The Merchant of Venice
Mar. 18th, 2005 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
millariAll right, I admit it. Never read it. Went to see the movie tonight at Pleasant St not really knowing much of the story except the pound of flesh thing. Some reflections:
1. Wow. And to think that Shakespeare must have been a raving liberal in his time. The anti-Semitism was hard to take, especially when his daughter runs away and all he seems to really care about is his honor and his gold; but what really shocked and bothered me was the humiliation of Shylock towards the end of the trial. I was gratified to know I wasn't the only one. There were barely audible groans running through the little airplane theater audience during the parts where they really debase him. The way his daughter abandons him to become a Christian and gets rewarded at the end basically because she elected to no longer be Jewish also left a bad taste in my mouth. It felt like watching in silence as two people have a conversation about the dirty Mexicans or something.
2. Pacino did a fairly classy job making Shylock as believeable a character as I imagine was possible given the original play. The seething, almost unbearable anger that he carried with him throughout the whole movie as a badge of pride reminded me of a conversation I had once with one of my African-American students.
3. Having never read the play and not really knowing the intricacies of the plot, I could tell there was some subtleties that I was missing due to the archaic language. Somewhere during the movie, I realized that this is what it would be like for my students to see *any* Shakespeare. They probably would have very little idea what was going on.
4. I don't know if events in the play are set up in the same order as the movie, but the whole thing with the lost wedding rings seemed like a tacked-on epilogue to me, an attempt to inject some levity after the really traumatizing trial scenes. I suppose there was a thematic connection between Jessica being rumored to have given away her father's ring and the two rings that were indeed given away, but after that extended trial scene, this duplicitious power play game about the rings seemed utterly and annoyingly trivial. Is this how Shakespeare arranged scenes in the play?
5. Is there no explanation in the play about how on Earth the wives ended up intercepting the letter from Dr. Bellario that allows them to concoct their crossdressing impersonation scheme?
1. Wow. And to think that Shakespeare must have been a raving liberal in his time. The anti-Semitism was hard to take, especially when his daughter runs away and all he seems to really care about is his honor and his gold; but what really shocked and bothered me was the humiliation of Shylock towards the end of the trial. I was gratified to know I wasn't the only one. There were barely audible groans running through the little airplane theater audience during the parts where they really debase him. The way his daughter abandons him to become a Christian and gets rewarded at the end basically because she elected to no longer be Jewish also left a bad taste in my mouth. It felt like watching in silence as two people have a conversation about the dirty Mexicans or something.
2. Pacino did a fairly classy job making Shylock as believeable a character as I imagine was possible given the original play. The seething, almost unbearable anger that he carried with him throughout the whole movie as a badge of pride reminded me of a conversation I had once with one of my African-American students.
3. Having never read the play and not really knowing the intricacies of the plot, I could tell there was some subtleties that I was missing due to the archaic language. Somewhere during the movie, I realized that this is what it would be like for my students to see *any* Shakespeare. They probably would have very little idea what was going on.
4. I don't know if events in the play are set up in the same order as the movie, but the whole thing with the lost wedding rings seemed like a tacked-on epilogue to me, an attempt to inject some levity after the really traumatizing trial scenes. I suppose there was a thematic connection between Jessica being rumored to have given away her father's ring and the two rings that were indeed given away, but after that extended trial scene, this duplicitious power play game about the rings seemed utterly and annoyingly trivial. Is this how Shakespeare arranged scenes in the play?
5. Is there no explanation in the play about how on Earth the wives ended up intercepting the letter from Dr. Bellario that allows them to concoct their crossdressing impersonation scheme?
