The Knife Of Discrimination Analysis

Ashley Zimmerman and Rachel Howard
Period 5
4/11/12
The Knife of Discrimination
Discrimination is a monster that has plagued society since the beginning of time, touching almost every faction of the human race at some point in history. Despite the modern world’s idealistic pursuit of equality, discrimination continues to poison civilization, causing fear, hatred, and even death. The only way to avoid the hateful spreading of bias and intolerance is to understand the minds and hearts of the people—usually a minority— who are discriminated against. They are, after all, people. In all of human existence, the one person with perhaps the greatest understanding of the human condition was the great playwright, poet, and thespian, William Shakespeare.
When she goes to court to help Bassanio’s friend, in order to be perceived as intelligent and respectable, Portia must disguise herself as a man. However, in court, Portia proves that she is extremely capable and brilliant in law—despite the stereotype surrounding her gender. The general portrait of a woman in Shakespeare’s time was that of a quiet, docile person who was completely submissive to the men in her life. Shakespeare, however, contradicts this view with characters like Portia. Jeanne Gerlach, one of the authors of “Revisiting Shakespeare and Gender,” says of the Bard’s female characters, “They control the action. Portia, for example, controls the final scene of The Merchant of Venice by bringing about the downfall of Shylock through her tempering of justice with mercy and by controlling the forces which enable her to live happily ever after with Bassanio,” and indeed she does. Portia, like many others of Shakespeare’s women, defies the traditional role of her gender in an unsympathetic
Shylock describes the incidents, saying, “You call me misbeliever, cutthroat dog, and spet upon my Jewish garberdine” (Shylock, 1.3.120-121). When Antonio must go to court because of his inability to pay back his loan to Shylock, the moneylender behaves rather viciously during the trial, but this lashing out is the result of the poor treatment Shylock has received in society. Shakespeare is not trying to attack the Jews in his writing; he is attempting to attack the greed of the Christians during this time (Bronstein). This Jewish character deserves sympathy because the discrimination and cruelty he has faced throughout his life has transformed him into a villain. Shakespeare’s portrayal of the Jewish person “stresses the common core of humanity that lurks beneath the exterior of Shylock’s public character,” says Grant Stirling. In his famous, touching monologue, Shylock expresses that humanity through his profound despair and frustration:
I am a Jew. Hath not/ a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,/ senses, affections, fashions? Fed with the/ same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to/ the same diseases, healed by the same means,/ warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer/ as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not/ bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you/ poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall/