Blooms Shakespeare Through the Ages THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling

Professor of the Humanities Yale University Volume Editor Neil Heims Contents Series Introduction. ix Introduction by Harold Bloom. xi Biography of William Shakespeare. 1 Summary of The Merchant of Venice. 5 Key Passages in The Merchant of Venice. 15 List of Characters in The Merchant of Venice. 35 Criticism Through the Ages The Merchant of Venice in the Seventeenth Century. 39 1664Thomas Jordan. On the stage appearance of Shylock. 41 The Merchant of Venice in the Eighteenth Century. 43 1701George Granville, Baron Lansdowne, from The Jew of Venice. 44 709Nicholas Rowe. Life of the Author, from The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. 46 1710Charles Gildon, from Remarks on the Plays of Shakespear. 47 1765Samuel Johnson. The Merchant of Venice (notes), from The Plays of William Shakespear. 48 1775Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, from Letters from England. 49 The Merchant of Venice in the Nineteenth Century. 51 1809August Wilhelm Schlegel. Criticisms on Shakspeares Comedies, from Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. 54 1817William Hazlitt. The Merchant of Venice, from Characters of Shakespears Plays . 56 1833Anna Jameson. Portia, from Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, & Historical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60 1838Heinrich Heine, from Heine on Shakespeare: A Translation of His Notes on Shakespeare Heroines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66 1839Hermann Ulrici. The Merchant of Venice, from Shakspeares Dramatic Art. 70 1849Georg Gottfried Gervinus. The Merchant of Venice, from Second Period of Shakespeares Dramatic Poetry. 75 1849Charles Knight, from Studies of Shakespeare. 84 1862Friedrich Alexander Theodor Kreyssig, from Vorlesungen uber Shakespeare . 90 1863Charles Cowden Clarke. The Merchant of Venice, from Shakespeare-Characters: Chiefly Those Subordinate. 91 1864Victor Hugo, from William Shakespeare . 95 1872H. N. Hudson. The Merchant of Venice, from Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters. 96 1879Review of The Merchant of Venice, from The Saturday Review. 99

1881A. Pietscher, from Jurist und Dichter . 102 1886Rudolf von Ihering, from Der Kampf ums Recht. 104 1894G. H. Radford. Shylock, from Shylock and Others: Eight Studies. 106 1898Georg Brandes, from William Shakespeare: A Critical Study. 111 The Merchant of Venice in the Twentieth Century. 119 1913Sigmund Freud. The Theme of the Three Caskets, from On Creativity and the Unconscious. 123 1927Elmer Edgar Stoll. Shylock, from Shakespeare Studies: Historical and Comparative in Method. 132 vi Contents 1930Harley Granville-Barker. The Merchant of Venice, from Prefaces to Shakespeare, Second Series. 149 1936J. Middleton Murry. Shakespeares Method: The Merchant of Venice, from Shakespeare. 150 1959C. L. Barber. The Merchants and the Jew of Venice: Wealths Communion and an Intruder, from Shakespeares Festive Comedy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 1962W. H. Auden. Love and Usury in The Merchant of Venice, from The Dyers Hand and Other Essays. 174 1965Northrop Frye. From A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 1972Leslie A. Fiedler. The Jew As Stranger; or These Be the Christian Husbands, from The Stranger in Shakespeare. 185 1987A. D. Nuttall. The Merchant of Venice, from A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality. 188 1991Harold Bloom. Introduction, from Shylock . 198 1992John Gross. Three Thousand Ducats, from Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend . 205 1996James Shapiro. The Pound of Flesh, from Shakespeare and the Jews. 206 t The Merchant of Venice in the Twenty-first Century. 225 2002Gary Rosenshield. Deconstructing the Christian Merchant: Antonio and The Merchant of Venice, from Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. 225 Bibliography. 251 Acknowledgments . 253 Index. 255

Introduction to The Merchant of Venice (pp. 1-1 59) is resolutely committed to the phraseology of 1 980s cultural materialism: the word recuperate and its cognates (not in the sense of getting well but of recovering something lost) is used five times, ideology and its cognates nineteen SHAKESPEARE 329 times. Each section of the introduction is a short essay on a theme, and many of them can be rather too easily summed up in a sentence that Drakakis draws out into several pages. Thus 'Venice: Myth and Reality' (pp. 3-8) tells us how Elizabethans perceived this exotic place, 'The Menace of Money' (pp. 8-12) gives a general introduction to the play's ideas about what money is and what it can do, and 'Usury or the Butler's Box (pp. 1 2-17) offers more on what early moderns thought of usury, although with

no explanation of the term Butler's Box, which comes up in an early book that Drakakis quotes. More substantial is the section 'Marlowe, Shakespeare and the Jews' (pp. 1 7-30) on the religious and economic contexts. Drakakis refers to Shylock as 'the Jew', Lancelot Gobbo as 'Clown' and Old Gobbo as 'Giobbe' without referring the reader forward to a place where these choices are explained. Drakakis's argument is much concerned with 'otherness', the idea that what Jewishness represented was the troubled incapacity of Christianity to do all that it would-especially in relation to economic development-for which the Jews as scapegoats had to be punished. No explanation is offered for a reference to 'the allegedly sexually inadequate Lancelet' (p. 26), nor why he here becomes 'Lancelet' instead of Clown or Lancelot.