Was Shakespeare a religious fanatic?

Question

In the play *The Merchant of Venice*, Shylock is pretty much disdained and humiliated only because he was a Jew. His thirst for revenge against Antonio is fuelled by the fact that Antonio constantly humiliates Shylock in front of his fellow merchants. Even at the end, after Portia skilfully tricks Shylock, Shylock is forced to convert from Judaism to Christianity for going on a revenge mission against a man who insulted and berated him. **Was Shakespeare a religious fanatic for having Shylock go through a forced conversion? Or was it necessary because of the times in which Shakespeare had to write the book?**

Answer 1

To add onto that--because I totally agree with Juliana--it is also true that Shakespeare was heavily influenced by medieval drama, which was almost exclusively religious plays. Growing up in Stratford, the theater he would have seen was traveling companies doing plays with titles like "The Play of the Sacrament" or "Abraham." Many of these plays feature extremely bloody scenes of torture, and many of those involve conversions. They're not long, so if you're interested, you might look up "Thais" by Hrostvitha of Gandersheim (though it won't be the most fun thing you ever read).

Anyway, this was Shakespeare's theatrical education, and there is a context in which, as hard as it is to believe, Shylock's forced conversion is a gentle and kind ending, since the plays Shakespeare saw as a kid would have, without exaggeration, spent the last act of the play just torturing and killing him.

Answer 2

Shakespeare was not a religious fanatic. He was an observer and critic of society. He observed what was happening around him and used satire, irony, parody, and other literary devices to comment on what he saw. What happened to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice was happening to many Jews during Shakespeare's time.