How Does Radford Use Sympathy For Shylock In The Merchant Of Venice
Sympathy for Shylock in Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice William Shakespeare’s well-known play The Merchant of Venice was brought to the silver screen in 2004 in film adaption directed by Michael Radford. Adapting The Merchant of Venice to film helped make this classic English literature easily accessible to the public, while also making one of Shakespeare’s famous characters a bit more human. Decisions made while filming the adaption of this play changed the lens through which Shylock is viewed, resulting in the audience feeling compassion for the character who had been played many times previously as a heartless villain. I believe Michael Radford’s choice to add an introduction describing the persecution of Jews in Renaissance Venice,
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The play The Merchant of Venice opens onto conversation between Antonio and his colleagues, while the film opens with a montage showing and explaining the oppression faced daily by the Jews of sixteenth- century Venice. The audience is informed by subtitles that the Jew’s of Venice were required to live in seclusion in an antiquated section of Venice, and were required to wear red hats whenever they left the ghettoes. As the montage progresses it shows Jews being attacked by Christian citizens, with one Jewish man even being thrown into a canal while he is tormented by monks in nearby gondolas. At its climax, we see Antoni spitting upon Shylock, the Jewish money lender. All of this added material works to place the audience on Shylock’s side before we are even given the chance to actually meet his character. I believe this opening exposition is needed to help explain to a modern audience what past events inform Shylock’s resentment and hatred of the Christian trader Antonio. When Shakespeare originally produced the play, the daily persecution of Jews would have been common knowledge, but a modern audience would have been ignorant to this information. Thus, by explaining the daily life of Jews in Venice, Michael Radford provides depth to the character of Shylock that would otherwise not be
The play The Merchant of Venice opens onto conversation between Antonio and his colleagues, while the film opens with a montage showing and explaining the oppression faced daily by the Jews of sixteenth- century Venice. The audience is informed by subtitles that the Jew’s of Venice were required to live in seclusion in an antiquated section of Venice, and were required to wear red hats whenever they left the ghettoes. As the montage progresses it shows Jews being attacked by Christian citizens, with one Jewish man even being thrown into a canal while he is tormented by monks in nearby gondolas. At its climax, we see Antoni spitting upon Shylock, the Jewish money lender. All of this added material works to place the audience on Shylock’s side before we are even given the chance to actually meet his character. I believe this opening exposition is needed to help explain to a modern audience what past events inform Shylock’s resentment and hatred of the Christian trader Antonio. When Shakespeare originally produced the play, the daily persecution of Jews would have been common knowledge, but a modern audience would have been ignorant to this information. Thus, by explaining the daily life of Jews in Venice, Michael Radford provides depth to the character of Shylock that would otherwise not be