The Sunday News
Highway to success Charles Dube
TREGEDY is a drama or literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a tragic flaw or moral weakness. Tragedy also typically involves a great person destined to experience downfall or utter destruction, as through a character flaw or conflict with some overpowering force. Comedy refers to any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or to amuse by inducing laughter, or in its simplest form comedy is a story with a happy ending.
Looking at The Merchant of Venice, through the above definitions we find that it can be classified as both a tragedy and comedy (tragicomedy). It shares features in common with comedies, but also contains the kind of dark elements we find in tragedies. For example, Shylock’s desire to have Antonio’s pound of flesh is intense and an unpleasant act. Such an act without proper medication administered to the victim is a recipe for disaster. Given Shylock’s way, Antonio could have died.
The way Shylock is treated by Christian characters is sickening and quite tragic. The Merchant of Venice is laden with characters who feel a deep sense of isolation. The most potent isolation is caused by religious differences. Shylock is isolated because he is Jewish — his religious beliefs and cultural values remain at odds with those of his fellow Venetians. Shylock, is the only character in the play that loses.
He gets a terrible ending. He loses everything from his possessions, to his religion, his daughter to his servant Launcelot Gobbo. For example, his daughter Jessica elopes with Lorenzo a Christian. She elopes with his most cherished possessions, that is his ducats and above all a ring presented to him by his late wife, Leah. Shylock is very angry with what his daughter has done. But in all the outburst of passion, Shylock equates the loss of his ducats to his daughter. This passion shocks Solanio because it speaks in one breath of his daughter and his money. To make matters worse for Shylock, he hears that his daughter Jessica exchanged that cherished ring for a monkey. Yet, Shylock says he could not have sold it for a wilderness of monkeys.
Shylock’s life is tragic because of a choice he makes. He chooses to pursue his pound of Antonio’s flesh because Antonio, among others, has chosen to treat him like a dog. Antonio chooses in the end to deprive Shylock of his religion among other things. However, there are elements that make this play a comedy — the fact that Antonio (who is the merchant of Venice) not only survives Shylock’s threat but also receives back all of his money.
The bankrupt Bassanio manages to find a way out of his debts and eventually helps his friend Antonio. All this is based on the fact that he asks for money from Antonio to go and woo a “lady richly left in Belmont”, that is Portia. Bassanio is successful in controversial circumstances but that does not stop him from helping his friend Antonio. When he tells his wife Portia they have to act fast. Portia and Nerissa cross-dress as male lawyer and lawyer’s clerk respectively and attend Antonio’s trial where Portia turns the tables against Shylock and wins the case for Antonio.
Portia and Nerissa’s husbands, Bassanio and Gratiano, have no idea who the lawyers are and say things about their wives they probably should not have said. This includes Bassanio telling Antonio that he valued their friendship more than his marriage to Portia, right in front of her. Bassanio says: “Antonio, I am married to a wife which is dear to me as life itself, but life itself, my wife, and all the world, are not with me esteemed above thy life. I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all here to this devil, to deliver you.”
Portia and Nerissa also force their husbands to give their rings to them – the same rings they told their husbands never to lose. Nerissa is very vocal about it as she reminds Gratiano that he swore to her when she gave it to him that he would wear it till his hour of death and that it should lie with him in his grave. Even though not for her, yet for his vehement thoughts, he should have been careful, and kept it.
Portia is able to marry the man of her choice despite the extraordinary limitations her father placed on her. The casket lottery was a hindrance to Portia’s choice of a husband, but luckily Bassanio her preferred suitor managed to make the right choice. Jessica and Lorenzo instead of living a life of exile and estrangement because of Shylock will receive her rightful inheritance. All these are comical scenes in the play.
There is the clown in Merchant of Venice Launcelot Gobbo at times referred to as the fool. Launcelot always told a good joke to cheer Jessica up when she was sad. Critics will tell you that there are generally no fools in tragedies.
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