explained. In addition, the courtroom scene, which features the irony of Shylock's praise for the judge (the disguised Portia) who will then manage a judgment which makes collection of his debt impossible. is hardly the comic scene it could have been. The reader might be amused at that irony, but certainly the destruction of Shylock which ensues wipes any smile off the reader's face. The lightheartedness which marks Shakespeare's comedies appears in this play only in the last of the five acts, after the conflicts have been settled. However, again, the gaiety and romantic arrangements solidified in the last act feel disconnected from the much darker four acts which precede it. If one waits for the play to become a full-fledged comedy, one finds oneself in the position of Bassanio in his address to Antonio and Salarino: "Good signiors both, when shall we laugh? say, when?/ You grow exceeding strange: must it be so?" (I, i, 66-67). For a play which is most often said to be a comedy or a romantic comedy, the play itself grows "exceeding strange," a fact revealed by an analysis of the work's major characters.
Indeed, whether one considers the play a comedy, the fact remains that the major characters are not comic figures. Beginning with Shylock, we find a man who is thoroughly unhappy and becomes even more miserable as the action progresses, both because of his own selfishness and because of others' reactions to that selfishness. There has been much debate over the nature of Shakespeare's portrayal of the Jewish usurer Shylock. Does the playwright mean to express the anti-Semitism of the era, or is he trying to expose the inhuman damage done to a specific Jew by such hatred and thereby create compassion for Shylock? The problem with the latter interpretation is that Shylock is such an inherently unsympathetic character from the beginning, and becomes even more unlikable as the play advances, driven as he is himself by hatred---the hatred...