Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the AgesTHE MERCHANT OF VENICEEdited and with an introduction byHarold BloomSterling Professor of the HumanitiesYale UniversityVolume EditorNeil Heims

ContentsSeries Introduction. ixIntroduction by Harold Bloom. xiBiography of William Shakespeare. 1Summary of The Merchant of Venice. 5Key Passages in The Merchant of Venice. 15List of Characters in The Merchant of Venice. 35Criticism Through the AgesThe Merchant of Venice in the Seventeenth Century. 391664—Thomas Jordan. On the stage appearance of Shylock. 41 The Merchant of Venice in the Eighteenth Century. 431701—George Granville, Baron Lansdowne,from The Jew of Venice. 44709—Nicholas Rowe. “Life of the Author,” from The Worksof Mr. William Shakespear. 461710—Charles Gildon, from“Remarks on the Plays of Shakespear”. 471765—Samuel Johnson. The Merchant of Venice (notes),from The Plays of William Shakespear. 481775—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, from Lettersfrom England. 49The Merchant of Venice in the Nineteenth Century. 511809—August Wilhelm Schlegel. “Criticisms on Shakspeare’sComedies,” from Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. 541817—William Hazlitt. “The Merchant of Venice,”from Characters of Shakespear’s Plays . 561833—Anna Jameson. “Portia,” from Characteristicsof Women: Moral, Poetical, & Historical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .601838—Heinrich Heine, from Heine on Shakespeare:A Translation of His Notes on Shakespeare Heroines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .661839—Hermann Ulrici. “The Merchant of Venice,”from Shakspeare’s Dramatic Art. 701849—Georg Gottfried Gervinus. “The Merchantof Venice,” from Second Period of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Poetry. 751849—Charles Knight, from Studies of Shakespeare. 841862—Friedrich Alexander Theodor Kreyssig,from Vorlesungen uber Shakespeare . 901863—Charles Cowden Clarke. “The Merchant of Venice,”from Shakespeare-Characters: Chiefly Those Subordinate. 911864—Victor Hugo, from William Shakespeare . 951872—H. N. Hudson. “The Merchant of Venice,”from Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters. 96

1879—Review of The Merchant of Venice,from The Saturday Review. 991881—A. Pietscher, from Jurist und Dichter . 1021886—Rudolf von Ihering, from Der Kampf ums Recht. 1041894—G. H. Radford. “Shylock,”from Shylock and Others: Eight Studies. 1061898—Georg Brandes, from William Shakespeare:A Critical Study. 111The Merchant of Venice in the Twentieth Century. 1191913—Sigmund Freud. “The Theme of the Three Caskets,”from On Creativity and the Unconscious. 1231927—Elmer Edgar Stoll. “Shylock,” fromShakespeare Studies: Historical and Comparative in Method. 132vi Contents1930—Harley Granville-Barker. “The Merchantof Venice,” from Prefaces to Shakespeare, Second Series. 1491936—J. Middleton Murry. “Shakespeare’s Method:The Merchant of Venice,” from Shakespeare. 1501959—C. L. Barber. “The Merchants andthe Jew of Venice: Wealth’s Communion andan Intruder,” from Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1641962—W. H. Auden. “Love and Usury inThe Merchant of Venice,” from The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. 1741965—Northrop Frye. From A Natural Perspective:The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1831972—Leslie A. Fiedler. “The Jew As Stranger; or ‘TheseBe the Christian Husbands,’ ” from The Stranger in Shakespeare. 1851987—A. D. Nuttall. “The Merchant of Venice,” fromA New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality. 1881991—Harold Bloom. “Introduction,” from Shylock . 1981992—John Gross. “Three Thousand Ducats,”from Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend . 2051996—James Shapiro. “ ‘The Pound of Flesh,’ ”from Shakespeare and the Jews. 206t The Merchant of Venice in the Twenty-first Century. 2252002—Gary Rosenshield. “Deconstructing the ChristianMerchant: Antonio and The Merchant of Venice,” fromShofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. 225Bibliography. 251Acknowledgments . 253Index. 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 sexuallyinadequate Lancelet' (p. 26), nor why he here becomes 'Lancelet' instead of Clown or Lancelot.