Contrasting Play and Film Version of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice is a play by well-known English dramatist, William Shakespeare. This play takes 16th century Venice as its setting. The Merchant of Venice once being filmed with Al Pacino as its main actor and also being staged on Broadway.

On its play version, The Merchant of Venice is a romantic-comedy that tells about Bassanio, a Venetian who wants to marry Portia of Belmont a beautiful and wealthy woman. To propose Portia, Bassanio wants to lend some money from Antonio, a prosper merchant of Venice, make a long story short, Bassanio lend money from a Jewish money lender, Shylock, with Antonio as the loan’s guarantor. The play version took Shylock in the ‘wrong’ side.

Different from the play version, on its film version, the story is emphasizes the life of Shylock and place Shylock as a tragic hero. The film version did bring an anti-Semitism, a discrimination towards Jews, issue during renaissance era deeper than the play did. That is why the film version is more like a tragedy than a romantic-comedy.

From the explaination above, we can conclude that even though film version has same story with play version, the issue that they emphasizes, what point of view that the movie brings, and how the movie being presented make the film version different from play version.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). The Merchant of Venice.