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Father/daughter relationships in The Merchant of Venice


Within Shakespeare’s plays, The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, King Lear and The Merchant of Venice to name a few, he has shown the complexity of all types of relations; fathers/children, mothers/children, siblings, lovers, friends and many more. In The Merchant of Venice two relationships in particular contribute greatly to the play, the relationships between Shylock and his daughter Jessica and Portia and her dead father. In order to try and understand people’s roles and relationships in society at that time, we need to take a look at Venetian society during Elizabethan times.
Women in Elizabethan society were treated like second-class citizens, having to answer to men for all aspects of life whether it was their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Most women would have had a male governing their finances, homes and marriage arrangements, hence Portia’s dilemma. Where financially possible a woman was sent into marriage with a dowry, the sum of which made quite a difference to the level they might rise within society. On marriage, women became their husband’s property, along with everything they owned.
In Venice at that time, many young daughters of Venetian nobles experiencing financial difficulties were sent to live in convents. They still had to pay a dowry but it was a lot less than that required to secure a husband. Some ended up living their lives within the confines of the convent. Other girls were sometimes “bought” back from the convent when the family fortunes were better. However, convents were not exactly prisons as the famous affair between Casanova and Marina Morosini in a Venetian convent, showed
The Jewish people were expected to live in a ghetto, which was kept locked at night. Jews were tolerated only because they were allowed to loan money while Christians were not, which led to ill feeling amongst both faiths.
Around the time of...