Analogues and Emblems in The Merchant of Venice

Shakespeares Merchant of Venice continues to fascinate and as well as to elude its critics. In this monkey, moneylender the Jew maintains on his legal right, in lieu of moneys owed, to ˜a trounce of flesh cut from the breast of the Christian merchant, Antonio so it goes in the fiscal district along the Rialto objet dart in Belmont, the plays other locale, suitors for the pass away of the fair, rich Portia must ship a risky filling among caskets of g white-haired, silver and lead. As the play entangles its flesh-bond with its casket-trial plot both old stories, brought here to a spiritedness at formerly grand and all too true we must ponder uncomfortable conjunctions. What do Venice and Belmont, money and love, castaway and community, justice and mercy book to do with one some other anyway?\nEverything or cypher; and most critics, pursuing what Barbara Lewalski once termed the plays ˜thematic harmonies (p. 44), have sought-after(a) to determine which. Midway done his probing hundred- pageboy essay, with which he introduces the Shakespeare comment Series collection of new essays on the play, John W. Mahon considers the limits of such approaches: he asks whether they do not insist on ˜harmonies which a ˜ context of the characters as staged will overthrow (p. 44). In other actors line: what is possible on the page may not be possible on the stage. Indeed, a concenter on Shakespeares frolic as performed one of the Series aver goals brings a special take up to our grasp of the Merchant of Venice. aft(prenominal) all, our work as viewing audience of this play is to follow loan shark as, to the perpetual bafflement of our reek of the plays anti-Semitism, he sheds the role to which the quarto text at times, kind of coldly, calls him: ˜the Jew.\nIn one of the quartet essays in this volume to focus on questions of performance history, Jay L. Halio urges actors and directors to deny the impulse to ˜simplify and, instead, to highlig ht the ˜ambivalence that touches mos...