Merchant of Venice Literary Elements

drama; comedy

English

Renaissance Venice (15th century); Belmont is a fictional Italian town.

N/A

Because the play contains rather serious conflicts within the genre of comedy, the tone and mood are rather ambiguous. The tone of the play is one of both despair and triumph, while the mood of the play is anxious and playful.

The protagonist of the play is Antonio. The antagonist is Shylock.

The central conflict of the play is that Antonio borrows money from Shylock for his friend Bassanio, but loses his fortune. Instead of monetary compensation, Shylock demands a pound of Antonio's flesh (or, put simply, Antonio's death).

The climax of the play occurs in court, when Shylock demands the pound of flesh from Antonio even after Antonio offers to pay double the amount of the loan. The Duke refers the case to Balthazar, who is really Portia in disguise.

The play foreshadows Antonio's loss of his fortune in the first scene, when the audience learned that Antonio has invested all of his money in a single fleet of ships (a fleet that eventually sinks). The beginning of the play also foreshadows the extremity of Shylock's loan, when Antonio hyperbolically tells Bassanio that he would essentially give him his life to help him. Finally, the play foreshadows Shylock's eventual forced conversion by making him an outlier character and by having Portia express the importance of Christian ethics during the trial.

The "pound of flesh" is itself a form of understatement, as it would have been impossible to exact a pound of flesh from somebody without killing them.

Because of the conflict between the Christian characters and Shylock, the play makes frequent reference to the Christian Bible (composed of the Old Testament and the New Testament) in opposition to the beliefs of Judaism (which only recognizes the Old Testament in the faith).

Important imagery in the play includes animals, money, music, and devils or demons.

In many ways, Shylock himself is a paradox as he is simultaneously a conniving and selfish miser and a victim of prejudice within the Christian setting of Venice. Through Shylock, the play questions how and where to lay blame for the conflicts in the play.

Shylock uses parallelism in his famous "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" speech, setting up a series of rhetorical questions that underscore the shared humanity between Christians and Jews.

In Act Five, Lorenzo personifies the moon as a thing that "sleeps" upon the riverbank, emphasizing the calm and serene conclusion to the high-stress trial in Act Four.

The Merchant of Venice stands out among Shakespeare's comedies in part because of its ambiguous tone and its question over whether Shylock is a victim or a villain. Through Shylock's soliloquies that question the nature and consequences of prejudice, the play smuggles serious topics and philosophical musings into the genre of comedy, when they usually appear as tropes of early modern tragedy.