The Economic and Social Effect of the Usury Laws in the Eighteenth Century

1933 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 197-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sybil Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Social Effect ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
English Stage ◽  
The One

I have just been reading “Three lectures by the late Sir Israel Gollancz,” printed for private circulation and kindly lent to me by Dr. Hubert Hall, in which the following passage occurs: “Long before Shakespeare thought of dealing with the theme, when Shakespeare was still young—a school-boy—the story of the Jew with reference to the same story that we have in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice had been enacted on the English stage. As early as 1579 we have a reference to it, but the play was lost; we know it only from Gosson's reference.” The author goes on to explain that” in 1579 we have already two elements that make up The Merchant of Venice; the Pound of Flesh motive on the one hand and, on the other, the Choice of the Caskets, combined into one play, The Jew, ‘representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers, and the bloody minds of usurers.’

scholarly journals Deconstruction of the Construction: Derridean Study of Selected Shakespeare’s Comedies

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 90-120
Author(s):  
Seyyedeh Zahra Nozen ◽  
Pegah Sheikhalipour
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
The One

Since it was first introduced by Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s, deconstruction, as a method of reading, has been applied to literary texts by critics to reveal the hidden messages of texts and provide opportunities to rethink textual and cultural norms and conventions. While the western tradition has always prioritized tragedy over comedy due to its elegance and graveness, this research tends to focus on comedy as an entity in itself. Tragedy, especially in the Shakespearean sense of the word, has been considered by critics as a “construction” that is well-wrought and perfect in nature. Comedy, on the other hand, is notable for laughing at the laughable and mocking the unfit. Put differently, there has always been a latent, freewheeling “deconstruction” within comedy, especially the Shakespearean. There is, thus, an attempt here to prove, on the one hand, how comedy can be put forth not as an inferior genre but as a supplement to tragedy and, on the other, how comedy moves toward deconstruction and how it tends to subvert or deconstruct the constructions. Investigating a selection of Shakespeare’s comedies including As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night, this study compares and contrasts Shakespearean comedy in light of some Derridean concepts. Along with it, Shakespearean ideas and concepts which are interconnected with those of Derrida are introduced and are buttressed through some meticulously chosen excerpts. Bearing in mind that Derrida is in a habit of deconstructing the so-called established creeds, Shakespeare’s texts are exposed to a deconstructive reading to examine how deceptively simple ideas are dealt with in his selected comedies. Also, as numerous enigmas have for years revolved around the personality of William Shakespeare, this study also aims to take up certain critical idioms of the Derridean canon, elaborate on them and then relate them to the selected plays from the Shakespearean oeuvre in order to disclose some personal aspects of Shakespeare’s personality as a historical figure.

Portia’s Pauline Perversion: The Merchant of Venice and Romans 1

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Stockton
Keyword(s):  
Married Couple ◽  
The Other ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The One

Paul’s sexed exception of Christ from the Christian prohibition against male bodily penetration vexes Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, a comedy about the power of marriage to simultaneously masculinize and Christianize. Dressed as a boy, Jessica elopes with Lorenzo, and later argues that she has thereby become a Christian. Also cross-dressed, Portia saves her husband’s friend Antonio from Shylock’s emasculating excision of flesh. Responding to Janet Adelman’s argument that the play shores up a Pauline ideology of Christian masculinity through Portia’s courtroom defeat of Shylock, this chapter juxtaposes contemporary queer biblical and Renaissance Protestant readings of Romans 1 to argue that the play instead perverts this ideology through its presentation of Christ as a penetrable eunuch in the character of Balthasar. As Portia/Balthasar’s ring trick opens the dyad of the married couple to the triad of married couple and friend, the “Pauline” distinction between monogamous, marital, Christian sexuality on the one hand, and sodomitical Jewish sexuality on the other, begins to erode.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Vietnamese Studies

The Introduction gives the background of the significance of translating and study of the text Errors of the Three Religions. The history of the development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Vietnam from their beginning until the eighteenth century is narrated. Particular attention is given to the different manners in which the Three Religions were taken up by nobles and literati, on the one hand, and commoners, on the other. The chapter also presents the pragmatic approach to religion taken by the Vietnamese, which was in part responsible for the receptivity of the Vietnamese to Christianity. The significance of the discovery of Errors and its impact on Vietnamese studies are also discussed.

A Comparison of Wolff’s and Kant’s Receptions of Emanuel Swedenborg

Kant-Studien ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Laura Follesa
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
Emanuel Swedenborg ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
The One

Abstract Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) did not provide the sole perspective through which Emanuel Swedenborg’s work was known in Germany in the eighteenth century. Before Kant, another German philosopher was interested in Swedenborg from a completely different perspective: Christian Wolff. On the one hand, this paper analyzes the meaning of Wolff’s anonymous reviews of Swedenborg’s early writings published in Acta Eruditorum, the authorship of which was only recently discovered, in order to show Swedenborg’s intertwinement with German scholars during the 1720s. On the other, I juxtapose Kant’s and Wolff’s evaluations of Swedenborg’s work at the origins of their different attitudes towards fundamental problems such as the nature of the soul and immortality.

COMMUNICATING EMPIRE: THE HABSBURGS AND THEIR CRITICS, 1700–1919

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 117-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Free Standing ◽  
Power Base ◽  
The One ◽  
At Home

ABSTRACTIn the vibrant current debate about European empires and their ideologies, one basic dichotomy still tends to be overlooked: that between, on the one hand, the plurality of modern empires of colonisation, commerce and settlement; and, on the other, the traditional claim to single and undividedimperiumso long embodied in the Roman Empire and its successor, the Holy Roman Empire, or (First) Reich. This paper examines the tensions between the two, as manifested in the theory and practice of Habsburg imperial rule. The Habsburgs, emperors of the Reich almost continuously through its last centuries, sought to build their own power-base within and beyond it. The first half of the paper examines how by the eighteenth century their ‘Monarchy’, subsisting alongside the Reich, dealt with the associated legacy of empire. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 the Habsburgs could pursue a free-standing Austrian ‘imperialism’, but it rested on an uneasy combination of old and new elements and was correspondingly vulnerable to challenge from abroad and censure at home. The second half of the article charts this aspect of Habsburg government through an age of international imperialism and its contribution to the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918.

Voltaire, Philosopher of Human Progress

PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 356-364
Author(s):  
Virgil W. Topazio
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
Single Addition ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Popular Consent ◽  
Positive Knowledge ◽  
Separate Discipline

With the emergence of philosophy in the nineteenth century as a separate discipline which stressed primarily questions insoluble by empirical or formal methods, Voltaire's reputation as a philosopher has gone into gradual eclipse. It has become unfashionable and degrading for philosophers to concern themselves with the practical aspects of philosophical enquiry. In eighteenth-century France, on the other hand, the identification of philosophy with science, which by twentieth-century standards had vitiated philosophical thought, produced the “philosophes” or natural philosophers who were on the whole more interested in human progress than in the progress of the human mind. And Voltaire was by popular consent the leader of this “philosophe” group, the one who had unquestionably contributed the most in the struggle to make man a happier and freer member of society. Yet, ironically, despite a lifelong effort in behalf of humanity, Voltaire's reputation as a destructive thinker has steadily grown even as the critics have pejoratively classified him as a “practical” rather than a “real” philosopher. Typical of this criticism of Voltaire is Macaulay's statement: “Voltaire could not build: he could only pull down: he was the very Vitruvius of ruin. He has bequeathed to us not a single doctrine to be called by his name, not a single addition to the stock of our positive knowledge.”

Dziedzictwo dawnej Rzeczypospolitej w języku pierwszego polskiego przekładu poematu „Metai” Kristijonasa Donelaitisa

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-400
Author(s):  
Jolanta Mędelska
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Journalism ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Polish Language ◽  
Influence Of Substrate ◽  
The One ◽  
Made In

The author analysed the language of the first Polish translation of the eighteenth-century poem “Metai” [The Seasons] by Kristijonas Donelaitis, a Lithuanian Lutheran pastor. The translation was made in 1933 by a socialist activist and close associate of Józef Piłsudski, Kazimierz Pietkiewicz. The analysis showed that the language of the translation is peculiar. On the one hand, this peculiarity consists in refraining from archaizing the translation and the use of elements that are close to the translator’s style of social-political journalism (e.g., dorobkiewicz [vulgarian], feministka [feminist]), on the other hand, the presence at all levels of language of peculiarities characteristic for Kresy Polish language in both its territorial variations. These are generally old features of common Polish, the retention of which in the eastern areas of the Polish Rzeczpospolita was supported by the influence of substrate languages, later also Russian, or by borrowing. This layer was natural in the language of the translator, born in Ukraine, who spent part of his life in Vilnius, some in exile in Russia. This is the colourful linguistic heritage of the former Republic of Poland.

Fielding and Richardson

PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 381-388
Author(s):  
William Park
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
General Type ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

But the Discovery [of when to laugh and when to cry] was reserved for this Age, and there are two Authors now living in this Metropolis, who have found out the Art, and both brother Biographers, the one of Tom Jones, and the other of Clarissa.author of Charlotte SummersRather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.

The Image of Jews as Constructed by Lexical Items

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-212
Author(s):  
Xiu Gao
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western World ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Face ◽  
Original Figure ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Target Culture ◽  
Social Backgrounds

In the Western world, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is controversial due to its stereotypical description of Jews as evil and greedy. In China, the work was not widely known until its translations came out. This article deals with two Chinese renderings of Shakespeare’s classic, by Laura White (1914–1915) and Shiqiu Liang (2001/1936) respectively, which reconstruct the image of Shylock and Jews on the basis of the translators’ perceptions of the original figure, combining their identities and social backgrounds. In imagology, based on the ideas of Pageaux (1989/1994), the image of the ‘other’ can be analysed on three levels: lexical items, larger textual units, and plot. On the face of it, the image of the ‘other’ in translation can originate in either the source or target culture. However, the present article, which focuses on the lexical level, shows that there is a third possibility – a lexicon that blends two or more cultures.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document