Just finished watching an early 90s film version of the play, The Merchant of Venice, and am now currently reading through the script...I am truly blown away at its complexity and ambiguity. I am particularly struck, as a religious studies scholar and one deeply rooted in a pluralistic perspective at its probings into religious difference and ontological alterity. I am, of course, limited in my post-Holocaust reading of the play, but I am perpetually perplexed at how to view Shylock as a character, a person, and a potential human being--or at the least, a creation in the mind of the one Harold Bloom calls the creator of the human, William Shakespeare. I don't believe it is as simple as asking whether Shakespeare is a bigot or a anti-semite, for he most certainly was, but this is beside the point--questions of authorial intent, particularly authorial intent from the 16th century are hardly our concern these days amid our own plethora of problems. What I am interested in and fascinated by is the complexity by which Shakespeare shapes this character and his place in the religio-cosmos which orbits around him. He is not, as most mistake him, the titular Merchant, but the play is most certainly his own. He steals it, or borrows it, or whatever terrible monetary pun you'd like to make. Is he justified in his deeds? His revenge? His sense of justice? From which faith perspective should we sit in judgment? If I must lay down a law (har, har), Shylock can only be judged by the law of particular subjectivity: he is a creation of a certain mind, in a certain time, with a particular intended reception that will only differ depending on the particular age by which and from which and by whom he is currently judged...nothing is absolute, all is not relevant, but all is subjective. Shylock is subject to our and his own subjectivity.