Friday, May 1, 2009
The Merchant of Venice
An interesting point I found in watching The Merchant of Venice was the appearance of a reoccurring theme throughout the semester; prejudices. The prejudice focused on in Merchant was differing religions. Shylock disliked everyone else in the play because they were all Christians. And reversely everyone else in the play disliked Shylock because he was Jewish! This theme never gets old, I can plays based off of prejudices a million times over and it still will interest me (as long as I'm not reading the same play a million times over, I'm talking about reading different plays which total up to a million plays!). I mean think about it, there is some form of prejudice feelings between characters in ALL the plays we read (except maybe Art, unless you consider the idea that the friends are prejudice against the forms of art the others like). Also think of this, Shakespeare wrote this play in the late 1500's, M Butterfly was written in the late 1900's. And both can be related to society today. I just thought it was interesting that no matter what type of play you read or watch there is always going to be a point of prejudice somewhere in the plot.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Prejudice is an on-going human problem.
ReplyDeleteIt is also well suited to theatre where the idea of perception v. reality (or illusion v. reality) is often written into scripts, but also always present as there is something inherently not real about a play. It seems that the idea of prejudice fits right in with this--our perception of other cultures and lifestyles versus the reality of them and our own experience with, to use the academic concept, otherness.