Overview

This volume documents the full tradition of criticism of The Merchant of Venice ranging from 1775 to 1939. The Merchant of Venice has always been regarded as one of Shakespeare's most interesting plays, though it poses many challenges due to what is seen as its inherent anti-Semitism. Before the 19th century critical reaction is relatively fragmentary, but between then and the late 20th century the critical tradition reveals the power of the play to evoke emotion in the theatre. Since the middle of the 20th century, reactions to the drama have been influenced by the Nazi destruction of European Jewry. An extensive introduction charts the reactions to the play up to the beginning of the 21st century and reflects changing reactions to prejudice in this period. Material by a variety of critics appears here for the first time since initial publication, including from Malone, Hazlitt, Jameson, Heine, Knight, Lewes, Halliwell-Phillips, Furnivall, Irving, Ruskin, Swinburne, Masefield, Gollancz and Quiller-Couch. This revised edition features a new supplementary introduction by Gary Watt surveying and analyzing trends in criticism since the volume was first published in 2005, including a focus on: * Jewishness and anti-Semitism and the character of Shylock * mercantile, financial, risk, insurance, usury and credit * trial, law, rhetoric, equity and justice * gender, queer themes, cross-dressing and the Antonio-Bassanio relationship * race and colonialism.

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9781350398979

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'Shakespeare, the Critical Tradition' is an immensely useful and important series. As Vickers states, scholarship is in danger of losing the criticism of the previous 150 years because of the amount of modern criticism and the rejection of previous schools of criticism. By bringing together scholarly and performance-based essays from 1775 to 1939, Baker and Vickers assure that this will not happen to the rich and varied history of The Merchant of Venice, and their choices are uniformly excellent...Summing up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. * Choice *

Author Information

William Baker is Trustee Professor, Distinguished Research Professor, Department of English and University Libraries, at Northern Illinois University, USA. He is the author/editor of numerous books and his co-authored Harold Pinter: A Bibliographical History and his The Letters of Wilkie Collins were honoured by Choice as the year's most outstanding books (2006 and 2000). Brian Vickers is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Distinguished Senior Fellow in The School of Advanced Study, University of London., UK. Gary Watt is a Professor of Law at the University of Warwick, UK, and one of the General Editors of Law and Humanities. He was named UK 'Law Teacher of the Year' 2009. His publications include Shakespeare’s Acts of Will: Law, Testament and Properties of Performance (The Arden Shakespeare, 2016) and, as general editor, A Cultural History of Law (Bloomsbury, 2019).

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