초록 열기/닫기 버튼
It seems to ordinary readers that Marlowe's The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice can be regarded as "the unambiguous triumph of good Christians over bad Jews"; as "the punishment of the brutal actions that Barabas and Shylock did." But this is a very simple and superficial interpretation. These plays are ironic plays which represent that the image of the 'good' Christians is not too much different from that of the Jews whose cruelty the Christians criticize. Marlow made the Jew, Barabas, so that the ordinary audience would see him as a villain, a cruel Jew, and Shakespeare also made the Jew, Shylock, so that the common audience in the Elizabethan period would see him as a villain, a cruel Jewish usurer. However, we can find that Barabas and Shylock are the victims of the racial prejudice in the period and perceive the authors' ironic satire on the 'merciless' and hypocritical Christians. Marlowe and Shakespeare were not anti-Semites; they were skeptical about the racial discourse in their period representing the Christians' anxiety and prejudice of the outsiders. The aim of this paper is to explore how the racial discourse of anti-Semitism is reflected in the two plays, The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice, with special reference to the relationship between the Christians and the two Jews, Barabas and Shylock, and also to show how the anti-Semitism Barabas and Shylock cause in the plays is overthrown by the merciless and hypocritical behaviors the Christians do.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
prejudice, Christian, Jew, Malta, Venice, irony
