Talk:The Merchant of Venice

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the Indies or West Indies?

Latest comment: 5 months ago5 comments3 people in discussion

On this change [1], I don't actually know which is more correct, though I suspect it's "the Indies", maybe someone else does. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:11, 10 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Indies??? I did some WP:OR and it turns out that in 16th-century Venice they didn't have motion pictures. But maybe Alex Andrews can work in some facts about how Shakespeare was predicting that indies would be a way for future Christian filmmakers to escape Jewish control of the entertainment industry. E Eng 17:38, 10 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Now, now, one shouldn't poke a sleeping debating society member. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:05, 10 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

This almost certainly refers to the East Indies. Antonio's trading ventures are explicitly said to include spices, which at that time was almost synonymous with the Indies. The Caribbean was at this time a festering pot of pirates and mercantile warfare unlikely to be considered a safe trading route (which Antonio is certain his ships are; hence why he doesn't hesitate to offer a pound of his own flesh as bond), and the main exports were sugarcane, molasses, and tobacco (spices are more recent).

There's some controversy over whether Antonio's diversity of trade routes is historically accurate, but this is because the pre-Suez canal route was over land to the Red Sea (long, risky, expensive) or the long way around the Cape of Good Hope (challenging) for which the Dutch were, apparently, the only one's technologically advanced enough to exploit. Either way the destination is the northern Indian Ocean. Xover (talk) 20:15, 16 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, Xover. No doubt he sent ships to the deserts of Bohemia. For potatoes. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 21:26, 16 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

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