Shylock (film) Shylock (film) Shylock is a 1940 Indian Tamil-language film directed by Kinema Ramu and Serukalathur Sama (under the name Sama-Ramu) and produced by Bharat Pictures. It is based on William Shakespeare's play "The Merchant of Venice". The film stars Sama as the title character, T. V. Janakam as Portia, S. G. Kasi Iyer as Antonio, P. S. Sivaramalingam as the Duke and T. S. Santhanam as Bassanio. The film was a commercial failure, and no print of it has survived, making it a lost film. Kinema Ramu, a lawyer based in Kumbakonam and scholar on William Shakespeare, wrote the dialogue
Jessica (The Merchant of Venice) critics have historically viewed the character negatively, highlighting her theft of her father's gold, her betrayal of his trust, and her apparently selfish motivations and aimless behaviour. In her 1980 survey, "In Defense of Jessica: The Runaway Daughter in "The Merchant of Venice"", Camille Slights calls out Arthur Quiller-Couch's opinion in the 1926 "The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare" as an extreme but representative example: Slights sees this as a consequence of sympathetic readings of Shylock, where the play is seen primarily as exposing Christian hypocrisy, and his actions merely natural responses to ostracism and prejudice. In such a reading Jessica's