Teaching The Merchant of Venice after Seeing Venice > IDEAS & IDEALS

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As a professor of English literature at the university I have taught William Shakespeare's well-known play, The Merchant of Venice, several times until now, and I am on schedule to teach it again in the coming semester. My past experience in reading this comic drama with the students in the classroom has always been a sweet and pleasant one, and there is no reason for me to be particularly fussy or flushed about the fact this time. All the conditions remain the same: the text, the teacher and the students. But there is one reason for me to be more authoritative than before. I, the teacher, have been to Venice and seen it.

      Reading or teaching The Merchant of Venice without seeing Venice did not pose any difficulty or problem in appreciating the play, I thought. But after seeing Venice with my own eyes and walked some streets in it with my own legs, I realized that I had missed a lot of facts and elements that would have contributed to the better explication and understanding, and consequently more lively enjoyment of it, had I known them. In short, I was quite ignorant. "Travelling is a fool's paradise," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, the famous American philosopher, but for an ordinary person like me the trip to Venice last summer was worth the money, time and the physical effort and suffering. Great man stays at home and knows all, but light man travels and learns something.

      First of all, I came to realize that Venice, the very seat of The Merchant of Venice, was a reality, not a dream. Venice had always been unreal or surreal to me like what I see in a dream. I knew it was somewhere on the map, but it always was too far, too beautiful and too small to be a real city for ordinary people to live in it. It seemed a huge and luxurious villa for a king and his royal family and for his loyal men. But I saw clearly there why Shakespeare gave this unromantic title to his romantic work.  

      To my great shame, I have never paid any attention to the title of the play and did not put any emphasis on it when I taught it to the students. And to my surprise and relief, none of my students had ever raised any questions about it. If anyone had asked, "Why, Sir, should the title of this play be none other than The Merchant of Venice?" he would have made a laughing stock of himself among the students by asking such a silly and stupid question. It was taken for granted. Now I think I have to thank them  for their ignorance as well as for their not being too intelligent. Like the teacher, like the students.

     Readers of The Merchants of Venice will surely meet and recognize several merchants living in Venice including Antonio and his friend Bassanio, whose source of wealth is the large trading ships, but we usually pass this very important fact without paying due attention. Instead, our interest is mostly directed to the trial in which Shylock, a Jew, money-lender, hater of Christians, demands a pound of flesh from Antonio.

      Most of Korean readers of the play understand and sympathize with Shylock, his loneliness and pathos, although we do not endorse his demand of justice. For the English audience of the play in Shakespeare's time, and surely for the Venetians in their time, especially for the Christians who harbored strong prejudice against the Jews, the defeat and humiliation of Shylock in the court at the end of the trial must have been a great source of laughter and satisfaction.

      A few of the lingering questions on The Merchant of Venice before my having been to Venice was these: How and why could Shylock, a Jew, a minority, live in that hostile atmosphere among the Christians in Venice to begin with; and furthermore, how could he keep his property safely, and lend money on interest to others without the possibility and danger of being embezzled; and how could he have fair trial and claim his legal right so rightfully and demand justice so vehemently before the judge, Portia, who was a Christian and was greatly prejudiced against him?

      I did not know the answers were lying hidden in the very title of the play. Most of the Venetians were sea-going merchants and they accumulated huge wealth by trading with other countries and with people they could reach. They were so successful, so ruthless, and so unethical in making money that they were known to deal even with "the devils," let alone with the Jews. So long as they could make profit, they didn't care who they were dealing with or living with. Ironically enough, the beauty of Venice with its stupendous palaces, churches and works of art we see today is the visible sign of the almost inconceivable wealth of these infamous Venetian merchants. Venice was, in other words, for the merchants, by the merchants and of the merchants.

      Merchants made Venice and Venice protected them in return. As a result of the successful international trade and commerce, Venice, like the United States of America today, became not only wealthy but also cosmopolitan, tolerant of the racial and religious differences, although Christianity was the dominant religion. Rule of law was the firm basis on which the peace, stability and freedom of the Venetian society stood. No surprise that Shylock could be so free, proud and even arrogant before the court. No wonder that Venice was the ruler of the Mediterranean over 1,500 years as the "Most Serene Republic" and the envy of Europe. But surprise and wonder to me that the framers of the United States Constitution studied Venice and its law for its model.  

      From last week I started to read The Merchant of Venice all over again to prepare myself for the class, and was thrilled to find that all the lines, names of the characters, the places, streets, scenes, manners, and costumes - all rushed to me with life. They are all alive. Everything has become so familiar, real and vivid to me. The distance, foreignness and antiquity between the text and me have remarkably disappeared. I came to feel one step closer to the text and to William Shakespeare. I did not know he lived when Venice was at its peak of glory and prosperity.

      I am afraid that my lecture on The Merchant of Venice hereafter would be more on Venice than on The Merchant of Venice. I confess I am overpowered by the beauty of Venice and engrossed in the dazzling history of it. I close my eyes and try to erase the image of it from my retina and eardrum but to no avail. The moment I close my eyes it returns to its former dreamlike reality again, floating in the lagoon, in mist and shadow, entranced by the ceaseless murmur and flutter of the waves as they never tire of lapping the stones of Venice.
      (February 23, 2001)