How is shylock a villain

We take revenge when done wrong. Shylock previous. I hate him for he is a Christian;. But more for that in low simplicity. He lends out money gratis, and brings down.

The rate of usance here with us in Venice. Act 1 Scene 3. I'll have my bond, speak not against my bond;. I have sworn an oath that I will have my bond. Act 3 Scene 3. In early productions of The Merchant of Venice , actors played Shylock as either a monster or an evil clown, enforcing the idea that he is the villain of the play.

He is described by other characters as obsessed with money, and a cruel father to his daughter, Jessica. However, when we take into account circumstances that took place before the play, as well as what happens over the course of the plot, Shylock begins to seem a like a victim as well as a villain, and his fate seems excessively harsh.

In addition to the abuse Antonio and other Christians routinely subject him to, Shylock lost his beloved wife, Leah. In the play Shylock and Antonio make a bond. Shylock is expecting Antonio would come to him for a favor sooner or later because Shylock knows Antonio lends money without interest.

Shylock knows that Antonio relies on his ships for income. He also knows the risks and factors the ships encounter. This is true when Shylock says: This kindness will I show.

Go with me to a notary, seal me there. I , iii This truly proves that Shylock uses his knowledge of Antonio and deception to exact his revenge.

The only way a villain can stay true to his plan of revenge, his mind must first be clouded with anger and hate. This is what happens to Shylock. Just the word bachelor is a shock, because although we have seen him with his daughter we have not so far put our minds to his married, let alone his widowed state.

A Jewish patriarch, yes, who makes his home a hell, as patriarchs are inclined to do, for his restless daughter. But a patriarch bringing up a child without a wife to help him — have we thought that one through?

We sense the loss to Shylock, anyway, without his rubbing the itch of it. Feeling is not, to him, that thing of elegantly weary display it is to Antonio and Portia. For Jessica to have stolen the ring her mother gave her father — and she would surely have known its significance — is a most terrible betrayal. For her to have parted with it a more terrible betrayal still. But to have parted with it for a monkey! There have been times when it was fashionable for a grand lady to dandle a pet monkey on her lap or parade with it on a studded leash.

Whatever her motivation, the grossness of the transaction is of a sort Jessica, the Jewish daughter of Jewish father, should have been alive to. To a people who conceived God as a philosophical idea, never to be named or seen, least of all to be confused with the animal gods worshipped elsewhere, nothing expresses the antithesis to civilisation more aptly than the unbridled appetite of an ape.

A wilderness is a desolate place. A wilderness of monkeys is a figure for the desolation of the human heart when faithfulness and honour have fled it. It is not, however, the last line of the scene. The play will have its action and Shylock will have his pound of flesh.

Yes, Shylock is granted an illuminating moment of humanity — that, after all, is what Shakespeare does: every villain has his say — but thereafter, and by his own choosing, the Jew quickly returns to the engrossing Jewish occupation of requital. That, however, is to say no more than that The Merchant of Venice is a play not a treatise, and that we would not expect Shylock to be sentimentalised. He does not become, by virtue of what we have learned, a man forgiven and explained.

But nor, in my view of the play, is it possible to return unchanged to all we previously thought. Our sense of who he is should always have been evolving anyway, and we cannot escape our new knowledge of him as a man who had and lost a wife, and can now be said to have had and lost a daughter.