Shylock: is there more freedom for women in this play when men and women are not so directly opposed to each other in the context of the opposition men and women in a dominant national community may share in opposition to an "alien" in their midst?

 

9.. Evaluate and analyze Portia's initial plea for mercy (perhaps founded on a Christian premise of saving grace), and her ensuing judgment which cites a law against any alien who plots the death of a Venetian citizen; Shylock's life is spared, but at least half of his wealth is demanded, he must become a practicing Christian, and he must provide for his daughter, Jessica who has eloped with Lorenzo, a Christian. To what extent does a spiritual life and social recognition, in this play, depend upon material prosperity?

 

10. To what extent does the scene between Jessica and Lorenzo, even despite their allusions to unhappy love stories (5.1) offer an alternative vision of interaction between ethnic groups (in relation, for example, to the trial scene and its outcome).

 

11. How do you/we understand Portia-as-Balthazar's request for Bassanio’s wedding ring as payment for legal services, and Bassanio’s compliance with this request (and note as well that Graziano gives up Nerissa's ring, see 4.2 and 5.1).

 

12. Reflect on how McEvoy's commentary affects your understanding and perspectives. For example, he states that "it can be argued that this is a play that ends with a woman very much empowered, while the men have been embarrassed and outwitted" (Shakespeare: The Basics p.165 in Second Edition), as for example when the ring as symbol of "male possession of women is transformed into a symbol of women slipping out of male power" (167), just as riddling language in the final scene also marks such slippage, and may pose the question: "Could a woman be the sort of friend (/lover) to a man that Antonio was to Bassanio?" (168). Do such egalitarian sentiments affect the representation of Shylock?

 

1. Explore the opposition of Mercy versus Justice set up by Portia's speeches in the courtroom. (4.1)
2. How does the play examine male/male relationships and male/female relationships (or force them to compete)? (1.1, 4.1)
3. How are Antonio's "human" concerns confused with financial concerns in 1.1?
4. Explore whether Shylock’s speech in 3.1 changes the play's overall tone from anti-Semitic to sympathetic to Jews and/or Shylock.
5. Why might this play be difficult to fit into conventional comedic form? Is it funny?
6. What is relevant to today about the positions of outsiders in this play? Who would Shylock and Jessica be? What groups occupy similar positions to these characters today?
7. Trevor Nunn, director of Masterpiece Theatre's The Merchant of Venice, states, "My intention is to show that the play is as much anti-Christian as it is anti-Jewish. It is a masterpiece about human behavior in extremis." Is this approach warranted by the text?
8. John Drakakis argues that The Merchant of Venice generates a difference "between its own historically specific concerns and those of the modern world," as well as generating a "sameness in so far as those historical differences can be collapsed into a timeless presence." How do we reconcile/interpret the play in light of this difference and sameness?
9. Leslie Fiedler, in an analysis of Othello and The Merchant of Venice, asserts, "exploited outsiders tend to resemble each other strangely, so that women and Jews fall together not only in Shakespeare but in the imagination of the Western world as a whole." Do women and Jews “fall together” in The Merchant of Venice? If so, where does one locate Jessica, Shylock’s Jewish daughter turned Christian?
10. While Jessica’s conversion to Christianity suggests a "normalizing" return to the dominant order of Venetian society and a rejection of the "otherness" of her father, does her subversion to her father's patriarchal authority, mark a reversal of obedience to dominant power?
11. What does the play, in its attack on Shylock's value of money, and the riddle of the caskets, say about material wealth in Venetian society?
12. What is the effect, on the play as a whole, of Shylock's forced conversion?
13. Explore the importance of gender boundaries and cross-dressing to the three characters, Jessica, Portia, and Nerissa. Do they achieve power or reinforce gendered identities in The Merchant of Venice?
14. Is John Drakakis' assertion that "Jessica is, more substantially than the other female characters in the play, that symbol of excess that patriarchy will always fear," an accurate assertion about Jessica as an erotic other?
15. Explore Lancelot's role/position. How does he treat Jessica and how does that position him in Venice?
16. Is Shylock an isolated figure? If so, how does this add to his demonization as a Jew or lessen the anti-Semitism of the play?
17. Examine the play's critique of Christianity through Shylock's speech. ( 3.1)
18. Explore how the play may or may not enact a vision of assimilation. Which characters have access to this vision?
19. Explore the roles/positions of Salerio, Solanio, and Graziano.

Further Questions and Resources

On Library Reserve, under Engl 345 Shakespeare, see:
in A Companion to Shakespeare, Vol. 1, Sasha Roberts, "Reading Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love: Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra in Early Modern England"
in Companion to Sh. vol 3 see Marion Wynne-Davis, "Rubbing off Whitewash: Intolerance in The Merchant of Venice
also essay collections on MV ed. by Martin Coyle, also volume ed. by Wheeler, MV: Critical Essays, and by Mahon & Mahon, eds. MV: New Critical Essays