Shakespeare’s Method: The Merchant of Venice

4 Pages 1010 Words

In the book entitled Shakespeare, John Middleton Murry wrote an analytical essay entitled Shakespeare’s Method: The Merchant of Venice. In this essay, Murray says The Merchant of Venice is “a matter-of-fact fairy tale: a true folk story, made drama.” (Murry, 189) William Shakespeare created this play for the sole purpose of making it a drama and a folk story and had no intent on this play being anything more. It can be seen that the play is a “pure melodrama or tragic-comedy, an almost perfect example of the art-form which being prior to art itself, most evidently and completely satisfies the primitive man in us all.” (Murry, 189) The Merchant of Venice had the sole purpose of being made into a feel-good story. Through this tragic-comedy, Shakespeare wanted to bring out our human emotions in all of us before art even had this quality of bringing out human qualities.
John Middleton Murry states that what Shakespeare did not do “was to attempt to make it (the play) an intellectually coherent whole. That seems to have been no part of his purpose; he did not entertain the idea because he knew it was impossible. The coherence of The Merchant of Venice is not intellectual or psychological.” (Murry, 192) Shakespeare did not want to put any reasoning behind the plot of his play because he knew it was going to be a hard task to accomplish so Shakespeare decided to let the pieces fall themselves without carefully placing them strategically. “The Merchant of Venice is not a realistic drama; and its characters simply cannot be judged by realistic moral standards.” (Murry, 194) For example when the reader views Jessica, she is seen as a good character who is very charming for what she is portrayed to be. In reality, she is a daughter of a Jew whom she ran away from which could be seen as unfaithful from a realistic standpoint. But viewing this play as a fairy tale, Jessica is seen a very charming character. “The Mer...