The Merchant of Venice The Director’s Interpretation.

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The Merchant of Venice The Director’s Interpretation.

The play “The Merchant of Venice” was written about 1596 by the great English playwright William Shakespeare. Although the play has gone through some revisions it has never been changed a great deal. In the past fifty or so years as Hollywood has come into light and the movie adaptations of some of Shakespeare’s greatest plays have been shown in a different perspective, they have given us other peoples pre-conceptions of the play. The Merchant of Venice is no different with several variations of the play on the silver screen. In this piece of work I am going to show how the director of the play has changed it in any way from what I thought of the original text. It was directed and produced by Jonathan Miller and starred Lawrence Oliver.

As I read the text I had many of my own pre-conceptions about setting, characters, personalities, traits and how they moved around the stage, and that the play would remain intact on the big screen-how wrong I was.

First I will deal with the characters how the text made me feel towards them and how I thought they would look. Lawrence Oliver portrayed Shylock enigmatically as he always had the presence of power and forcefulness on screen through his actions and words. I imagined Shylock to be a short, withered man who was quite plump, greedy, bald and of no conscience what so ever. The play made me feel no sympathy towards him as he was taking a man’s life away and that he was the one who should be at the receiving end of the knife not poor Antonio and that he showed no remorse for what he was about to do. However in the film I saw a man who was six foot tall and was a proud man, who I felt the other characters were persecuting for being a Jew. When he was being referred to in the play he was referred to as the Jew not Shylock. I felt this was of no significance until I saw the film and was surprised to see how much hatred was put into the saying the Jew. As if hatred flowed through the one syllable word, if he was in the room people would refer to him as the Jew but not to Shylock but indirectly as if he wasn't even there. Yes he was a cold hard man but in my opinion the film made me feel sorry for him as he had lost a wife and daughter. Jessica Shellac’s daughter is what I believe has fueled his hate of Christians as she has eloped and got married to one. But in the book it is said to have been Antonio the Christian’s good deeds towards the people who owe Shylock money and can’t afford to pay and I feel that Shylock was the victim in this film and was the main character as it was all about the bond. I say victim because I didn’t feel that in the play that there were any anti-Semitic feelings towards Shylock but in the film I felt that the other characters hated him, as he was a Jew. It was not the place of the other characters to judge Shylock for taking his bond as it was Antonio fault for making the bond between him and Shyllock as he shouldn't have gambled so much on the prevailing winds as we should say.

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Antonio is the merchant of Venice and as one of the plays main characters it was important to my vision of the play as to what he was like. I pictured a man in his late twenties, tanned and of high stature in society as he had a lot of money and his personality was that of happiness and of the joy of life which was being taken away from him by the cruel and tyrannical Shylock. Whenever I saw him in the film I saw a man of about 65 standing sullen as a priest at a funeral who was ...

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