Common Module - Merchant of Venice Essay PDF

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Common Module essay for advanced english on the Merchant of Venice which received a 18/20 in the HSC...

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ROS - MOV ESSAY While theatre purportedly holds a mirror up to human nature, the fact that playing can imitate life provokes a questioning of what defines truth at all. Manipulating the complexities of the theatrical and comedic form, Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’ entangles us in a multifaceted web of paradoxes and inconsistencies where the lines between artifice and truth are blurred, a space where an individual’s true nature cannot be delineated from mere acting. From this inherently subjective and pluralistic framework, Shakespeare asserts that an individual’s roles and bonds to self, others and society come to define their actions, thus creating a human experience bereft of any universal principles except it’s susceptibility to change. Shakespeare encapsulates this flux through dramatising the inconsistencies that define his characters behaviours, subsequently encouraging audiences old and new to recognise the inherent complexity of the human experience as an axiom which transcends the limits of absolutist human rationalisation.

In meticulously constructing the Merchant, Shakespeare employs his form as a vehicle to blur the lines between acting and being and ultimately, artifice and truth. From within the theatrical form, dramatic irony endows readers with an awareness of the characters acts of deception and disguise subsequently revealing how limited our view of others can be, and in this way, Shakespeare is inviting us to consider the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of discerning the absolute truth. Such deception is encapsulated by Portia disguised as Doctor Balthazar, a guise which Shakespeare couples with sophisticated lexicon to bestow her with agency as Lorenzo says to Portia and Nerissa, “Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way of starved people”. Ostensibly, the audience views this as an attempt to subvert Venetian hierarchies, however, by using disguise in a performative manner, Shakespeare is revealing the malleability of language and how it can be used as a tool to fashion the truth through lies, consequently impeding humanities ability to differentiate acting from being and thus the true nature of the human experience. Shakespeare further conveys our inability to ascertain singular transparent truth as he performs a deeply subversive Christian ending to the play as he attempts to communicate how, as the ‘other’, structurally and in a meta way, Shylock provides the conflict and in many ways the story. Shakespeare applies the BOO bw “flesh and blood” and H+V villain as a metonym for the HE as he asserts we cannot have one without the other; an inextricable bond that lies at the heart of our inability to grasp an absolutist definition of the human experience. Thus, through irony and paradox, Shakespeare blurs the distinctions between artifice and reality revealing how meaning lies in our construction, a concept which underscores the futility of ever attaining the definite truth.

The centrality of bonds in the play reflects the value that societal roles hold in defining identity, paradoxically creating a human experience riddled with singularities and defined solely by flux and change. Shakespeare’s characterisation of the complex and paradoxical Shylock and his relationship with Antonio is performative of the power entrenched within societal roles as they define individual experience. This becomes immediately clear at the beginning of the play as Antonio’s self-reflexive negation, “I know not why I am so sad” is driven by surrounding characters who define Antonio by his wealth as Salarino states, “Your mind is tossing on the ocean, there where your argosies with portly sail”. Dramatically, Antonio’s sadness diminishes as his role becomes more vital through his signing of the bond of “flesh and blood” with his theological ‘other’ in Shylock. Cleverly, Shakespeare manipulates this binary of hero and villain found in Shylock and Antonio to invite us to see the unchallenged role bonds in defining our individual and collective identities. Shakespeare achieves this by undermining the simplicity of their roles as he highlights how the othering of Shylock shapes his villainy as Shylock exclaims, “the villainy you teach me I shall execute”. In revealing this paradox within the villain, Shakespeare successfully communicates the complexity of the human condition as the audience comes to perceive identity as a construct forged by one’s unique interactions with society. Hence, Shakespeare uses the relationship between characters as a mechanism to emphasise the unbridled power of bonds and roles in defining self, thereby creating a framework from which to assert the singularity of the human experience as if individuals have unique bonds then so too must their human experiences be defined by such idiosyncrasies.

By revealing the inconsistencies of human behaviour and the paradoxical unity of traditional binaries, Shakespeare asserts that we must relinquish our attempts to define the human experience in absolutist terms. Manipulating the archetypal story of God and Satan, Shakespeare bastardises the binary of good and evil through his contextually subversive characterisation of Jews and Christians throughout the play, highlighting the fallibility of conventional narratives of religion in delineating human experience and extolling a common humanity instead. This is best revealed in the court scene as Portia states, “Mercy is above the sceptred sway… It is an attribute to God himself”. This reveals the inconsistencies in human behaviour, as Portia, a Christian, speaks of mercy as it reigns supreme to any mortal act of goodness, establishing mercy as a precept which transcends socio-cultural divides and instead lies at the core of what it is to be human. However, while Portia extols the importance of mercy, fails extend mercy to the “Jew”, Shylock, on grounds of difference and self-imposed superiority, thus embodying the dogmatic Christian paradigm of the Elizabethan era that held that Jews have no entitlement to conserve mercy which is further emphasised through the Dukes’ hubris as he states to Shylock, “We all expect a gentle answer, Jew”. After making the social stratification within Venetian society evident to the audience, Shakespeare employs irony as a vehicle to highlight the fallibility of human knowledge as the Duke states, “How shalt thou hope for mercy, rendering none?”, a tremendous inconsistency tearing down the integrity of the religious system, underscoring the paradoxical nature of society in its entirety. Thus, in highlighting the opposites and binaries engrained in society, Shakespeare underscores the fallibility of human reasoning in attempting to understand an inherently incomprehensible human experience that vacillates between incohesion and unity.

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Ultimately, Shakespeare utilises the dialogic platform that theatre offers to present a human condition seemingly bereft of singularity and definition. By drawing our attention to the conflation of binaries, the complexities of paradoxes and the bonds of opposites, Shakespeare presents a resounding message: humanity must relinquish their dogmatic search for absolutist truth and power in favour of a quietest acceptance of the inevitable flux and inconsistencies within the human experience.

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