The Merchant of Venice: Venice and Belmont (original) (raw)

The Merchant of Venice: About This Volume

The Merchant of Venice: Critical Insights edited by Robert C. Evans Salem Press, 2023, 2023

The Merchant of Venice: Critical Insights edited by Robert C. Evans Salem Press, 2023

Wonder, Ambivalence and Heterotopia: The City in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

Aletria: Revista de Estudos de Literatura

This essay proposes a discussion of the representation of Venice in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, addressing the city as a site of ambivalence and cultural interrogation. It examines how Shakespeare drew on the “myth of Venice” to create a space into which Renaissance anxieties about justice, gender, religion and finances were projected. Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is applied here to show how representations of Venice are used to mirror Elizabethan and Jacobean society. The essay also proposes an analysis of how the Italian city-state is rendered in Michael Radford’s filmic adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, with special attention to the images of the prostitutes in the film, and the ambivalent portrayal of the justice system during the courtroom scene.

Sweet Use: Genre and Performance of The Merchant of Venice

Philosophy and Literature, 2009

This paper answers the questions ‘what is the Merchant of Venice?’ and ‘how may it accomplish its purpose?’ I argue that the usual treatments of this play are inadequate and show how the play is a comedy through which the passions appropriate for the good human being are engendered. What is raised and ridiculed are our own temptations to lesser joys and less sweet uses mimetically roused in us by the action and characters of the play. What is whetted but left unsatisfied is our higher love for justice. Thus the play provides a catharsis (purification) of desire and sympathy. Attached is a PDF of the final typescript, for purposes of scholarly notation, the journal version (Phil and Lit) should be used.

The Merchant in Venice: Shylock’s Unheimlich Return

Multicultural Shakespeare

The first decades of the new millennium have seen an odd return to origins in Shakespeare studies. The Merchant in Venice, a site-specific theatrical production realized during the 500th anniversary year of the “original” Jewish Ghetto, was not only a highlight among the many special events commemorating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016, but also a more creative and complex response to historicism. With her nontraditional casting of five Shylocks (developed through collaborations with scholars and students as well as her international, multilingual company), director Karin Coonrod made visible the acts of cultural projection and fracturing that Shakespeare’s play both epitomizes and has subsequently prompted. This article, written by a participant-observer commissioned to capture on video the making and performance of Compagnia de’ Colombari’s six-night run in the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, explores the way this place is—and indeed, the category of place itself is a...

In Venice with William Shakespeare

Hardly a novelty, literary tourism represents an opportunity to explore locations in a different light, bearing some particularities treasured in the tourism industry, like: i) lower dependency on seasonality; ii) the fact that tourists seek an emotional experience recalling what they might have read in the text; iii) increased time and financial capabilities, allowing them to more substantially get to know the region; and iv) the expectation to further expand the textual impressions retained about the location and the characters, enriching it with their own journey. However, the niche market it caters to usually demands a higher level of qualifications from its providers, namely specialized training and deep knowledge about an author and its works, as well as the ability to involve tourists in activities that promote the desire to interact with an expanded setting of the author’s biography and the environments portrayed by her/him. While many itineraries have explored authors' biographies, resulting in an abundance of related studies, fewer have been developed based on a single work. Consequently, it remains an under researched topic, requiring more scientific inquiry about this emerging business activity. Apart from the ongoing disputes about its authorship and its historical relevance, this paper seeks to highlight how William Shakespeare’s plays have crossed the centuries while remaining an incisive portrayal of human nature. Whether re-enacted, filmed or published, these works continue to be synonyms of success and can be considered an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. In his plays, both his fans and the casual reader are recurrently invited to a journey not just through the places described, but mostly about the social praxis revealed by his stories. 400 years passed, his works continue to deserve admiration and enthusiasm to the extent that, in essence, they depict human relationships and those remain similar, regardless of time and space. Following evidence from experimental research covering the visitation, observation and short interviews carried on in locations alluded to in two contemporary bestsellers – Paulo Coelho’s “The Pilgrimage” and Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” –this paper addresses William Shakespeare’s "The Merchant of Venice", which takes place in one of the world’s most romantic cities, once a city-state, full of historical and cultural meanings. Aiming for a comparison between the author’s description and present-day Venice, it focuses on the narratives tourists create from their personal experience.