Introduction

Abstract

In a sense, The Merchant of Venice provides its own context in which to be viewed or read insofar as the play offers a range of responses for many of the issues it raises. By proposing categories in conflict — tragedy and comedy, law and mercy, Jew and Christian, money and love, “other” and same, female and male — Shakespeare offers his audience opposing perspectives on the action of the play. He also keeps these oppositions from being neat dichotomies by offering exceptions and complexities that multiply the perspectives from which an audience can consider them. However, the play’s historical context reveals even more ways to understand the issues Shakespeare represents. The play was probably written in the mid- to late 1590s near the end of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. The texts selected for this edition express a wide range of ideas available in the early modern period, the era spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In offering these contexts, I am less interested in Shakespeare’s influences or “intention” than I am in imagining what kind of assumptions and opinions an early modern audience might bring to a performance of the play as well as what kind of views might encourage a modern audience to reexamine its initial response to the play. In this introduction, I identify four central areas of interest — Venice, Finance, Religion, and Love and Gender — considering first how the play presents each topic before turning to a wider view of these ideas provided by the accompanying contextual writings.