/lit/ - Literature

>>8777230
>There's talk about Shylock being a positive character during a time when speaking out positively for the Jews would have been a bad thing indeed for one's career and reputation.

Does Shakespeare portray Shylock, openly, as a "positive" character, though? I think it is more ambiguous than that. Shylock is a great character because he is not just "positive" or "negative".

By the end of the play, he is a broken man, yet Portia fails to pulverize him, as Harold Bloom would say. After Shylock's daughter runs away with some Christian fag, that is the moment he breaks. He is deprived not only of a place in society and of humanity by the other characters, but his own family denies him that. He does not know what's more important, his ducats or her daughter, not because he is a miser, but because his money allows him to participate in a society that would otherwise shun him to death (it gives him work too); his daughter, on the other hand, is possibly the only real link to another human that is similar to him and that could understand his despair. Yet she betrays him (perhaps not without reason, since Shylock seems overprotective of her daughter and his ducats, as if one were an extension of the other, though which derives from which is open to interpretation). The other Jewish character that has any lines, Tubalt, is also ambiguous towards Shylock, and he could either be helping him out of sympathy, or trying to torture his business rival (some stage interpretations decide to portray this interpretation, and the text certainly allows it: notice Tubalt's tone, and also Shylock's "Thou torturest me, Tubalt" or something similar).

But what really affects Shylock is the supposed loss of his turquoise ring, Notice the "supposed", since Tubalt himself says it is a rumor, further allowing the interpretation of Tubalt's being cruel towards Shylock. The ring is important to Shylock not for his monetary value, but because Leah, his dead wife, gave it to him before they married. He even says that he would not trade it for "a wilderness of monkeys", since her daughter traded it for one. Notice the exchange is not monetary, but rather of an animal. William Hazlitt also remarked that "wilderness" is a nice choice of words, since it is an "Hebraism", fitting for a character of Shylock talking about his Jewish roots.

And in a play where rings, marriage, and coffers made of gold and silver that contain messages (not unlike the messages that rings have in their inside face), the fact that Shylock's biggest lose is his wife's memento should not be taken lightly.

I could say more, but I would also want to hear that other's have to say about this.

about to go on a date and probably have sex for the second time today with a cute 19 year old girl from toronto

wish me luck

how do i behave at dates?

Write the most awful opening to a book you can think of.