Shakespeare’s Purpose of Portraying Shylock in the Merchant of Venice10.doc

PAGE  PAGE 13 Shakespeare’s Purpose of Portraying Shylock in the Merchant of Venice  = 1 \* ROMAN I. Introduction William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is one of the most remarkable playwrights and poets the world has ever known. With his 38 plays, 154 sonnets and 2 long poems, he has established his giant position in world literature. He has also been given the highest praises by various scholars and critics the world over. In the past four hundred years, books and essays on Shakespeare and his works have kept coming out in large quantities. Ben Jonson once wrote a person once wrote a poem eulogizing Shakespeare as being “not of an age, but for all time”. Shakespeare’s greatness as a playwright and the success of his plays on the stage from Elizabethan England up to the present-day world chiefly depend upon his penetrating exposition of human nature, his lively paintings of human life and his truthful reflections of human reality. His works provide us with a vivid and authentic panorama of his age. All this, for Shakespeare, has been achieved through his unremitting endeavor in bringing about his lofty ideal of humanism and his painstaking efforts in mastering various techniques. He is not only a master of English language but also a genius of character portrayal and plot construction. The Merchant of Venice ranks with Hamlet as one of Shakespeares most frequently performed dramas. Written sometime between 1594 and 1598, the play is primarily based on a story in Il Peotone, a collection of tales and anecdotes by the fourteenth-century Italian writer Giovanni Florentine. There is considerable debate concerning the dramatists intent in The Merchant of Venice because, although it conforms to the structure of a comedy, the play contains many tragic elements. One school of critics maintains that the drama is fundamentally allegorical, addressing such themes as the triumph of mercy over justice, New Testament forgiveness over old testment law, and love over material