My reflection on our work on The Merchant of Venice

Unit four reflection

The Merchant of Venice is a play written by William Shakespeare, and it was first released to the public in around 1596 or 1597. It featured a Merchant, who had a debt to settle with a greedy Jew called Shylock, and how if the Merchant did not repay, the Jew would cut a pound of flesh off of his body. It featured tragedy and sometimes comedy and it reflected the way Jews were shown to be at the time. Greedy and good for nothing money lenders. That’s not true, of course, but it was seen as the typical Jew attitude back in Venice during the time. We had to write an essay in language arts class, which showed how much we sympathized with the main Jew, Shylock, who did many bad things in his life but was also a victim to many bad things. It wasn’t easy, and in many ways, I felt stuck. I had to use different skills to work on my essay and make it efficient, and I’d like to tell you how I handled it and what I found difficult.

Connect

When I was reading this play, I was getting many familiar feelings throughout. I felt prejudice. As a Muslim, I know how all the Jews in this movie felt. Muslims are usually bashed around for, well, being Muslim. The Jews in this movie were bashed around for being Jewish. I could relate to the pain that those millions of Jews were feeling then because that pain is what millions of Muslims are feeling today.  This also made me a little more interested in the topic, which more enhanced the quality of my essay. It also provided more ways to help me sympathize with Shylock the Jew, as it was quite a long essay.

Extend

Before I started The Merchant of Venice, I was a little confused about the way justice worked. I thought of it as a man just going to prison. But now I know that justice is created from a person’s viewpoint on something. I learnt that if a person despises a criminal due to a personal experience, then their idea of justice would be different than a person that has never been experiences with a criminal. This is what happened in this movie. Christians hated the Jews, and their view of justice for the Jews was changed because of personal and religious background, changing the way they were treated in court. This is same for African Americans that were discriminated in America in the early 1900’s, as they did not receive proper justice either.

Challenges

There was one huge challenge that I had to overcome. The way I thank challenged me. I’m usually the kind of boy that goes into his own world and comes up with crazy stories to let people have a good time. For this essay, I had to change that thinking method into a more analytical way of thinking. It was difficult, as in the morning I am usually creative, and have to switch from that mood into a more critical, analytical mood. It is challenging to be something different from what you were just a second ago, and that hounded me for a long time. However, with help from many teachers and other students, I got enough feedback to make my thinking more analytical than before and leave the creativity out of it.

Thank you for reading! By the way, here is a link at the bottom that leads you to an imdb page which tells you a lot about the Merchant of Venice movie, which was released way back in 2004.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379889/?ref_=nv_sr_1