Journal 13
In staging the Merchant of Venice I really preferred to leave it in it's own time period. I really like it being set in the Elizabethan time period because it deals with issues that were pretty relevant for the time. If set in todays society I feel that they are dying issues that most people wouldn't feel warranted a play about them. The whole idea of usury being something that only the Jewish people do seems really archaic to us because nowadays no one borrows money from anyone without interest tacked on. Interest is a fact of life to anyone with just a credit card nowadays. I bet the christian religion is no longer being taught around the idea that they are not allowed to lend money with interest because it would be impossible in todays society to think that interest is unchristian since it is so common. I personally don't feel the need to reset a play into a time where it seems devoid of the meaning it was meant to convey in the first place. Hollywood seems to think that taking old plays and making them into comedies surrounding teenagers brings new meaning to them, but it just dilutes the original message. In this case setting MOV in something like modern day New York in high school really takes out the issues of usury and racism because high school isn't necessarily centered around ideas like that. It would just expand into a love story about Portia and Bassanio, leaving out the ideas that were meant to educate and inform.
I concur
I really believe that it is our job as readers to uncover what the author's intended meaning is. I like the idea of keeping the play within it's original setting. The problem, however, is that you might not be portraying the same idea. Is it our goal to show how racism affects love (Portia and Moor)? Or is it to show that Portia didn't like him so much cuz he was different? Can we keep the intended meaning by transposing to a more familiar setting? Or are we just trying to show the original play?
Ryan K Bishop
wrong answer, maybe
There are at least two schools of thought on this. One is expressed by scholars Wimsatt and Beardsley in their essay "The Intentional Fallacy." The thrust of their argument is that there is no way we can know what the author intended when they wrote what they wrote. Instead, we have to take the text at face value (more or less). What we have, these two argue, is a collection of marks on the page that form sentences, thoughts and ideas. These things will mean different things to different people so we can't try to get at intent. We can, instead (if we are Wimsatt or Beardsley) look only at the artifact in front of us, look at its formal characteristics (plot structure, theme(s), imagery and the like). That way we don't "read into" the text what some would say is NOT there. Of course, there are many scholars who dismiss this notion. For us, we have to be aware of the problems created by attempting to divine what another intended. Bradley
Bradley