Overview

The Merchant of Venice is both Shakespeare's most controversial play and one of his most popular. But despite being written over 400 years ago, this work is not just a window into the ages of Elizabeth and James--it is also a compelling commentary on the ages we are now living through. Shakespeare's capacity to critique unjust exercises of power and hierarchies based on class, gender, and race provides a lens through which contemporary events can be usefully understood. In the only book-length dialogue on The Merchant of Venice, Lutz and Josyph grapple with how this play can offer important insights into cultural biases and polarization in America. For Lutz, who has taught Shakespeare for over three decades, and for Josyph, who has acted and filmed Shakespeare, the conversational format invites both authors to freely explore their different perspectives on a wide range of issues that make The Merchant of Venice as vital and as topical now as when it was first written. Sometimes in perfect agreement, sometimes at odds, Lutz and Josyph are alike in their admiration of Shakespeare's complex representation of a corrupt and patriarchal society that remains relevant today.

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9781476658674

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John Lutz is chair of the liberal arts department at the LIU Post Campus of Long Island University. He teaches philosophy and literature, empathy and ethics, moral philosophy, postcolonial literature and theory, political philosophy and twentieth-century literature. His publications include articles in Mississippi Quarterly, Conradiana, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, LIT, Research in African Literatures, Rethinking Marxism, Mosaic, and The Faulkner Journal. Peter Josyph is a writer, painter, actor and filmmaker. This is his fourth book on Cormac McCarthy. He lives on New York's Long Island.

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