Analogues and Emblems in The Merchant of Venice

Shakespeares merchandiser of Venice continues to glamour and also to elude its critics. In this play, Shylock the Jew insists on his legitimate right, in lieu of species owed, to Ëœa pound of flesh cut from the meet of the Christian merchant, Antonio so it goes in the financial district on the Rialto while in Belmont, the plays separate locale, suitors for the hand of the fair, rich Portia essential venture a unfounded choice among caskets of gold, silver and lead. As the play entangles its flesh-bond with its casket-trial plot both(prenominal) old stories, brought here to a life at erst fantastical and all too real we must speculate uncomfortable conjunctions. What do Venice and Belmont, m iodiney and love, outcast and community, justice and grace pass water to do with iodin a nonher anyway?\nEverything or nonhing; and most critics, prosecute what Barbara Lewalski once termed the plays Ëœthematic harmonies (p. 44), have sought to determine which. center(prenomin al) through his probing hundred-page essay, with which he introduces the Shakespeare Criticism Series collection of raw essays on the play, John W. Mahon considers the limits of such(prenominal) approaches: he asks whether they do not insist on Ëœharmonies which a Ëœconsideration of the characters as staged go away undermine (p. 44). In otherwise words: what is possible on the page may not be possible on the stage. Indeed, a focus on Shakespeares drama as performed unitary of the Series avowed goals brings a surplus 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 obfuscation of our sense of the plays anti-Semitism, he sheds the social occasion to which the Quarto text at times, rather coldly, calls him: Ëœthe Jew.\nIn one of the four essays in this intensity level to focus on questions of surgery history, Jay L. Halio urges actors and directors to resist the impulse to Ëœsimplify and, inst ead, to play up the Ëœambivalence that touches mos...