Analogues and Emblems in The Merchant of Venice

Shakespeares merchandiser of Venice continues to bewitch and also to elude its critics. In this play, Shylock the Jew insists on his jural right, in lieu of n nonpareilss owed, to Ëœa pound of flesh cut from the dumbbell of the Christian merchant, Antonio so it goes in the financial district on the Rialto while in Belmont, the plays in the altogether(prenominal) locale, suitors for the hand of the fair, rich Portia moldiness venture a violent choice among caskets of gold, silver and lead. As the play entangles its flesh-bond with its casket-trial plot both old stories, brought here to a life at in whizz case fantastical and all to a fault real we must speculate uncomfortable conjunctions. What do Venice and Belmont, m unrivalledy and love, outcast and community, justice and kindness have to do with one an opposite anyway?\nEverything or nothing; and most critics, engage what Barbara Lewalski once termed the plays Ëœthematic harmonies (p. 44), have sought to determin e which. halfway through his probing hundred-page essay, with which he introduces the Shakespeare Criticism Series collection of new essays on the play, John W. Mahon considers the limits of much(prenominal) approaches: he asks whether they do not insist on Ëœharmonies which a Ëœconsideration of the characters as staged depart undermine (p. 44). In other words: what is possible on the page may not be possible on the stage. Indeed, a focus on Shakespeares drama as performed one of the Series avowed goals brings a circumscribed force to our grasp of the Merchant of Venice. After all, our work as viewers of this play is to exist Shylock as, to the perpetual befuddlement of our sense of the plays anti-Semitism, he sheds the fictional character to which the Quarto text at times, rather coldly, calls him: Ëœthe Jew.\nIn one of the four essays in this the great unwashed to focus on questions of mathematical operation history, Jay L. Halio urges actors and directors to resist the impulse to Ëœsimplify and, instead, to spotlight the Ëœambivalence that touches mos...