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.

Shylock, the Devil and the Meaning of Deception in The Merchant of Venice

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-51
Author(s):  
Jonathan Elukin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The World ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Fallen World

Abstract The article explores Shakespeare’s secularized retelling of the Christian theological narrative of deceiving the Devil, with Antonio playing the role of Christ and Shylock as the Devil. The article argues that recasting the contest between Christ and the Devil in the world of Venice sets the stage for Shakespeare’s larger exploration of the pervasive nature of deceit in human affairs. Although it seems that Shakespeare’s characters are resigned to live in a fallen world where truth is obscured, Portia’s invocation of mercy may be Shakespeare’s attempt to offer some hope of an earthly salvation. The article argues that this portrait of a world filled with deception resonated with Shakespeare’s audience. Men and women in early modern England lived in a world where they often had to hide their religious identities and loyalties. This interpretation challenges more recent attempts to see the play as primarily concerned with race and tolerance.

Shylock, the Devil and the Meaning of Deception in The Merchant of Venice

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-51
Author(s):  
Jonathan Elukin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The World ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Fallen World

The article explores Shakespeare’s secularized retelling of the Christian theological narrative of deceiving the Devil, with Antonio playing the role of Christ and Shylock as the Devil. The article argues that recasting the contest between Christ and the Devil in the world of Venice sets the stage for Shakespeare’s larger exploration of the pervasive nature of deceit in human affairs. Although it seems that Shakespeare’s characters are resigned to live in a fallen world where truth is obscured, Portia’s invocation of mercy may be Shakespeare’s attempt to offer some hope of an earthly salvation. The article argues that this portrait of a world filled with deception resonated with Shakespeare’s audience. Men and women in early modern England lived in a world where they often had to hide their religious identities and loyalties. This interpretation challenges more recent attempts to see the play as primarily concerned with race and tolerance.

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.

Umstrittene Expertise

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Global Dimension ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Controversial Nature

The current political debates about climate change or the coronavirus pandemic reveal the fundamental controversial nature of expertise in politics and society. The contributions in this volume analyse various facets, actors and dynamics of the current conflicts about knowledge and expertise. In addition to examining the contradictions of expertise in politics, the book discusses the political consequences of its controversial nature, the forms and extent of policy advice, expert conflicts in civil society and culture, and the global dimension of expertise. This special issue also contains a forum including reflections on the role of expertise during the coronavirus pandemic. The volume includes perspectives from sociology, political theory, political science and law.

The Textile Black Body

2016 ◽  
pp. 169-185
Author(s):  
Ian Smith
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Black Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Theatrical Representation ◽  
Black Man

In addition to cosmetic applications for early modern ‘blackface’ theatrical representation, the essay posits that performers used a variety of racial prostheses, most notably cloth and animal skins. In The Merchant of Venice, Morocco’s description of his own body as ‘shadowed livery’—that is, dyed cloth worn by a servant or apprentice—reveals a complex metatheatrical consciousness indebted to this prosthetic blackface tradition. Morocco’s identification with livery connects specifically to Lancelot, the other liveried character in the play whose servant uniform contextualizes Morocco’s corporal blackness as a sign of membership in a social underclass. The play’s mercantile ethos, reflecting John Wheeler’s assessment from A Treatise of Commerce that pervasive economic interests bring ‘all things into commerce’, creates the conditions for category violations: people are perceived as commodities, and none more insidiously than Morocco, the textile black man, read, in turn, as a powerful antecedent for post-Enlightenment constructions of race.

scholarly journals Racism, Ethnic Discrimination, and Otherness in Shakespeare’s Othello and The Merchant of Venice

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Shaghayegh Moghari
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Discrimination ◽  
Religious Discrimination ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Comparative Examination

This study aims to present a comparative examination of the traces of racism and discrimination in two plays of Shakespeare, Othello and The Merchant of Venice, written in 1603 and around 1598, respectively in the Elizabethan Period. The attempt in this paper is to explore the construction of racism and the evidences of discrimination as depicted in Othello and the Merchant of Venice by use of the deconstruction of marriage. For this purpose, it deconstructs the marriage by focusing on Othello in Othello, and The Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice; and, depicts racism and discrimination by comparing the characterizations of Othello in Othello and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Both sections critique the cruel issues these people experienced as other. The notion of ‘otherness’ and its application in the characterizations of Othello and Shylock, Othello vs. Shylock, the application of deconstruction of marriage to Othello and The Prince of Morocco, and racism in Othello and The Merchant of Venice are among the major items on which this article elaborates following by a conclusion describing the role of human conscience in racial and religious discrimination.

The Last Days of the UK Film Council

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Doyle
Keyword(s):  
Civil Servants ◽  
The Political ◽  
Coalition Government ◽  
Key Players ◽  
Political Background ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Considerable Detail ◽  
Film Policy

Based on key players’ testimony and an extensive documented record, this chapter initially discusses the political background to the fraught merger talks between the BFI and the UKFC in 2009-2010, along with the uncertain role of the DCMS. It then turns to consider the shock decision to close the UKFC taken by Conservative ministers in the DCMS serving in the Coalition government elected in May 2010. Various possible reasons for closure are evaluated in considerable detail and the impact on the UKFC is described. The account analyses each of the steps taken by the DCMS to devise a new landscape of film support post-UKFC, with the BFI assuming many functions after extensive negotiation with ministers and civil servants. Next, the BFI’s new turn in film policy is considered. A range of views on the closure decision, both pro and con, is discussed.

Bungei Kyōkai

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guohe Zheng
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Original Script ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Financial Difficulties ◽  
Training And Research ◽  
A Doll's House ◽  
Second Period

Launched in February 1906 out of a drama club of Waseda University students, Bungei Kyōkai was one of the two pioneering organizations of the modernist movement in Japanese theater, the other being Jiyū Gekijō. Bungei Kyōkai, particularly its second period, is considered the beginning of shingeki for its contributions to Modernism in establishing professional actors and actresses in modern Japanese theater, in its impact on society, and in its having elite intellectuals as its leaders. During its early period Bungei Kyōkai was more reformative in nature; while it produced selected acts of The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet, it also produced Tsubouchi Shōyō’s modern kabuki Kiri hitoha (A Paulownia Leaf), and the role of Portia in Merchant was played by an onnagata (male performer of female roles in kabuki). This led to these resignation of disappointed members and the beginning of its financial difficulties. To overcome these challenges, Shimamura Hōgetsu, Tsubouchi Shōyō’s disciple and the de facto manager of the organization, persuaded his teacher to take direct charge from February 1909. Shōyō started Bungei Kyōkai’s later period by building, on the site of his own residence, a theater academy, intended for both training and research. The two-year co-educational academy program was quite rigorous, with Hōgetsu and Shōyō among the instructors and using as textbooks the original script of The Merchant of Venice and the English translation of A Doll’s House. Later, however, elements of traditional Japanese performing arts, including kyōgen and stage fighting, were added to the curriculum, reflecting Shōyō’s vision of a national theater as the ultimate goal of Bungei Kyōkai.

Shylock in Buchenwald

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-174
Author(s):  
Gad Kaynar-Kissinger
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
World War ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Second World

Can The Merchant of Venice be performed in Germany after the Holocaust, and if so, how? Is the claim that the play is a touchstone for German-Jewish relations, with a philosemitic tradition – and therefore eligible to be performed today – verifiable? The article begins by briefly surveying this tradition from the Jewish emancipation in the mid-eighteenth century, which, with a few relapses, continued – especially in productions directed by Jews and/or with Jewish actors in the role of Shylock – until the rise of the Nazi regime, to be resumed after the Second World War. The main part analyses a test case, staged by the Israeli director Hanan Snir at the Weimar National Theatre (1995), and intended rhetorically to avenge the Holocaust on the German audience: Merchant as a viciously antisemitic play-within-a-play, directed by SS personnel in the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp with eventually murdered Jewish inmates compelled to play the Jewish parts.

scholarly journals How Marston Read His Merchant: Ruled Women and Structures of Circulation in The Dutch Courtesan

Early Theatre ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Meghan Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Male Sexuality ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Source Text ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice

This essay argues that The Merchant of Venice was highly influential on John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, guiding the changes Marston made to his source text. Marston extends Merchant’s critiques of nascent capitalism and is especially critical of the commodifying male sexuality embodied by Freevill and influenced by the characterizations of Portia and Bassanio. Recognizing Courtesan’s debts to Merchant also enables a better understanding of how Marston’s move to the Children of the Queen’s Revels affected his dramaturgy. By showing how Freevill self-consciously and inauthentically performs the role of a romance hero, Marston participates in the company’s characteristic ironizing of romance.

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