Abstract

 
 
 John Cage narrates: “...Somebody said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike... Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way. I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should be alike.” The interviewer asks Cage: “Isn’t that like pop art?” And consequently, Cage responds: “Yes, that’s what pop art is, liking things.”1
 Shakespeare’s plays have long been put under scrutiny, praised, and devalued through various theoretical lenses. Regardless of the innumerable doctrines against which his tragedies and comedies have been over-analyzed, tending to his art in terms of the essence of his works, the artistry of them seems more than crucial. Morality, ethics and individual and collective philosophical readings of Shakespearean plays have coexisted with and mirrored in words, hence literature. There seems to be no way out but to weigh Shakespearean plays against these impossibly heavy concepts. This paper intends to undergo an ethical reading of The Merchant of Venice, through the ideas of Emmanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham. Consequent to the ethical reading of The Merchant of Venice, the artistic value(s) of it will be discussed; whether one is blessed with an artistic sense or otherwise is a question to be tended to.
 
 
Highlights
The Merchant of Venice has been among those controversial plays having a hard time falling under the right category
Some critics have taken the play seriously enough to have been conveying a message, including Harold Bloom: “I know of no legitimate way in which the Merchant of Venice ought to be regarded as other than an anti-Semitic text...”2 Whereas, some have considered it nothing but a comedy, devoid of any specific connotation
Burton Raffel considers the play merely a sort of pop art, not intending to mean anything plausible: We must be careful not to lean on a tremendously effective and enormously popular comic drama, trying to place it in an ideological schema-like that which we have come to call anti-Semitism- in which it has little if any legitimate place
Summary
The Merchant of Venice has been among those controversial plays having a hard time falling under the right category. He further clarifies in this regard: There is, only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.10 Does this clarify the essentially good in itself, and puts such a huge responsibility on each and every human being’s shoulders as an agent. In the discussion of human beings as moral beings and the necessity of categorical imperative moral reasoning, Kant suggests the inevitable necessity of the definition of another imperative, the practical imperative By that he intends every moral human being: So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means..
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