Resumo de The Merchant Of Venice - William Shakespeare

The historical context of The Merchant of Venice turns, for the most
part, on one question: the status of Jews in Shakespeare's England.
Jews had lived in England throughout the Middle Ages; they were treated
then as property of the King, and were permitted to stay in England,
over the protests of the Church, only by his good graces. In fact,
English kings allowed the Jews to remain in England largely for
financial reasons: practicing trades, particularly money-lending, that
were highly profitable but forbidden to Christians for religious
reasons. Jews earned large sums of money, profits that were then, under
the burden of equally large taxes, usurped by the King. Eventually,
taxation impoverished most English Jews to an extent that they were no
longer a source of revenue for the King; at that point, the King,
Edward I, expelled the Jews from England in 1290. A few Jews converted
to remain in England, but most were banished. Thus, there were
essentially no Jews living in Shakespeare's England, making it unlikely
that Shakespeare ever even met one.The
Merchant of Venice was probably first performed in 1596 or 1597. At
that point, two treatments of Jews, one legal and one dramatic, were in
recent memory. In 1594, Roderigo Lopez, one of the few Jews in England,
and the Court Physician to Queen Elizabeth, was put on trial for
treason. At a time of feverish anti-Spanish sentiment, Lopez, of
Spanish descent, was the victim of a court intrigue (involving an
aspirant to the Spanish throne named, like the merchant of this play,
Antonio), and was accused of conspiring to assassinate the Queen. On no
evidence, Lopez was convicted of treason and hung for his supposed
crime. The result of the trial was an upsurge of anti-Semitism in
England, a sentiment to which this play can arguably attribute some of
its initial popularity.The primary dramatic influence on
Shakespeare's play is undoubtedly a play, likely of 1589, by the other
major playwright in Renaissance England, Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe's
The Jew of Malta features Barabas, the Jew of the title, who is
portrayed, like Shylock, as a scheming and sinister profiteer who ends
up losing his daughter and paying for his crimes. Marlowe's play makes
little of justice or of Barabas' humanity, representing his actions as
a spectacle of rather extreme villainy (most infamously, Barabas
poisons all of the nuns in a convent). Many readers have argued that
Shakespeare's play is a deliberate reworking of Marlowe's, one that
takes his rival playwright to task for his pandering anti-Semitism, and
instead portrays Shylock as a human being, not, like Barabas, a
caricatured Jew.That reading, like all interpretations of the
relationship of this play to anti-Semitism, is an object of contention.
And an essential part of the historical context of The Merchant of
Venice is the history that has happened long after its composition.
Recent productions have revealed that it is difficult to reconcile what
seems to be the overt anti-Semitism of the play's heroes, and indeed
of the very character of Shylock, to post-Holocaust sensibilities. To
read The Merchant of Venice is to enter into a very real historical
conflict, one that sets the politics of Shakespeare's time against the
politics, and ethics, of our own.

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