Women in The Merchant Of Venice Essay

Women in The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare, were treated unequally to men and were often shown a lack of respect in their daily lives. Through the stories of the different women in the play, such as Portia and Jessica, we can see how women were so poorly treated.

Portia is a daughter of a very rich, dead man, who has left, in his will, rules for her to follow and people to enforce those rules in his absence. With this, he has created a test for anyone wishing to marry her. This test does not take into account her opinion and cares little for her choice of whom she wants to marry. I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike. This quote shows Portias distain for the horrible position her father has put her in, and provides perfect insight as to how women were treated in Elizabethan England times.

The one time Portia and her lady-in-waiting, Nerissa, do receive the kind of respect they deserve, is when they dress up as men! These women dress like this in order to help out their lovers. Portia was the doctor, Nerissa there her clerk This, in itself is appalling and reveals to the audience how ill treated these women were. A woman of such high intelligence and ranking cannot even be considered a lawyer of such a time!

Dressing as man must have caught on quickly in these times, as Jessica also dresses like this, in order to escape her ghetto city. Cupid himself would blush to see me thus transformed to a boy, Jessica knows that what she is doing is wrong and she is ashamed to have been driven by men to conform so much as to turn into one of them. She is not embarrassed because she is abusing to fact that men are accepted to be walking the streets at night, but rather that she is accepting the fact that she has to change her sex to act inconspicuous at nighttime.

This means that generally women were expected to be inside at night and

Jessica, daughter of Shylock the Jew, is not even missed by her father when she runs away. Her terrible situation of being stuck between two worlds (a Jewish or Christian) is heart wrenching in itself, but to add to her depression of such a predicament, her father declares he cares more about the money she stole to make a new life, than that of her life itself. I would my daughter dead at my foot and the jewels in her ear, this shocking and distasteful statement portrays just how little the world, men, cared for women, in such times.

Through these three women of the play The Merchant of Venice, we can see that women were not treated equally and with the same respect as men in this play. Shakespeare has used these characters to portray the harsh reality of Elizabethan England and it is attitudes towards women.