Is The Merchant of Venice anti-Semitic?

We also find in TWELFTH NIGHT: "Antonio, O my dear Antonio! / How have the hours racked and tortured me / Since I have lost thee!"(TN5.1.214-216). One might wonder if the printer played the comedian here. At any rate, the author still has MV in mind 3 or 4 years later when writing TN.

And another Antonio is apostropheid.

"You have too courtly a wit for me, I'll rest"(AS YOU LIKE IT3.2.67).

And therefore, given that Antonio and Orsino each begin their respective plays, each has the same difficulty. That is, "the perplexities of love," as Professor Bate suggested. This quotation is a much noted comment from a contemporary of Shakespeare.

And therefore Shylock's "The patch is kind enough, but a huge feeder, / Snail slow in profit, and he sleeps by day / More than the wildcat"(MV2.45-47), links Shylock with Nick Bottom in A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM(see post #522).

Another contestant for the title most perfect and complete fool in a Shaxberd text is Romeo's man Balthazar. He's the one who must hear Romeo say "The time and my intents are savage-wild, / More fierce and more inexorable far / Than empty tigers or the roaring sea"(ROM5.3.37-9). Perhaps because Balthazar is one of a very few parts in Shakespeare that I can imagine myself playing onstage, I noticed Antonio's lines "You may as well go stand upon the beach / And bid the main flood bate his usual height, / You may as well use question with the wolf"(MV4.1.71-3).

And one might note that Balthazar, or Balthasar, is the name of a servant of Portia and the young Doctor of Rome(MV4.1.153). On the cover of the Annotated Shakespeare edition we read that "on-page annotations give readers all the tools they need to comprehend the play and begin to explore its many possible interpretations."

Professor Raffel, for his 2006 introduction, quoted John Gross: "Nothing can alter the fact that, seen through the eyes of the other characters, Shylock is a deeply threatening figure, and the threat he poses is of a peculiarly primitive kind." His point is, in part, that as Charles D. and Hawkman pointed out here in this thread, that folklore is an important matter in the play. Also important is Scripture. In ancient Scripture, adultery is a serious crime and was a serious matter regarding the life and death of Queen Elizabeth's mother. In the scene right before the Court scene, Lorenzo says "I shall grow jealous of you shortly, Lancelet, if you thus get my wife into corners"(MV3.5.22-3). "Green-eyed jealousy"(MV3.2.112) may then be a passion driving Shylock.

Professor Kenneth Gross also noted Philip Roth's 1993 novel where a character quotes part of Shylock's first line. "[The character's] diatribe is something of a blind, however, being intended mainly to draw the narrator(Roth himself) into a secret plot." Therefore, one might argue that the character botches the quote(see post #471 here) because he has something else on his mind. And Danik seems to agree with Marchette Chute's 1956 comment on MV: "the fascination of his two chief characters is so strong that no audience can resist them. They are Portia the heiress and Shylock the moneylender, and between them they create an extraordinary play."

Another question is whether the author had in mind translations of DEUTERONOMY 6.4 when he wrote the monologue in Act 2, scene 2: "The fiend is at mine elbow, and tempts me, saying to me, 'Iobbe, Lancelot Iobbe, good Lancelot,' or 'good Iobbe,' or 'good Lancelot Iobbe, use your legs, take the start, run away.' My conscience says, 'No, take heed honest Lancelot, take heed honest Iobbe,' or as aforesaid 'honest Lancelot Iobbe, do not run, scorn running with thy heels'"(MV2.2.2-7). While Professor Drakakis preferred "Giobbe," and tells us that the word is the Italianate form of Job, John Andrews wrote: "It is not clear whether the Quarto spelling is meant to differentiate Iobbe from Gobbo(line 35) or to suggest an equivalence. 'I' appears where modern 'J' occurs in words like Justice and Jew." We read that the Scriptural passage is important in Judaism.

And thus as Charles D. suggested(see post #117), the above Biblical allusion is of a piece with much else in the play. Antonio's sadness, Shylock's motives, Portia's courtroom strategy and so forth are all matters for further discussion and as Professor Leggatt noted, various comments are "allowed" by the play.