Nationalistic Stereotyping in The Merchant of Venice
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When asked by her attendant, Nerissa, to judge her many suitors the Lady Portia directs a shocking amount of cruel stereotypes towards the young men who vie for her favour. She accuses the Frenchman of being a flippant fop; the English duke is a dumbard; the German man a violent drunk and the Scottish lord has a bad habit of getting into pointless brawls. The question is: are these stereotypical beliefs still held by people in a modern day world?
My answer would have to be a tentative no. We have all come across these particular clichs in our lives, but I have found that most of the time they are used in a very tongue in cheek fashion in pop culture. Many shows try to take stereotypes to the extreme for comedic purposes, such as the flappy-headed Canadians on South Park, or the crazy, unconventional Australians in The Simpsons. I believe that the over the top exposure of stereotypes in these satires helps put the issue into perspective and actually takes away a lot of the negative power behind stereotyping by making it look so utterly ridiculous.
In fact, it was very possible that Shakespeare was trying to achieve this exact effect when he wrote Portia's rant in the fifteen hundreds. After all, The Merchant of Venice is a comedy and if her words were meant to be taken seriously, I honestly doubt that Shakespeare would have insulted his English audience by calling them badly dressed, uncultured idiots. I'm not arguing that these stereotypes didn't exist at that time- because they obviously did- but I think a lot of what Shakespeare was trying to communicate in this play was the foolishness of judging someone by their nationality...