All the World's a Stage

Duplicitous Nature 

in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,

A stage where every man must play a part,

And mine a sad one.

(Antonio, Act 1 Scene 1)

Source for photo: Here

Shylock, a victim or a villain? Women, empowered or suffused? Is the bond of friendship more powerful than love? Hazard or destiny? Human law or divine justice? Money or Love? Venice and Belmont.

Two Settings

“Venice: the thriving hub of international trade, inhabited by those involved in the cut and thrust of business and commerce. // Belmont: an imaginary setting, a civilised and romantic place, home to the gracious Portia” (Source: Oxford School Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice,” 2006)

Money?

In Act I of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice, “ fortune, which in Shakespeare may mean “luck” as well as “wealth,”grants Antonio a victory by rendering him “Vailing (mast-lowering) Andrew” (Spanish galleon from Cádiz captured by the British). Antonio introduces a debate at stake between material wealth and “ventures not only in one bottom “trusted.” 

Fortune / Free Will / Fate / Hazard

Solanio sways from the material to the more elated explanation of presupposing love as the cause of Antonio’s “sadness” or “haziness.” Antonio's continued denial unravels deeper, while Solanio contemplates the immutable truth that our essence is shaped by the cards of fate dealt by nature." ”Nature had fram’d strange fellows in her time; “ Hazard (used in its etymological sense as "randomness") and fate contest to pull characters in divergent paths of understanding.

The choice of caskets is another good example of how hazard, destiny and free will mesh with each other. Portia cannot choose whom to marry, it is only one of the gold, silver, and lead caskets chosen by one of her suitors that will decide her destiny as commanded by her father. Yet, this choice has been contrived by him.

Friendship or Love?

As the play unfolds, Antonio places high stakes on his friendship with Bassanio by offering to accept a contract with Shylock bidding his own life as commodity, a pound of flesh will be cut if he fails to “forteit the bond.” 

Equally, friendship surpasses love when Bassanio is ready to dispose of the betrohal ring that Portia offers him as token of their love in exchange for Portia’s services, disguised as a lawyer, in defense of his friend, Antonio. In the amorous subplots, bonds and betrayals ensue. Jessica will be ready to reject his father, and his religion for the love of Lorenzo.

Villain?

In spite of his merciless cruelty upon Antonio, Shylock is also presented as a tragic figure: he is dispossessed of dignity, mocked at, and derided. His claiming for mercy speech turns the balance between villain or victim:

I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? (Act 3, scene 1, lines 53 and following)

Women empowered or suffused?

Portia crowns Bassanio lord of her house and heart when radonmness has led him to choose the lead casket, the one that contains the portrait of Portia and the one that will grant him her hand. 

Myself and what is mine to you and yours
Is now converted: but now I was the lord
Of this fair mansion, master of my servants,
Queen o’er myself: and even now, but now,
This house, these servants and this same myself
Are yours, my lord. (Act 3, scene 2, lines 165 and following)

Yet, Portia will not relinquish her position of power, “lord of her house,” and disguised as a “lawyer,” she will administer justice to settle the case between Antonio and Shylock. Possible inferences about Elizabeth the Queen might actually be embodied in the character of Portia.

Women trespass the boundaries allotted to them as daughters (Jessica), home-ridden partners as well as the natural barrier between daylight and night time when they rove streets. Women in Shakespeare’s time were played by boys: this double transvestism, boys dressed as women, who dressed as boys remains puzzling as to the role women played in Shakespeare’s works.

"The Merchant of Venice" by William Shakespeare

 INITIAL THOUGHTS

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare - Presentación de Ana María Sánchez Mosquera

Olive Kitteridge: Reviews on "Tulips," "Ship in a Bottle," "Starving, " "The Concert," "The Pharmacy" and "Incoming Tide"

REVIEWS ON TULIPS-SHIP-STARVING-THE CONCERT: OLIVE KITTERIDGE de Ana María Sánchez Mosquera

"The Piano Player" and "A Little Burst"

 

"THE PIANO PLAYER " AND "A LITTLE BURST" de Ana María Sánchez Mosquera

"Throwing Ordinary life off Kilter"

  Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive Kitteridge”

Source for title phrase here

Source for image: here

“Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book in 2009 “Olive Kitteridge” is not strictly a short story collection, but rather a novel with carefully drawn vignettes of different lives lived in a small fictional community in Crosby on the coast of Maine, a quintessentially New England town. Uniting them all is the formidable figure of Olive Kitteridge, a school math teacher and the wife of a pharmacist. A larger-than-life character, she is at the centre of several stories and peripheral in others” Source: here

Alice Munro described Elizabeth Strout’s novel as “shining integrity and humor, about the bravery and hard choices of what is called ordinary life.” As Reshma Ruia states, “these are the quiet dramas that can throw an “ordinary” life off kilter, one wrong decision or choice that can alter the entire landscape of a life.” Strout reveals loneliness, broken hearts, suicidal drives, ageing, disappointment, the hunger for love and the fact that no one knows everything (“A Little Burst”).  In “Starving,” she voices a centripetal axis that may pull these lives ashore, in the words of Winston Churchill: never, never, never, never give up. 

The towering, ominous, bulky, and almost statuesque Olive Kitteridge, “ never in anyone’s memory inclined to be affable, or even polite ...”("A Different Road “128) that reveals herself through the story arc hardly appears in the opening story “The Pharmacy.” It is the eyes of Henry that usher us into the novel and through Henry we hear and see Olive. It is in this silence, observed from outside, and from the naïve insecure orderly world of Henry that her character starts to emerge as a powerful binding force of this coastal community.  It is in Henry’s fears, pettiness and insecurities that we learn of Olive’s strength, independence and sturdiness.

“For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist” opens the chapter “The Pharmacy.”The reference to the span of time underpins the paralysis that some of the inhabitants of Crosby resonate with. Seasonal changes occur: colour fading and blooming.  Coming and goings of the inhabitants of Crosby run apace with the passage of time.  Some elope, some stay stagnant and engulfed by their little and big bursts (nod the chapter that bears the title "A Little Burst"): “You get used to things without getting used to things.” The elopers are missed and the ones that remain gaze empty-eyed through windows of cars, houses, and local stores. Henry’ s sense of self-complacency in his small pharmacy world contrasts with the shady description he makes of his wife: 

“Retired now…. He remembers how mornings used to be his favourite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him…. The ritual was pleasing, as though the hold store...was a person altogether steady and steadfast.” 

Objects, places seem to vividly shape the souls of the community. The piano in “The Piano Player” is not just an instrument, it is a character in the room. Whereas Henry shines in his small orderly world of vials caressed by a dappled sun, Olive first appears as “And any unpleasantness that may have occurred back in his home, any uneasiness at the way his wife often left their bed to wander through their home in the night’s dark hour...” (2). He watches that she does “not bear down too hard on Christoper.” 

Henry’s infatuation with his pharmacy assistant, Denise, is peremptorily accepted by Olive. She shifts from derision”Handwriting is as cautious as she is ...she is the plainest child I have ever seen. With her pale coloring, …”(13)  to indifference. Yet Henry acknowledges this powerful binding to Olive as a bastion of his life “...women are far braver than men. The possibility of Olive’s dying and leaving him along gives him glimpses of the horror he can’t abide” (18). As the possibilities of a liaison with Denise fleet before his eyes, he desires Olive “with a new wave of power. Olive’s sharp opinions, her full breasts, her stormy moods and sudden, deep laughter unfolded within him a new level of aching eroticism” (11).  It is Henry’s tantalizing affair that reveals Henry’s own fears of solitude: “You’re not going to leave me, are you?” (he asks Olive).