What Should His Sufferance Be? Protesting Injustice in Shakespeare's Venice and the Age of Black Lives Matter

Abstract

This essay considers the impossibility faced by The Merchant of Venice's Shylock in seeking redress for his suffering and how dismissal of his complaints parallels criticism of protests against racial injustice in the twenty-first century, with particular attention to Colin Kaepernick's 2016 protest against police brutality. Venice's idealization of Christ-like passivity and our own age's veneration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence create impossible standards for those attempting to call attention to injustice, leading to condemnation of protesters' actions and misinterpretation of their motives.