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The Literature Review

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The Mystery of Antonio’s Sadness in The Merchant of Venice （正文用Times New Roman小四，1.5倍行距，各段首行空4个字符，书名用斜体加粗）

Written sometime between 1596 and 1598, The Merchant of Venice is classified as both an early Shakespearean comedy (more specifically, as a "Christian comedy") and as one of the Bard's problem plays; it is a work in which good triumphs over evil, but serious themes are examined and some issues remain unresolved.

In The Merchant of Venice , Shakespeare wove together two ancient folk tales, one involving a vengeful, greedy creditor trying to exact a pound of flesh, the other involving a marriage suitor's choice among three chests and thereby winning his (or her) mate. Shakespeare's treatment of the first standard plot scheme centers around the villain of Merchant, the Jewish moneylender Shylock, who seeks a literal pound of flesh from his Christian opposite, the generous, faithful Antonio. Shakespeare's version of the chest-choosing device revolves around the play's Christian heroine Portia, who steers her lover Bassanio toward the correct humble casket and then successfully defends his bosom friend Antonio from Shylock's horrid legal suit. Antonio, as the title character, is sad from the beginning to the end of the play but never names the cause of his melancholy even when his friends ask him. Antonio plays the role as an outcast in the play. Shakespeare uses Antonio’s sadness simply as the device to set the tragic tone in the comedy or make Antonio be one of his melancholic characters in his works? Or Antonio is the representative of the complicated human nature? Antonio's unexplained melancholy is a significant element in understanding the play.

1. Studies on The Merchant of V enice（Times New Roman + 四号+首缩进4字符，下同）

Karl Marx once cited that Shakespeare is the greatest playwright in the world.

Shakespeare’s comedy The Merchant of Venice is one of the most influential comedies in his works. Shylock has mostly been the center of the research on the play.The Merchant of Venice was first printed in 1600 in quarto, of which nineteen copies survive. This was followed by a 1619 printing, and later an inclusion in the First Folio in 1623. The play was written shortly after Christopher Marlowe’s immensely popular Jew of Malta (1589), a play wherein a Jew named Barabas plays a greatly exaggerated villain. The portrayal of Shakespeare's Jew was and remained comic until the late 1700s at which time he was first played as a true villain. In 1814 Sh ylock’s role was depicted as a character to be pitied, and in 1879 he was first portrayed as a tragic character. Subsequent interpretations have varied greatly over the years, but since World War II he has most often been conceived of as tragic. The Merchant of Venice has been described as a great commentary on the nature of racial and religious interactions.

2. Deficiencies of Previous Studies on the Mystery of Antonio’s Sadness in The Merchant of V enice

The title character, Antonio, begins the play intriguingly: "In sooth, I know not why I am so sad; / It wearies me" (I.i.1-2). Much ink has been spilled with conjectures about Antonio's melancholy: that he's simply melancholic of temperament, that his devotion to Bassanio is homoerotic and the news that this friend seeks to marry has depressed him (Antonio is a name Shakespeare uses also in Twelfth Night for a character with an intense devotion to another male), or that he has an "ominous foreboding" about the events that will transpire in the course of this play. Although those pioneers aroused people to think much of The Merchant of Venice and left us invaluable and systematic reference, and made many achievements in description and explanation of the cause of Antonio’s sadness, there remain many deficienc ies.

First, The Merchant of Venice,which is considered to be one of Shakespeare’s four great comedies, actually functions as Shakespeare's farewell to comedy. Antonio is one of Shakespeare’s melancholic characters. Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice is undermining all that passes for comic entertainment. Shakespeare uses Antonio’s