The Merchant of Venice (opera) 2013. Keith Warner directed the production, which was also supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Grand Theatre – National Opera, Warsaw. The opera libretto follows the plot of the original play very closely, generally using Shakespeare's own words. Many of the minor characters are excised. Act I introduces the melancholy merchant Antonio, his friend Bassanio who asks Antonio for money to back his wooing of Portia, the Jewish moneylender Shylock, his daughter Jessica and her Gentile lover, Lorenzo. Despite evident mutual personal animosity, Shylock agrees to lend Antonio 3000 ducats against the pledge of a pound of the
Hamlet's Father Hamlet is sent to Hell for the harm he's caused and will be with his father for eternity. Orson Scott Card has modernized other Shakespeare plays, including "The Taming of the Shrew", "The Merchant of Venice", and "Romeo and Juliet", "so that modern audiences can understand them instantly and easily while still remaining "[sic]" all the flavor of blank verse in Elizabethan English." In his foreword to the "Hamlet's Father", Card says that he could never identify with Hamlet: "I have little interest in a dithering hero; nor am I much inspired by revenge plots." He wrote the story in