The Merchant of Venice (Norton Critical Edition) » (1st Edition)

Leah S. Marcus is Edwin Mims Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes, and Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature. She is co-editor of Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals and Elizabeth I: Collected Works.

The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare’s most beautiful plays and, conversely, his ugliest. Juxtaposed within the same conceptual frame are heavenly and musical harmonies, romantic love, materialism, and racism.

Booknews

A collection of new perspectives on Shakespeare's most controversial play, for students. Essays open up the play's historical, cultural, and political significance, and demonstrate some of the ways in which contemporary criticism is both based on critical theory and is also about the practice of criticism. Specific subjects include Shakespeare and the Jews, colonization and miscegenation in the play, how to read the play without being heterosexist, and Venetian patriarchy. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.