Merchant of Venice Act IV Discussion Questions
- Is this play a comedy? In a traditional comedy, the lovers, having overcome the obstacles that separated them, are now reunited. Several of Shakespeare's comedies, including As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, and others follow this same essential classic pattern of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. (The fact that boy meets girl is often complicated by the fact that the girl is dressed like a boy is another topic altogether...but an interesting one.) However, though this play is technically classified as a comedy, this determination is harder to make.
- For one, are Portia and Bassanio truly united by love? Were they ever?
- In many productions, Shylock's forced conversion is hardly depicted as comical. The implication in many performances is that he has gone to end his life. The defeat of this antagonist is a Pyrrhic victory, if it is a victory at all on any level, whether judicial, religious, or ethical. How does Shylock's defeat "poison the well" here?
- Portia's victory over Antonio, if we read it as such, is also a Pyrrhic victory given that her intervention and disguise unwittingly revealed the extent of the connection between Antonio and her husband. If this is not an intimate relationship, it is doubtlessly a deeply emotional one, as both characters' actions strongly demonstrate.-- it is a connection for which Antonio would give his wife and Bassanio his life. Has Portia won Bassanio? If so, has she won anything worth having? Antonio, in re-blessing the marriage in a role that seems almost priestly, suggests that Bassanio is "bound" to Portia now. Does she now become the new Shylock?
- Is this funny?
Some questions may have been taken or adapted from the following site:
http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/345merchant.html