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Based off of the texts Othello and The Merchant of Venice, William…
Based off of the texts Othello and The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare is not racist nor is he anti-Semitic, he is merely an observer of human life who addresses the two subjects through his characters.
If you think a bit deeper about the concept of Christians being racist and discriminating others, it shows how hypocritical the characters were in Shakespeare's work.
In both Othello and The Merchant of Venice, the majority of the characters practice Christianity and one character of a different race/religion are the odd man out. However, when you look deeper into the text, there is much more behind the Christians hatred than just racism.
"This reading offers a measured departure from most existing scholarship by exploring the play poststructurally as the sight of a metaphoric, performative conversion where Shakespeare employs the trope of anti-Semitism ironically to convey a coded message about the moral incoherence in popular Christianity-- specifically concerning aroused anxieties about Christian identity as seen in forced conversations and the complete violation of the basic tenets of mercy and justice which highlight the hypocrisy in Christianity as Shakespeare saw it practiced."(Shakespeare’s Grand Deception, 74)
Looking at this play from a different perspective, the Christians are the ones who should be shamed upon for their hypocrisy. According to the bible, God says that everyone of the Christian religion should love and forgive thy neighbor , as well as only God may judge. When it comes to a black or Jewish man, why turn to racism or anti-Semitism. Do they value their own egos enough to choose prejudice before their religion? This makes the reader think about who the "villain" of the story really is.
Using The Merchant of Venice and at least one other Shakespearean texts discuss whether or not Shakespeare was anti-Semitic and/or racist?
Shakespeare may had been ahead of his time in the sense that he was not afraid to write beyond the expectations of the audience. His intention was likely to move outside of his societies comfort zone and to explore uncomfortable topics; to go where no other writer has gone.
"In the literature of sixteenth-century England there existed, together with new currents, many traditional elements. Thus in a period we are apt to think of as witnessing profound changes, writers continued to assume, and expect their readers to assume, certain views about the nature of things that had been accepted for centuries past."(“France and England.”)
As a writer in the 16th century, Shakespeare wrote about the current issues his society faced. During this time, a large amount of Christians saw blacks and Jew's as inferior. They treated them with disrespect and discriminated them. It is obvious Shakespeare would want to write about this topic as it was relevant to the current times. Using his imagination and talent, he composed a work that introduced the topic of racism and anti-Semitism in literature.
If you look at his work from a different point of view rather than just assuming he was racist, you are able to see that he may have been trying to get across the message that racism and anti-Semitism were unfair and rather than making the assumption that he is racist just because he wrote about it. He likely wrote about the uncomfortable topic because it was something he had witnessed at some point in his life and it was something he could directly connect to.
"Jews in 16th-century England practised their religion secretly, and many of those raised in the Jewish faith either converted to Christianity or pretended to have done so." (“How Were the Jews")
Shakespeare may have chosen to write about the current issues that were apparent in his time period as many writers do. Anti-Semitism specifically, was a large issue during the Elizabethan era due to the fact that society accepted the discrimination of Jewish people. Christians were often the ones to target the Jews as they saw them as inferior. An example of this would be when the characters in The Merchant of Venice made refrences about Shylock being a "Dog".
In the 16th century, the normalization of racism was more apparent, especially for the Christians. People who practiced the Christianity were most often very against people of other races and religions.
The Christians in both Othello and The Merchant of Venice disrespected the Jewish man and the African-American man. The white characters treated them as lesser and depicted them as the villains of the story.
Although Shylock was made to look like the bad guy of the story, he was the one who made a fair deal and kept his word when he said he would take a pound of flesh from Antonio. He never asked for more than what they initially agreed upon. While the Christians did everything in their power to get out of the agreement they made so Antonio would live and not pay Shylock back.
If you take Shakespeare's charterers into consideration, realistically he made Shylock and Othello the most noble, honest, and respectable characters in the stories.
In Othello, the Christians let their jealousy and greed get the best of them when they aimed their hatred towards Othello because of his high status in the army. They also discriminate him based on the color of his skin, they don't think he is worthy of loving Desdemona. The Christians even go out of their way to sabotage their relationship.
The fact that Shakespeare's work includes racism and anti-Semitism, does not mean he himself must be racist.
"Racism is the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics. Racial separatism is the belief, most of the time based on racism, that different races should remain segregated and apart from one another."(“Racism.”)
Since Shakespeare lived so long ago and died before any of his texts ever made it big in the writing industry, we never truly got to know anything about him. Due to this, we can not assume the type of person he was or what his beliefs were. As of what we know, he was only a man who wrote about racism and anti-Semitism through his stories. The statement that certain characters from Othello or The Merchant of Venice were profoundly racist or discriminant would be more appropriate. You can not choose to believe a man is what he writes about.