Melina valente1 1 English
undergraduate student at University of São Paulo. E-mail:
melvalente4@
gmail.com Abstract: This paper aims a comparison between the rumination observed in the character Shylock, in Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, and the rumination of our society addressing the issue of prejudice and anti-Semitism. Psychological aspects of the character were considered making use of the play’s metaphors depicting econom-ic exchanges. The rumination is used here as a metaphor on how we could dwell over art and literature’s themes to reflect upon our society issues.
Keywords: Anti-Semitism. Rumination. Shakespeare. Shylock. Zeitgeist.
A
s any science-fiction enthusiast knows, whenever we make a drastic time travel, some aspects are not very well brought in the same shape. As we take William Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, written in the late 16th century, to our con-temporary times, some of its aspects might warp if taken literally. That is precisely what stirs up accusations about the prejudice issues of the play and such controversy trou-bles contemporary audiences with the possibility of its anti-Semitic theme.But why cannot we stop ruminating over the alleged anti-Semitic aspect of the play as a major question? It seems it is worth the debate and doing so we can move on.
Shylock is a complex character; on his ambiguity we tend to sympathize with him at the same time that we could consider that his obsessive, non-indulgent hate to-wards Antonio is a trait of his villainy. But in such politically correct times of ours, our feelings are determined: it is wrong, wrong, very wrong to hate Jews and anything that might remotely suggest that, even a Shakespeare’s play, must be immediately sup-pressed.
It is essential to overcome the fact that Shylock is not simply a Jew, ‘C’estn’est pas une juif’2 - he is a fictional character, which does not represent, endorse or create the archetype of the Jews, neither instruct how anyone should act towards Jews, as well as how any Christians should behave. Prejudice is a matter of minority and evidently if the Christians were minority, the play could also be regarded as anti-Christian, based on Antonio’s behavior, regardless the plot’s outcome. This rumination reveals the Zeitgeist of the present time and the anti-Semitic issue is the reduction of the discussion to where all the stigmas became leveled down. In such sense, the play might as well be perceived
2 Reference to René Magritte’s painting
“c’estn’est pas une pipe”, 1929 which makes clear that the object of analysis is the painting and not literally a pipe.
Juif means Jew in French.
as bullying the Scottish, Italian, French, German, blacks etc.
Furthermore, one might dwell on Shylock’s behavior. He has a hard time overcoming things and his rumination seems to be his very distinguished fea-ture. On his brooding over his losses, he analyzes the situation but not himself.
Nevertheless, on the judgment day he is his own council, and it is not beneficial to him. Shylock is a man portrayed - as Gar-ber puts it - “with preference of unplea-sure to pleaunplea-sure (...) joyless, (…) and with a house shut off against the world” (GAR-BER, 2004 p. 229). His solitude seems to give emphasis on his literal interpreta-tion that drives his “deep sense of justice mixed up with the gale and bitterness of his resentment” (HAZLITT, 1817 page 146).
Shylock and Antonio’s economic moods reflect their actions because the perception of risks is what leads them.
Antonio is the optimist; he takes risks be-lieving that in the future they will pay off (equally to his investment on his feelings for Bassanio). On the other hand, Shylock is the pessimist; he lends money with in-terest, and the deal is always better when the result is disastrous for the borrower - the plot takes place in a commercial-ori-ented Venice, where money would rep-resent a compensation for his emotional losses. This trade is not bound to please bears and bulls3 since every market is a cut-throat market in its own praxis (and that cut aspect is taken in a very extreme way by Shylock).
Shylock’s resentment is shown in Act I, scene III, when he says to Anto-nio: “Still have I borne it with a patient
shrug, for sufferance is the badge of all our tribe” (SHAKESPEARE, 1958, p. 275).
But his silence aggravates, his feelings are suppressed and Venice is not the setting of the play by chance - as a matter of fact, Venice was as a city where the economy was at its peak and the force of trading was expected to eclipse cultural and re-ligious differences, at least superficially.
And as Shylock cannot abandon his feud, we seem not to let go the anti-Semitic is-sue in the play either.
The ‘tragic fact’, as Bradley ex-plains, is when “men may start a course of events but can neither calculate nor control it” (BRADLEY, 1905, p. 10). In this sense, Shylock take action to mute his ruminations, but this goes wrong and the resentment he inflicts on himself became his punishment, with the subsequent ex-ternal consequences coming after in the trial scene.
Shylock’s goal was to revenge the misconduct perpetrated by all the Chris-tians, especially Antonio, and in doing so he approaches his frustrations. The means for that were economic ones, as a Jew he was able to lend money with inter-est, something that the Catholic church reproaches, despite the fact that at the same time benefits from it. Shylock’s plan backfires (as the tradition of the small words of any contract taught us, there is relevance in the content, even though dis-guised in the form) his attachment to the law is strict, but the preponderance of the economic forces are imperative: Portia has not only the rhetoric, but the capital.
If rumination is the compulsively focused attention on the symptoms and
3 In the financial jargon, the bears buy and the bulls sell bonds.
on its possible causes and consequences of one’s distress, it is the opposite to its solutions. Rumination focuses on bad feelings and experiences from the past and is associated with anxiety and other negative emotional states.
In Goal Progress Theory (GPT), ru-mination is conceptualized not as a reac-tion to a mood state, but as a “response to failure to progress satisfactorily towards a goal” (MARTIN, 2004, p. 153).
Our poor Shylock felt and felt again (etymologically resentment derives from old French resentire which means feel again) and after four hundred years the present reader keeps reading Shake-speare. On brooding over in a literal man-ner the pseudo anti-Semitic aspect of the play, our punishment is to censor it, and therefore miss the debate on what could teach something about, at least, rumina-tion itself. Y
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