There's no doubt about it, bad guys are more interesting than good guys. In dramas catering to mass audiences every hero is set within a strict moral rubric. We know what to expect from him. The villains are the wild cards. In the typical Hollywood blockbuster they have meatier lines, they get to end with a really good death scene, and they are often the main driving force behind the plot. Villains can act unpredictably, can either be more cruel than anyone we would know in real life, or can just as easily show sensitivity and practice random acts of kindness that help develop his character. The well-realized villains can even gain the audience's sympathy, can force them to think about him, about why he is the way he is, and perhaps regret whatever situation made him so.
[...] The most recent approach in the 2004 film by Michael Radford was not only to cut out the “hate him for he is aside, but to go a step further by opening the film documentary-style describing the oppression of Venetian Jews and ending the film with a shot of Shylock standing forlorn and disconsolate in a Venice street. According to the play, following the trial scene Shylock goes the way of all other Shakespearian villains after being dispatched off-stage (Geller). [...]
[...] Today it seems that there was no assassination attempt and that Lopez's execution was in fact a political ploy by the powerful Earl of Essex, but the public was unaware of this. To them Dr. Lopez was living proof that villainous Jews like Barbaras existed. Shakespeare may not have believed all of the stories about supernatural Jews and, having at least partial acceptance as part of England's tightly knit social elite, may have been privy to part of the political story behind Lopez's execution. [...]
[...] to be the bad guy, a murderous Jewish usurer in line with Jewish characters in other Elizabethan dramatic works, such as Barbaras in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. The important difference between those unrealistic stereotypes and Shylock lies in Shakespeare's inability to write a flat character and in his ever- present, possibly unintentional tendency to identify with the despised and downgraded. These elements elevate Shylock above Shakespeare's contemporaries' caricatured Semitic monsters and instead define an emotionally wounded product of an oppressive society. [...]
[...] 263) and there is evidence of such in his realistic descriptions of wartime suffering in Henry and the heartfelt appeals by the slave Dromio in A Comedy of Errors. These instances seem somewhat contradictory when placed next to the casual anti- Semitism many of Shakespeare's characters espouse. Shakespeare unselfconsciously enlivens his dialogue with anti-Semitic figures of speech, but is still aware of the implications such turns of phrase hold. Perhaps, until Shylock, he had not attempted to come to terms with this contradiction: perhaps Shylock was written to resemble the stereotypical Jewish villain of The Jew of Malta, but has the secret advantage of holding the writer's sympathy. [...]
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