The Merchant of Venice be a "happy ending" for the character, as, to a Christian audience, it saves his soul and allows him to enter Heaven. Regardless of what Shakespeare's authorial intent may have been, the play has been made use of by antisemites throughout the play's history. The Nazis used the usurious Shylock for their propaganda. Shortly after Kristallnacht in 1938, "The Merchant of Venice" was broadcast for propagandistic ends over the German airwaves. Productions of the play followed in Lübeck (1938), Berlin (1940), and elsewhere within the Nazi territory. In a series of articles called "Observer", first published in 1785, British playwright
The Maori Merchant of Venice in 2002, while Waihoroi Shortland won the film award for best actor at the New Zealand Film and TV Awards in 2003. "The Merchant of Venice" is not the only Shakespearian play to have been adapted to Māori themes, though it is the only one to have been released as a feature film. Adaptations of "Othello", using a Māori cast and usually set during either the Musket Wars or New Zealand Land Wars of the nineteenth century, have been performed on numerous occasions since the late 1990s, most notably at Christchurch's Court Theatre in 2001. The Maori Merchant of Venice