What is the theme of Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice?
The traditional theme of the play is to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio,to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty, wit and loyalty, and to expose the greed and brutality of the Jew. Many people today tend to regard the play as a satire of the Christians' hypocrisy and their false standards of friendship and love, their cunning ways of pursuing worldliness and their prejudice against Jews.