Anshu Reads Stuff

I first flipped through this play when I was twelve. I decided that I didn't like Cleopatra. I wanted to read about strong women, and what kind of strong woman lounges on divans for an entire play waiting for her Antony to come back? Thomasina has a lovely line to that effect in Stoppard's Arcadia : "Everything is turned to love with her. New love, absent love, lost love – I never knew a heroine that makes such noodles of our sex. It only needs a Roman general to drop anchor outside the window and away goes the empire like a christening mug into a pawn shop. If Queen Elizabeth had been a Ptolemy history would have been quite different – we would be admiring the pyramids of Rome and the great Sphinx of Verona." I read and loved Julius Caesar a few years later, but I hated Antony. I didn't know what he saw in Caesar worth avenging. As I saw it, Julius Caesar portrays Caesar as a self-important tyrant past his prime. Either Antony overthrew the Liberatores for l...

In Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom illustrates how grossly implausible it would have been for Shylock to convert to Christianity. "No one in The Merchant of Venice is what he or she seems to be —not Portia, Antonio, Bassanio, or Jessica —and can Shakespeare allow only Shylock to maintain a consistent stance? Who in this comedy can have his or her bond?"  If anyone could have kept his bond, I would have bet on Antonio or Shylock.  As Bloom points out, the play's inhabitants are so frivolous that they appear insubstantial beside our two main characters. Portia has more wit than the rest, more colorful plumage, but certainly she does not have stronger principles. Why did she save Antonio? For the fun of it. Listen to her: " I'll hold thee any wager, / When we are both accoutred like young men, I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two...and speak of frays / Like a fine bragging youth, and tell quaint lies, How honourable ladies sought my love, / Wh...