Posted by Barry Pineo on March 27, 1998 at 09:10:48:
In Reply to: Why shouldn't The Merchant of Venice be ban from school. posted by John McMan on March 23, 1998 at 16:40:25:
While I would say that reading books such as
_ Lunch_ or __ would probably not be
entirely appropriate for high school reading (and
I'm uming that's what we're talking about
here), I really cannot imagine why any play by
Shakespeare should be banned in any high school.
While Shylock is certanly the villain in the play,
and more than a bit of anti-Semitism may be read
into that choice, the Christians in the play do
not make out much better than the Jew. If
anything, I have always seen Shylock as a somewhat
sympathetic figure. While his insistence on his
pound of flesh is reprehensible, his wrongs at
the hands of the Christians are all too real.
Should we ban _Othello_ because the antagonist
is a white man? Or _Hamlet_? Or _Julius Caesar_?
Once you ban one, where does it end?