"Hath not a Jew eyes?"

[dorchadas]

Reading Dara Horn's People Love Dead Jews and there's a chapter about The Merchant of Venice's antisemitism and how people still argue about it to this day. I saw it when Chicago Shakespeare put it on over a decade ago and even with their attempts to make Shylock a tragic character it was very uncomfortable to watch. But the book makes the point that the speech everyone brings up, the one about pricking and bleeding and so on that defenders say indicates Shylock's essential humanity, is just Shylock's supervillain monologue.

You know the one. Where the villain captures the hero and says, "We're not so different, you and I", and then tries to convince the hero that if the hero had been scarred by acid, or lost their spouse to an experimental teleportation machine, or been raised by dinosaurs in the lost valley of the Savage Land, that the hero would also be trying to use their Degen Ray to turn everyone in New York City into apes. That under these circumstances, anyone would turn to villainy. You certainly would, right, hero? The only reason you haven't is because you've had a better life than me.

"All it takes is one bad day."
-The Joker, The Dark Knight

That's the point of Shylock's speech. People always quote the part about body parts and not the "if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" part, because it's not quite as uplifting when you realize the whole scene is Shylock justifying his elaborate plot by saying, "If you were me, you'd do the same."

Comments

[tcpip]

One of the many things that struck me in Mistakes were made (but not by me) was a section on how people can be revenge or punishment-motivated when others do something wrong, but very much prone to explanation, context. and justification when it refers to their behaviour or those who are closely-aligned.

[dorchadas]

Even putting aside the fundamental attribution error, why that happens makes sense to me--it's easy to understand our own mindset because we have access to our own interior lives, and more access to those of friends than those of strangers.