Marginalization in William Shakespeare’s - The Merchant of Venice

The normal human experiences we acknowledge everyday are built of a multitude of emotions, feelings, attitudes, values and characteristics that differentiate us from other beings like animals. The fabric of our human nature is a reflection of the human experience, our beliefs, attitudes, and events that we go through compacting different ideologies into our mindsets. William Shakespeare, through his plays presents these ideologies, attitudes and values, both relevant and present in the Elizabethan context as well as in a modern context. Through a reading and analysis of Shakespearean plays we can see the ideology of how through the marginalization of society, there is a cultivation of the cycle of hatred, leading to revenge, preventable if we are able to open up and be merciful and forgive instead of succumbing to hatred and revenge. These feelings of mercy, hate, forgiveness, and revenge are built into the core of our human nature, and hence it has been present in the people of society during Shakespearean times as well as being easily relatable and understandable to our modern day society, due to it being in the fabric of our human experience and nature since the start of the human civilization.

Modern day society struggles with the woes of marginalization on a daily basis, as well as in past important events that has changed the course of history and society. From daily issues such as the people who detests all immigrants who enter their country, as a result of racial differences, the now subsiding inequality of men and women, and the infamous anti-Semitic Nazi holocaust, where an estimate of 6 million Jews where killed by Adolf Hitler’s rule. As we can see this is closely related to Shakespeare’s famous play, The Merchant of Venice, which was written around 1597 and based in the 16th Century.