On Stereotypes, Prejudice and Discrimination: Shakespeare Versus Wesker
On Stereotypes, Prejudice and Discrimination: Shakespeare Versus Wesker

A Dialectics in Time

Summary/Abstract: Shylock, the archetype of the Jewish merchant in one of Shakespeare’s most controversial plays, The Merchant of Venice, as opposed to Sir Arnold Wesker’s play, The Merchant, – a response written centuries later to The Bard’s canonical approach – constitutes the subject of this study. Many Jewish artists and intellectuals have reacted to Shakespeare’s text, considering it, as well as most of its stagings, anti-Semitic. In 1983, Sir Arnold Wesker wrote a play of his own, The Merchant, which he later renamed Shylock; the play is written in defence of Jewishness and it offers the audience Shylock’s perspective.The hereby study analyses the dialectics between Shakespeare and Wesker’s plays. The method-ology is based on several research strands: historical sources, literary and dramatic analysis of the plays discussed, as well as a cultural-anthropological approach to the plays’ worlds and to their historical context.

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