FREE ESSAY ON MERCHANT OF VENICE

MERCHANT OF VENICE

Many scholars think that William Shakespeare was an anti-Semite, and yet others feel that
he was in fact not anti-Semitic. I think along the same lines as the people that feel
that William Shakespeare was not anti-Semitic. I have read the Merchant of Venice and the
evidence that I gathered from that made me think that Shakespeare isn't anti-Semitic. I
noticed that he placed characters in this story that were anti-Semitic, like Antonio, but
I don't feel that he was trying to express how he felt through his characters. He also
put in some evidence that would support the way that I feel about Shakespeare's views on
the Jewish Religion. One piece of evidence that I noticed began on line 55 of 3.1, and it
reads: I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimension, senses,
affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the
same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer
as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? Shylock. 
I feel that writing this line into the play Shakespeare was trying to show that
Elizabethans that Jewish people were like them. I also feel that if Shakespeare was
anti-Semitic, he wouldn't have had Shylock live or at least be tortured more. In
conclusion, that is why I feel that William Shakespeare was not anti-Semitic, even though
he put characters in his plays