Arnold Wesker’s The Merchant: Wesker Is My Name

Abstract

This study seeks to examine how Arnold Wesker’s The Merchant (1976) appropriates the canonical Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1595). The study investigates Wesker’s reasons behind his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Shylock as a British working-class Jewish playwright. Employing multicultural perspectives, this study discusses how Wesker rewrote his Shylock, subverting and redeeming Shakespeare’s Shylock, and how Wesker’s version represents class, race, religion, and other cultural phenomena to resemble or differ from the original text’s representations. The paper is interested in exploring how Wesker reshapes the popular imagination, the ideological assumptions of the public, and how the cultural tradition of Shakespearean Shylock is viewed. Wesker’s personal struggle as a Jewish working-class playwright is one of the vital variables examined in this study. The study reveals how Wesker voices his own literary thought, ideological philosophies, and anger, redeeming himself of the discrimination and the feeling of being an outsider in the British Theatre establishment.