- Marianne L. Novy, “Giving, Taking, and the Role of Portia in The Merchant of Venice,” 58 Philological Quarterly 137, 139 (1979).
- Id.
- Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964; reprinted 1978), p. 96. For Elizabethan women as their fathers' property, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), pp. 180–191.
- Harry Berger, “Marriage and Mercifixion in The Merchant of Venice,” 32 Shakespeare Quarterly 155, 160 (1981).
- Novy, supra note 1 at 151. Novy concludes her essay by stating that “Like the threat of Shylock, whose trial postpones the consummation of marriages, otherness may seem an obstacle to love and indeed Shylock's exorcism may be intended to remove it as an obstacle. But the acceptance of Portia's self-assertion that we find at the end of The Merchant of Venice is also a celebration of otherness and of the means it depends on—financial, sexual, verbal—to give and to receive.”
- See Berger, supra note 4 at 161–162.
- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, David Bevington, ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1988). Hereinafter, parenthetical line references will be in the text.
- Karen Newman, “Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice,” 38 Shakespeare Quarterly 19, 22 (1987). Karen Newman looks at The Merchant of Venice in the light of Lévi-Strauss' anthropological theory of cultural exchange (in which he defines the origin and sustenance of society to be the authorized exchange of women to ensure male bonding) and of Luce Irigaray's feminist critique of his theory. From this perspective, Newman concludes that “Instead of choosing one interpretation over the another, idealized male friendship or homosexuality, Irigaray's reading of Lévi-Strauss allows us to recognize in Antonio's relationship with Bassanio a homosocial bond, a continuum of male relations which the exchange of women entails.”
- See Stone, supra note 3 at p. 118. In concluding his chapter on “Family Characteristics,” Stone explains that children were often sent out of the home to be raised by other families. As a result, nuclear family bonds were weakened so bonds based upon mutual political or economic interests could be strengthened. He writes that “This was a family group was held together by shared economic status and political interests, and by the norms and values of authority and deference. This was a family type which was entirely appropriate to the social and economic world of the 16th century, in which property was the only security against total destitution, in which connections and patronage were the keys to success, in which power flowed to the oldest males under the system of primogeniture, and in which the only career opening for women was in marriage. In these circumstances the family structure was characterized by its hierarchical distribution of power, held together not by affective bonds but by mutual economic interests.” To an Elizabethan audience, therefore, Antonio's paternal bond to Bassanio would seem much more logical and familiar than it does to us today.
- See Bevington, ed., supra note 7 at 104 for a translation of this story.
- See Max James, “Our House is Hell”: Shakespeare's Troubled Families (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), pp. 12–16. See also Stone, supra note 3 at p. 190.
- David Sundelson, “The Dynamics of Marriage in The Merchant of Venice,” 4 Humanities in Society 245–262 (1981).
- Carol Leventen, “Patrimony and Patriarchy in The Merchant of Venice,” A Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakerare, Valerie Wayne, ed., afterword by Catherine Belsey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p.70.
- Newman, supra note 8 at 25.
- The Merchant of Venice (BBC television broadcast, 1981).
- See Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 165–169; Barbara K. Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice” 13 Shakespeare Quarterly 327, 334 (1962); reprinted in
- Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Merchant of Venice, Sylvan Barnet, ed. (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970), pp. 33–80. My reading exists in an unpublished essay, “Reconciliation and Closure in The Merchant of Venice.”
- See F.W. Brownlow, “John Shakespeare's Recusancy: New Light on an Old Document,” 40 Shakespeare Quarterly 186 (1989). The document naming John Shakespeare as a recusant is dated 1592, a date close to the earliest date of 1594 given for the composition of The Merchant of Venice. Brownlow also points out that the authorities tended to deal gently with most recusants, and that a common explanation for their absence from church was debt. In the law and social culture of Elizabethan England, there was evidently a connection between debt and religious nonconformity that may have laid the groundwork for Shakespeare's development of a similar connection in Merchant.
- See further Daniel Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics Against Christianity in the Middle Ages (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1977); David Berger, The Jewish- Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus (Philadelphia00: Jewish Publication Society of America, 5739–1979), pp. 30–32; Egal Feldman, Dual Destinies: The Jewish Encounter with Protestant America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); and Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide (New York: The Seabury Press, Inc., 1974). Cecil Roth also traces the origin of anti-semitism to the Jews' refusal to convert, but shows that under John's reign, political and economic concerns also became powerful motivators. See Roth, supra note 3 at 32.
- Richard Popkin, “A Jewish Merchant of Venice,” 40 Shakespeare Quarterly 329, 329–331 (1989).
- See Roth, supra note 3 at 139–144 and Maurice Freedman, A Minority in Britain: Social Studies of the Anglo-Jewish Community (London: Mitchell Valentine, 1955), p.9. Roth's chapter “The Middle Period” recounts the history of other Jewish groups in England, suggesting that they were not completely absent from England during Elizabeth's reign.
- Bonds—Made and Broken (New York Bar Association reading, December 11, 1992). The reading was part of a symposium on “Legal Aspects of The Merchant of Venice.” See “Editor's Preface” to this number.
- Novy, supra note 1 at 147.
- Berger, supra note 4 at 161.
- Id.
- See Novy, supra note 1 at 148–149.
- Richard Weisberg, Poethics, And Other Strategies of Law and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 102.
- Id. at 101.
- Ronald A. Sharp, “Gift Exchange and the Economies of Spirit in The Merchant of Venice,” 83 Modern Philology 250, 263 (1986).
- Newman, supra note 8 at 32.
- Anne Parten, “Re-establishing Sexual Order: The Ring Episode in The Merchant of Venice,” 9 Women's Studies 145, 145–155 (1982).
- See Sundelson, supra note 12 at 252–257.
- Roth, supra note 3 at 141–142.
- James, supra note 11 at 97–98.
Law & Literature
Volume 5, 1993 - Issue 1: A Symposium Issue on The Merchant of Venice