The Boundaries of Comedy: The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice

Shakespeare ◽  
1993 ◽  
pp. 72-86
Author(s):  
Susan Bassnett
Keyword(s):  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice

The Merchant of Venice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Tom Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice

Maritime Fantasies and Gender Space in Three Shakespearean Comedies

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Wai Fong Cheang
Keyword(s):  
Female Characters ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Gender Space ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender And Space

Abstract Laden with sea images, Shakespeare‘s plays dramatise the maritime fantasies of his time. This paper discusses the representation of maritime elements in Twelfth Night, The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice by relating them to gender and space issues. It focuses on Shakespeare‘s creation of maritime space as space of liberty for his female characters.

Figuren des Hasses. : Prolegomena zu einer Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte1

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-90
Author(s):  
Von Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf
Keyword(s):  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice

In William Shakespeares um 1596/97 entstandener und wohl noch vor 1600 in London uraufgeführter Komödie The Merchant of Venice findet sich im 3. Auftritt des 1. Akts die folgende Äußerung des Juden Shylock in Bezug auf Antonio, den titelgebenden Kaufmann von Venedig:

Richard Mackenney, Venice as the Polity of Mercy: Guilds, Confraternities, and the Social Order, c. 1250–c. 1650. Toronto Italian Studies. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2019, xiii, 471.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 551-552
Author(s):  
Thomas Willard
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Legal Scholar ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
Italian Studies ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Social ◽  
University Town ◽  
The University

Shakespeare is well known to have set two of his plays in and around Venice: The Merchant of Venice (1596) and The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (1603). The first is often remembered for its famous speech about “the quality of mercy,” delivered by the female lead Portia in the disguise of a legal scholar from the university town of Padua. The speech helps to spare the life of her new husband’s friend and financial backer against the claims of the Jewish moneylender Shylock. The play has raised questions for Shakespearean scholars about the choice of Venice as an open city where merchants of all nations and faiths would meet on the Rialto while the city’s Senate, composed of leading merchants, worked hard to keep it open to all and especially profitable for its merchants. Those who would like to learn more about the city’s development as a center of trade can learn much from Richard Mackenney’s new book.

Intertheatricality and Propaganda

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Publicover
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Real World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Political Background ◽  
Controversial Nature

This chapter analyses the ways in which the collaborative drama The Travels of the Three English Brothers defends the Sherley brothers’ real-world political endeavours across Europe and Persia through its intertheatrical negotiations. Explaining the political background of those endeavours and their controversial nature, it illustrates how the playwrights liken the Sherleys to the heroes of dramas that had been popular on the early modern stage over the preceding twenty years, in particular Tamburlaine and The Merchant of Venice. It also examines the significance of Francis Beaumont’s specific parody, in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, of an episode in Travels in which the Persian Sophy acts as godfather to the child of Robert Sherley. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of playing companies in shaping dramatic output.

The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque

2019 ◽  
pp. 152-172
Author(s):  
Lizzie Leopold
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Trade Winds ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice

In Act II, Scene V, of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Bassanio, a Venetian lord, prepares to host a masque, but the trade winds change unexpectedly and Bassanio’s ship sets sail that very evening, cancelling the masked ball. Although this masqued scene is never realized, written, or staged, its mention is enough reason to interrogate its possibility. Through a Derridean decentering of presence, bringing together the extensive literature on Elizabethan masques, early modern understandings of touch and dance, and a deep interrogation of religious tensions, as played out throughout The Merchant of Venice, the masque’s textual absence is at once made an important, albeit impossible, presence. These intersecting texts create a web of social ideologies that describe the early modern moment from which this play emerges. What is unwritten proves powerfully choreographic, the absence itself working to organize bodies in space, separated by religious and gendered difference.

‘If you prick me, do I not bleed?’: Antisemitism, racism and group analysis —some thoughts

2021 ◽  
pp. 053331642199611
Author(s):  
Claire Bacha ◽  
Sue Einhorn ◽  
Sue Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Group Analysis ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
Blind Spots

The Merchant of Venice contains some of the most powerful depictions of Jewish–Christian relations in an era when Christian antisemitism dominated European life. It is one of the most difficult plays for Jews to watch: not only for Shylock’s torment at the treatment he is subjected to, particularly in the Christian characters’ relentless contempt for him, but for the depiction of his gradual descent into violent revenge, as a result of which he himself is crushed. The revenge part of Shylock’s speech is crucial. The anti-Semites in the play unconsciously fear their victim, especially after treating Shylock with cruelty and contempt. The racists then project hatred, consequently fearing that Shylock will hate them, that he will be filled with rage and seek a revenge even more cruel than that which has been perpetrated upon him. Shylock speaks the racist’s fear and then wants to carry it out. In Shakespeare’s play, Shylock becomes a justification for hatred. If we look at this as the unconscious of antisemitism, then Shakespeare is personifying this unconscious in the character of Shylock. Seen in this way, The Merchant of Venice is a dramatic depiction of the violent effects of antisemitism on the subjectivity and identity of both victims and perpetrators. We know that racism creates trauma. Sue Lieberman’s work on transmitted trauma (Lieberman, 2015) and Earl Hopper’s work on massification and aggregation both explored unprocessed trauma (Hopper, 2003). However, the permeating trauma of both racism and antisemitism has festered without being addressed adequately. Our purpose in this article is to begin to look at this disturbing truth. We will address the historical relationship between antisemitism and racism. We will make links to the development of psychoanalysis and group analysis. That Foulkes, himself was a victim of racism has always been present but largely unspoken. Unspoken, it has created blind spots, including our own racism.

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