Merchant-Of-Venice-Study-Guide.Pdf
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INDIANA UNIVERSITY THEMESter // wWW.THEMESter.indiana.edu 1 Welcome to William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Cardinal Stage’s Collaboration with the Contents: COAS Themester on Beauty SECTION 1: 2 Beauty from across the Disciplines Ellen MacKay, Associate Professor, English, Director of IDAH, chair of faculty advisory committee of Themester 2016: Beauty. SECTION 2: 4 A Short Sketch of Shakespeare’s Life as We Know it When I proposed Beauty for an IU moment is ripe for lively and thoughtful Themester topic, I did so with the engagement of beauty’s standards, costs, following pitch: risks, pleasures and values. SECTION 3: As an organizing principle for As an example of this rich and complex 8 “Which is the Merchant programming that reaches across the tradition of beauty, The Merchant of here, and which the Jew?” diverse disciplines that comprise the Venice is extraordinarily apt. At a first College of Arts and sciences, Beauty glance the reason for this is pretty SECTION 4: is ideal: not only can a wide range of orthodox. Merchant is is a play by William 10 Beauty and Ugliness scholars, scientists, artists and community Shakespeare, by longstanding consensus in Jewish History members speak to it, they can do so the foremost writer of the English impassionedly. After all, beauty is at the language, named by Helen Vendler as the SECTION 5: root of who we are and what we do: the poet of the millennium on the New York 11 The Merchant of Venice: fundamental principals of science and Times’ “Best of” list in 2000. Written Excerpts from the mathematics unfold to us a universe during the strong ascent of Shakespeare’s Critical Reception of a of staggering beauty, and any form of career with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men Beautiful and Ugly Play cultural expression is always, in some (before the establishment of the Globe), crucial way, aesthetic. Philosophy has long Merchant belongs to the same period as tried to explain the tight grip beauty has Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s SECTION 6: 13 Beauty in The Merchant on human consciousness; more recently, Dream, and Henry IV Part 1, the last of Venice: a close look cognitive science has shown us the way featuring the ingenious invention of the our neurons fire in its presence. Yet in past Prince of Wales and Falstaff as a pair of decades, scholars have neglected beauty’s delightful rogues. These are plays that SECTION 7: place in our thinking. Its association have a kind of sacred geometry to them, 14 Quick Facts About Money with appreciation instead of critique by which I mean that characters and in Shakespeare’s Time and surface instead of depth has meant actions are so well counterpoised that not that criticism has, until lately, given it a a phrase seems out of place. Given all this, SECTION 8: wide berth. In everyday discourse beauty it follows that The Merchant of Venice 16 The Beauties of Shakespeare likewise plays the foil to the intellectual, would serve, like its contemporaries, / Shakespeare on Beauty the serious, or the substantive, insuring as an example of beautiful writing and its neglect as a site of generative thinking. dramatic form. Yet Merchant is in many SECTION 9: With prime-time programming largely ways an ugly play, enfolding within its 18 Beautiful Poetry given over to singing, dancing, interior comic juggernaut a vicious battle between design, fashion design and cooking the forces of anti-Semitic prejudice competitions, as well as top to bottom and bloody revenge. Off-handed racism, personal and home makeovers, the claustrophobic patriarchy, and a society In such as play as this, beauty’s relation to the ethical and the good is set out for our active reconsideration. Whereas for Plato, beauty was an effect of the quest for a just society, for Shakespeare, beauty sugars over social cruelty, with Venice’s luxe environment a callous, mercenary world that is prepared to condone the murder of one of its citizens in the open court. And yet the problems that the play that takes as its highest value the right “lead,” it may be that like Jason, who brings forward ignite a spark of hope. to sell anything, including and especially achieved the fleece only because Medea That Shakespeare notices Shylock’s human flesh, are all uncomfortable showed him how to steal it, Bassanio persecution, and that he hinges his play on features of a comedy that is ostensibly can only discover where beauty lies by our noticing it too, makes The Merchant a fairy-tale romance. The title from cheating. of Venice a work that pushes us to envision the 1600 quarto (pocket-sized) edition The passage reveals the play in the care that we owe each other, not by law brings out this mixed and discordant microcosm. Throughout The Merchant of or even by shared faith but by recourse to composition: The most excellent / Venice, venerable ideals like the marriage our better natures. Beauty is in terrible Historie of the Merchant / of Venice. / of true minds or the quality of mercy are ways absent from The Merchant of Venice, With the extreame cueltie of Shylocke shown to be erratically upheld. Is Portia but the beauty Bassanio seeks, a beauty the Jewe / towards the sayd Merchant, a dowry or a partner to Bassanio? Is she based in virtue, is repeatedly glimpsed at, in cutting a just pound / of his flesh: and “as dear as life” or a chip to be traded for to become an idea that stays with us long the obtayning of Portia / by the choyse of Antonio’s reprieve, as Bassanio fruitlessly after the curtain comes down. three / chests. imagines during the trial scene? Does The content of this Program offers As a result, The Merchant of Venice is her fidelity amount to a symbol, in the many perspectives on beauty, from less a beautiful work than a work that form of the wedding ring she gives him sample lines taken from Shakespeare’s offers us a sustained questioning of and he gives away? Or is there something corpus to poems selected by literary beauty. Nowhere is this more visible than greater to the marital bond than what scholars to Themester faculty accounts in Bassanio’s turn at the casket test, when can be cashiered by Venice’s melancholy of their discipline’s take on the subject. It he attempts to figure out from the surface Merchant? Shylock’s eloquent attacks on also delves into the challenging nature of of each chest (gold, silver and lead) where Christian hypocrisy bring out questions The Merchant of Venice and its author. As inner beauty lies in the form of Portia’s like these in high relief, summed up by Plato said after trying and failing to come portrait. (There is a close reading of a his quip, “These be Christian husbands!” up with a universal description of the passage from this scene in the pages that before he is brought low by Portia’s concept, “beautiful things are difficult.” follow). This is a paradoxical project, but “mercifixion” (this term is part of the By taking some time with what is hardest Bassanio somehow manages to choose play’s fraught critical tradition—see in Shakespeare’s play, perhaps you will well, deciding that beauty is “purchased Section 6). But the trouble doesn’t end concur. by the weight” and cannot be tallied by its with Shylock’s downfall. Even when outward charms—a choice that contrasts Antonio’s debt is resolved by Portia’s strongly with present standards of female intervention, Shakespeare never relieves beauty that emphasize the svelte and us of the sense that the play’s romances the outwardly lovely. Yet to arrive at this are headed for unbeautiful endings. He judgment he contradicts his own earlier ratchets up our discomfort by bringing descriptions of Portia as the “golden the Christians back to a Belmont in which fleece,” a prize to be won by tournament, every twinkling star reminds Jessica and not by sober logic. And given that Portia’s Lorenzo of the false and dead lovers at the retinue play a song during his deliberation heart of the Western tradition. that rhymes each verse with the word INDIANA UNIVERSITY THEMESter // wWW.THEMESter.indiana.edu 1 section 1 Beauty from across the Disciplines This year’s Themester asserts that Beauty is an organizing concept across the academic disciplines. But in its multiple applications it is not the same concept, nor does it do the same work. Below, several faculty members offering courses tied to the Themester theme describe the traction of beauty in their respective fields of inquiry. A common feature is that for a professor leading a course, beauty is less an idea than a structure of inquiry, or even a practice. Heather Akou, Associate Professor, examine the world with a microscope, objects to attract a mate, much like how Fashion Design, School of Art + mathematicians prefer to use the wrong humans adorn themselves with accessories Design end of a telescope. they hope will make them appear beautiful Nevertheless mathematicians are to potential mates. In essence, the subjects As a professor of fashion design and the purest hedonists in academia. Few of our research have innate qualities that merchandising, my research focuses on embark on a career in math for the promise beautify them to others of their kind and textiles, dress, and the human body. In of money, fame, or sex, for which ends as biologists we are fortunate to enrich our particular, I study African dress (Somali, one would be better off in lawn care.