Abstract
On his televized journey across the Sahara (2002), Michael Palin asks a Christian missionary how many Muslims have converted to Christianity but she refuses to answer his question, telling him it doesn’t matter whether it is hundreds or just one.1 Palin touches a nerve: a dialogic history of Christian-Muslim relations, which in Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice connects also with Muslim-Jewish relations and anxieties about ‘aliens’ and conversion.
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Notes
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Jay L. Halio, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Allan Harris Cutler and Helen Elmquist Cutler, The Jew as Ally of the Muslim: Medieval Roots of Anti-Semitism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1986), p. 82.
Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice1550–1670 (London and New York: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1997), p. 4.
Cutler and Cutler, Jew as Ally, p. 116, cite Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: the Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism, 2nd edn (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), p. 185.
All references are to H. S. D. Mithal (ed.), An Edition of Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London and Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, in The Renaissance Imagination Volume 6, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988).
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. N. W. Bawcutt, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978).
Margaret Hotine, ‘The Politics of Anti-Semitism: The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice’, Notes and Queries, 38 (March 1991), pp. 35–8 (p. 37).
Richard H. Popkin, ‘A Jewish Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (Fall 1989), pp. 329–31 (p. 330).
Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: a New History of the Renaissance (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), p. 374.
J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 3rd edn (London, Boston et al.: Butterworths, 1990), p. 530.
Walter Cohen, ‘The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism’, ELH, 49 (1982), pp. 765–89 (p. 770).
Ania Loomba, ‘Shakespeare and Cultural Difference’, in Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2, ed. Terence Hawkes (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 164–91 (p. 181).
Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), p. 100.
Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa, FL: University of South Florida, 1991), p. 165.
John Rudkin, Commedia dell’arte: an Actor’s Handbook (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 119.
C. B. Purdom, Everyman, 4 August 1932.
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Nicolas Robins, ‘On Fighting the Audience’, Globe, 8 (1998), pp. 22–3 (p. 23).
Edward Braun, The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Grotowski (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 112.
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Robert C. Toll, On with the Show: the First Century of Show Business in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 81 and 86.
Toll, On with the Show, p. 121. He writes: ‘Neither Bob Cole nor William Marion Cook, both classically trained musicians could freely express their talents. To earn livings they had to write caricatured sketches and “coon songs” that perpetuated negative images of Negroes.’ See also John Blair, ‘Blackface Minstrels in Cross-Cultural Perspective’, American Studies International, XXVIII:2 (October 1990), pp. 52–65,
and James H. Dormon, ‘Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: the “Coon Song” Phenomenon of the Gilded Age’, American Quarterly, 40 (December 1988), pp. 450–71.
Alex Gordon, ‘J for Jewish: From The Jazz Singer to Shoah: Louis B. Mayer to Mel Brooks’, Sight and Sound, 3 (March 1997), pp. 28–30.
David Addenbrooke, The Royal Shakespeare Company: the Peter Hall Years, with a foreword by Peter Hall and afterword by Trevor Nunn (London: William Kimber, 1974), pp. 57–8.
John Russell Brown, ‘Three Directors: a Review of Recent Productions’, Shakespeare Survey, 14 (1961), pp. 129–37 (p. 136).
See Homi K. Bhaba, ‘The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference 1976–84, eds Francis Barker et al. (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 148–72 (p. 151).
Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds), Post-Colonial Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 11.
Terry Grimley, Birmingham Post (7 April 1984).
Ian McDiarmid, ‘Shylock in The Merchant of Venice’, Players of Shakespeare 2: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with The Royal Shakespeare Company, ed. Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 45–54 (p. 49).
Nicholas Shrimpton, ‘Shakespeare Performances in Stratford-upon-Avon and London, 1983–4’, Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985), pp. 201–13 (p. 209).
Stanley Wells, ‘Shakespeare Performances in London and Stratford-upon-Avon, 1986–7’, Shakespeare Survey, 41 (1989), pp. 158–81 (p. 162).
Gregory Doran, ‘Solanio in The Merchant of Venice’, in Players of Shakespeare 3: Further Essays in Shakespearian Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, ed. Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 68–76 (pp. 72–3).
Anita Deshmukh, Birmingham Post (27 April 1987).
Leo Salingar, ‘The Idea of Venice in Shakespeare and Jonson’, in Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, ed. Michele Marrapodi, A. J. Hoenselaars et al. (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 171–84 (p. 173).
Ibid., p. 53. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967).
John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (1992; London: Vintage, 1994), p. 303.
Donald Spoto, Laurence Olivier: a Biography (London: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 302.
James C. Bulman, Shakespeare in Performance: The Merchant of Venice (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 84.
Anthony Bloomfield and Philip French (producers), The Arts This Week (BBC radio transcript; PLN17/TK1104; transmission 30 April 1970). The British Film Institute.
Herbert Kretzmer, Daily Express (29 April 1970).
Royal Shakespeare Company Production Pack, The Merchant of Venice (RSC Education, 1993), p. 5.
Peter Holland, ‘Shakespeare Performances in England, 1992–1993’, Shakespeare Survey, 47 (1994), pp. 181–207 (p. 197).
Alan C. Dessen, ‘The Image and the Script: Shakespeare on Stage in 1993’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 12:1 (Winter 1994), pp. 5–8 (p. 6).
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© 2003 Maria Jones
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Jones, M. (2003). Defining the Alien in The Merchant of Venice. In: Shakespeare’s Culture in Modern Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597167_3
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