Shylock: Hero or villain?

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Shylock: Hero or villain?

        The Jews ancestral home-land, where they had lived for hundreds of years was Palestine. However, they were exiled from this land in about the year 400 AD. They scattered out and formed a Diaspora, a community of exiled people. Once the Roman Empire had deteriorated, a lot of them began to make their way back to Palestine, which was then invaded by the Turks, and ruled by them for 800 years until the British came.

        The Jews came over to Britain with William the Conqueror in 1066, and in 1217 they had to wear yellow badges to distinguish them. They were heavily discriminated against and were blamed in murder cases often involving Christian children, leading to many Jews being executed. In 1269 their rights were restricted; they couldn’t own land and they were made unable to inherit anything. In 1290 the Jews were expelled from Britain and were disallowed for 350 years. Many plays were written about evil Jews. The Merchant of Venice was written by William Shakespeare although he had never met a Jew in his life, he doesn’t seem to portray Jews in his play as evil as a lot of them in plays in his time. 

         

        I don’t think Shylock can really be defined as either a hero or a villain, because this seems, to me, to immortalise him. A hero is someone who constantly strives, sometimes against everything else, for good, and a villain is someone who intentionally causes evil for his own selfish purposes and doesn’t care for anyone else.         If the title was ‘Shylock: Good or bad?’ then I would say that throughout the play that he is probably more bad than good, however, I don’t believe that this proves him to be a villain. To really get a clear idea of this I looked through the different points of the play and found evidence both for and against Shylock. 

        First of all, having read the play and looking over it all, it’s clear that Shakespeare doesn’t seem to have written him as purely a villain or purely a hero, he is portrayed, simply, as a human. A human, who like millions of others, seeks revenge, wants justice fair rights and has basic needs too. I think, for someone who has never met a Jew, and who’s grown up in the majority of society saying Jews are evil, Shakespeare has created a very open minded characterisation.

        Shylock’s story begins when he’s just starting to snap; all of his life has been a struggle. Not only have his fellow Jews and ancestors been persecuted for their religion, but so has he. The Christians have made it so that he can only do one job, then they slander him for charging interest and making a profit. In our first meeting with Shylock and Antonio together, Shylock complains that Antonio always insults him, spits on him and dismisses him. Antonio says:

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‘I am as like to call thee so again, to spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.’

This blatantly shows his disrespect for Shylock and his open hatred for him. However, this doesn’t represent clearly his hatred for Shylock’s race, and when,  Shylock says, in an aside, on his first sight of Antonio in the play, ‘I hate him for he is a Christian’ This is a general term of racism he uses, and it would be easy to accuse Shylock of being a villain from this evidence. But, further on, in the aside. He exposes information about ...

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