Merchant Of Venice Research Articles

On Common Values in the Community of a Shared Future

This study employs a multimodal analytical framework combining textual analysis of dramatic literature, cross-examination of primary and secondary sources, and the theoretical framework of the “community with a shared future for mankind” concept. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the research aims to excavate the inherent values and philosophical implications within literary texts. Taking Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice as a case study, the investigation first establishes the socio-historical context of the Renaissance drama. Subsequently, it conducts an in-depth exploration of the "community with a shared future" paradigm, systematically analyzing its theoretical dimensions while establishing substantive connections with the play's narrative architecture. The conceptual correlation not only validates the contemporary relevance of this humanistic philosophy but also reveals its interpretative potential for classical texts. The study culminates in proposing actionable recommendations for fostering harmonious development in contemporary global society, thereby bridging literary scholarship with practical socio-political discourse.

The Rich Gloss of Surface: Allegory and Sacred Theft in The Merchant of Venice

ABSTRACT In criticism, the motif of theft in The Merchant of Venice has simply been regarded as an ironic counterpoint to the characters’ invocation of Christian values. In contrast, this article argues that Shylock’s account of Jacob’s ewes – a narrative of primordial appropriation and displacement – introduces a sense of unease at the imputation of theft that at first seems to characterise the Jewish moneylender but then gradually afflicts characters across the religious divide, creating complex networks of remorseful thieves in Venice and Belmont. The play’s obsessive concern with shiny outer surfaces – rich fleece and gilded caskets – inscribes both allegorical interpretation and the acquisition of wealth within a sacred economy of theft, the theological resonance of which has not been fully recognised. Like St Augustine and John Donne, Shakespeare reads biblical thievery as a generalised sign of man and woman’s abject sinfulness. In the process, the play’s dialectical understanding of thrift and theft, transfer and supplanting, deceptive covering and hidden truth acquires a profound, deeply conflicted, soteriological meaning. Written at a time of growing hermeneutical instability, the comedy problematises attempts to demarcate in-groups of the elect by showing that to possess the blessing is to develop a peculiar consciousness of misappropriation.

The Merchant Of Venice by William Shakespeare (review)

The Merchant Of Venice by William Shakespeare (review)

Shylock as Jew-voice: Rhetorical listening and identifications in The Merchant of Venice

Shylock is a Jewface role, whose effect is to create stereotypes and to distort Jewish ethnicity and religious practice. Yet it is also more than that, as Shakespeare created a complex character who sometimes invites a kind of identification. This article will argue that practicing rhetorical listening and thinking about identifications in The Merchant of Venice – and how they are created especially through sound – can help us to understand the complexities of this paradoxical character. In particular, theories of disidentification and non-identification can help to map out patterns of possible identifications, vexed and otherwise, within the play .

Legal Problems and Legal Consciousness in The Merchant of Venice

Legal Problems and Legal Consciousness in The Merchant of Venice

SHAKESPEAREAN PROJECTS IN THE THEATRE HISTORY OF ZHYTOMYR

The article presents the results of the search, identification, and systematization of Shakespearean projects in the history of Zhytomyr theatre, including original works by Zhytomyr theatres, touring performances, and translations of dramatic texts. This investigation was conducted as part of the large-scale activity of the Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre, which aims to collect and systematize information about the stage representation of William Shakespeare's works in Ukrainian theatres. The research aimed to create a detailed list of Shakespearean performances in Zhytomyr, explore postmodern interpretations related to them, and organize the information for an all-Ukrainian ongoing catalogue of Shakespearean performances. The authors undertook the following tasks: identifying and comparing sources regarding the theatre history of Zhytomyr, conducting archival and historiographic searches, and interviewing contemporary theatre professionals. These tasks were combined with a deductive method based on the study of facts, particularly to determine the language of the performances. The research demonstrates that from the very beginning of the history of stationary theatres in Zhytomyr, performances based on Shakespeare’s works have taken place on the city stage. Among the prominent theatre figures who contributed to the formation of Shakespearean discourse in Zhytomyr are A. Żmijowski, J. I. Kraszewski, I. Hołowiński, A. F. Aldridge, I. Kocherga, Boris Ten, V. Humenyuk, V. Martens and P. Avramenko. Plays presented on the Zhytomyr stage include "Hamlet", "Othello", "Titus Andronicus", "The Merchant of Venice", "Romeo and Juliet", "The Winter's Tale", and "A Midsummer Night's Dream". Shakespeare's texts were performed (in chronological order) in Polish, Russian, English, and Ukrainian. The investigation highlights the role of Shakespeare's texts in introducing the Zhytomyr audience to the context of world classics, reveals the challenges of staging performances during the ideological dictates of the Soviet era, and demonstrates the prospects for modern interpretations of the classics.

"All That Glitters is Not Gold": Reflections on Javor Gardev's Production of William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" at The Bulgarian National Theatre

The article reviews Javor Gardev's recent production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice on the stage of the Bulgarian National Theatre in the context of the play's long debated generic ambiguity and the "unpleasant" issues it confronts. It argues that even though, due to good historical reasons, the issue of antisemitism has attracted most of the attention so far, the central "unpleasant" issue in the original text is patriarchalism and the inequality between men and women. The play and the production's divergent treatments of this issue are considered in the context of today's antifeminist backlash, as well as the more general tendency to withdraw from traditional Western values, such as democracy, freedom, human rights. The current global and locally Bulgarian perspectives are discussed in order to demonstrate the urgency of taking a clear stand in support of these values.

"All That Glitters is Not Gold": Reflections on Javor Gardev's Production of William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" at The Bulgarian National Theatre

The article reviews Javor Gardev's recent production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice on the stage of the Bulgarian National Theatre in the context of the play's long debated generic ambiguity and the "unpleasant" issues it confronts. It argues that even though, due to good historical reasons, the issue of antisemitism has attracted most of the attention so far, the central "unpleasant" issue in the original text is patriarchalism and the inequality between men and women. The play and the production's divergent treatments of this issue are considered in the context of today's antifeminist backlash, as well as the more general tendency to withdraw from traditional Western values, such as democracy, freedom, human rights. The current global and locally Bulgarian perspectives are discussed in order to demonstrate the urgency of taking a clear stand in support of these values.

Contracted Time: Apocalypse and Identity in The Merchant of Venice

Contracted Time: Apocalypse and Identity in <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>

Shakespearean Spiders and Shakespearean Slime Mold

This article draws on the debts to Shakespeare—in particular Hamlet , Macbeth , The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest —in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time (2015–22) novels to illuminate the trilogy’s complex engagement with posthuman identities. It identifies and analyzes a sustained pattern of connections between Tchaikovsky’s allusive processes and the various biological mechanisms of transformation and inheritance which drive the trilogy’s complex plot. The Shakespearean subtext becomes particularly resonant at moments when human survival or identity is challenged by unfamiliar life forms. In response to critical disagreement over whether Tchaikovsky embraces or rejects an anthropocentric view of the universe, it argues that Shakespeare’s own practice of presenting ethical or political debates in utramque partem , on both sides of the question, provides a model for decoding Tchaikovsky’s complex, shifting, and playful exploration of humanity’s encounters with very different life forms.

Spacious analogies: Teaching the local in the distant in the Israeli classroom

This essay explores how the social world intrudes on the Israeli classroom, where open discussion of relations between Palestinians and Jews can feel nearly impossible. I will consider the strategy of confronting societal conflicts with students through what I call spacious analogies—that is, by studying social and historical sites removed from the local context but analogous to it in provocative ways. My objects of analysis will be two ‘teaching stories’: my narratives of discussing Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice through the lens of Orientalism and Richard Wright’s Native Son in dialogue with Whiteness Studies scholarship. In both stories, social hegemony akin to racial whiteness manifested itself, in the way students identified with characters and in their classroom affect. Through the relative safety of literary texts from different social worlds, however, the students were invited to confront the hegemony of their own context and build resilience to the discomforts of doing so. I will propose that teaching by analogy can allow educators to scaffold the discomfort of students from the hegemonic group without recentering their needs over those of marginalized students or resorting to analytical models that sanitize histories of oppression.

‘I will not eat with you’: Shylock and the Value of Vegetarianism in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1598)

ABSTRACT Beyond a mere dietary preference, eating meat and vegetables in Shakespeare’s drama is also indicative of the consumer’s identity, social status and religious beliefs. This article probes the dietary language in early modern culture with a particular focus on Shylock’s seemingly violent flesh-eating rhetoric in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1598). If eating meat connotes early modern sacrifice rituals and masculinity, then vegetarianism becomes a source of communal virtue, spiritual wealth and the celebration of religio-cultural diversity. Shylock’s vulgar rhetoric, his references to meat-eating (both animal and human), and his preference for a rotten, Christian pound of flesh are all situated within a context of religious conflict. Yet Shakespeare’s depiction of Shylock’s violent, carnivorous language is ultimately in ironic service of the moderate individual who is always willing to set aside self-interest and social biases for the sake of peaceful coexistence.

Cultural entrepreneurship in Shakespeare’s Italy

This study deals with Shakespeare's work in Italy and how it has been used today in the form of cultural entrepreneurship. The three famous works he inspired and wrote about the Veneto region, namely "The Merchant of Venice", "Romeo and Juliet", and "The Taming of the Shrews" have been a trigger for many travelers to visit Italy since ancient times even in the context of the "Big Tour". Today the cities mentioned in the works and especially Verona have developed cultural entrepreneurship in the footsteps of "Romeo and Juliet".

“Jew Yankel”: Three Versions of Dostoevsky’s “Finished Drama”

Only F. M. Dostoevsky’s brief message speaks about the completion of his play “Jew Yankel” in January 1844. The article formulates three hypotheses/assumptions about the content of the drama. The first correlates the writer’s idea with the literary tradition of portraying a Jewish moneylender, laid down by Shakespeare (“The Merchant of Venice”), Walter Scott (“Ivanhoe”), Pushkin (“The Miserly Knight”) and Gogol (“Taras Bulba”). The humanizing effect of V. Scott’s novel is emphasized. The second version associates Dostoevsky’s Yankel exclusively with the homonymous character from Gogol’s story, first published in 1835. It is proposed to take into account the author’s revision of the story for the 1842 edition, in which Yankel, in the process of building up the epic potential of the work, is endowed with a powerful vital resource and rises to the role of the antagonist of the title character. The third hypothesis refers to the trial of the Jews in the town of Velizh, who were accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child and acquitted many years later. Yankel Aronson died under investigation, which was conducted by inhumane methods. Evidence is provided to confirm that Russian society became aware of these events. The painful end of the Jewish youth could serve as a source of drama, structured with a focus on the writings that made a strong impression on Dostoevsky at that time: “The last day of a man sentenced to death” by V. Hugo and the melodrama “Ugolino” by N. Polevoy. All three versions confirm that pity was not only one of young writer’s motives, but also the ontological basis of his creative universe. The scientific significance of each of the proposed hypotheses also lies in the fact that their deployment allows to expand the understanding of the potential sources of the writer’s work, to reveal an unknown or little-known historical and cultural context of his early, least studied period.

The subversive subtext of Shakespearean allusion in Sheridan LeFanu’s ‘Carmilla’

Early on in J. Sheridan LeFanu’s ‘Carmilla’, Laura’s father rattles off the opening lines of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (p.14; 1.1.1-4). It is the most obvious but not the only allusion to Shakespeare in LeFanu’s gothic tale. This article identifies a handful of further references, notably to Cleopatra and Ophelia, and to instances of disguise in The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, and to cross dressing in Twelfth Night. It begs the question, ‘What is Shakespeare doing haunting LeFanu’s nineteenth-century text?’ Ultimately connecting these allusions, some more subtle than others, to the othering of Carmilla (and her associates) and to the twin corruptions of cross-dressing and suicide, the article finds that the sometimes only half-visible figures of Shakespeare’s plays act as alluring but corrupting forces within LeFanu’s diabolical tale not unlike the titular vampire.

Shakespear’s Employment of Malapropism in “Much ado about Nothing”and The Merchant of Venice”

Malapropism, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, is a linguistic mistake occurs when one term is replaced with another that sounds similar but has a different meaning. The current article aims to find out how malapropism is used in Shakespear’s “Much ado about Nothing “and “The Merchant of Venice “and to investigate the most common type of malapropism used in these two plays .The article mainly draws on Fay and Cutler’s(1977) division of malapropism to analyze the selected data. The study concludes that malapropism is used by the plays’ characters basically to create a sense of humor by using a word or a phrase that is different from what they intended to say .It was also found that classical malapropism is the most common used type in both selected plays.

A wilderness of monkeys: value, love and the law of the father’s will in The Merchant of Venice

ABSTRACT ‘I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys’: so, says The Merchant of Venice’s Shylock, referencing the ring gifted to him by his late wife, Leah, now stolen by his errant daughter, Jessica. An odd pronouncement for a character often read as an exemplar of exchange values for whom everyone and everything has its price. Excepting, of course, Leah’s ‘turquoise’. The implied use value of which repositions Shakespeare’s most uncomfortable stereotype – Shylock as the Jewish usurer – as a critic, rather than comprador, of early modern Capital, thereby anticipating not only Marx but Freud. For at stake in The Merchant of Venice is nothing less than the surplus-jouissance of the Capitalist’s discourse itself, coincident with, but ultimately defined against the ‘jewish-ssance’ of Shylock. This article will draw upon the insights of psychoanalysis, as well as those of political economy to examine the status of value, love, and law in The Merchant of Venice, arguing that Shylock may be not only Capitalism’s fiercest critic, but its most misunderstood psychotherapist.

Shapes of hatred and violence in Shakespeare

I use five Shakespearean plays to discuss how the meaning of the shapes of hatred and violence depend on individual character traits. In this sense, hatred and violence can either make comic characters meet some sort of reconciliation or self-destruction in the case of tragic characters. In The Comedy of Errors, the Dromio brothers, who are subject to violence from their master’s part, are the ones who can find redemption nonetheless. In The Merchant of Venice, the structural hatred between Shylock and Antonio seems to configure a form of meaning to them. In King Henry V, the enablement of violence during war time seems to suggest that the capacity for violence is inherent to every human being. This suggestion is carried over through Titus Andronicus, in which Shakespeare explores the traumatic effects of violence within a mythical realm. Finally, in Macbeth, we see how the protagonist, who is accustomed to the violence of war, can have his own nature changed when he is forced to unwillingly commit a murder outside the context of war.

Differentiating between romantic and mature love: Revisiting the three caskets.

Freud's paper on the three caskets is revisited. His view that the lead casket represented death is supported by extracts from The Merchant of Venice, in particular the song, "Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred". It is argued that the acceptance of death is a necessary step in the transformation of romantic love to mature love. With experience of reality a disillusion of romantic idealisation becomes possible, but this means that losses have to be accepted and mourned. It is argued that this is made more bearable if an ironic stance enables an acceptance of the pleasures of romance without believing them to be literally true.

“Shallow fopp’ry” and “music of the spheres”: the multifarious mnemonic values of music in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

In The Merchant of Venice, music is perceived both mentally through the words alluding to it – literally or metaphorically – and from the sounds of the words – through resounding rhetorical forms and the musicality of language. These musical encounters address the memory of the characters and audience alike, reviving traumatic experiences or reminding them of joyous events. In addition, the characters’ lines are environed by songs and instrumental music, psychically inspiring and contributing to reach a desired and universal harmony, as recorded in classical texts.This paper offers close readings of the musical and rhetorical strategies at work in the play’s text (as well as in some recent performances) to shed light on the ways in which music is embedded in the play and stimulates memorization processes. At the same time, it shows how Shakespeare’s play serves as a reminder of Early Modern social and religious issues tied in to the understanding of music and its practices.