Shakespeare in Production: The Merchant of Venice

A recent testimony to The Merchant of Venice’s perennial fascination for critics and students of performance is the number of books devoted to it. Mahon and Mahon (2000) edited The Merchant of Venice: New Critical Essays consisting of 18 fresh reassessments of the drama. Four years earlier in Coyle’s (1998) The Merchant of Venice in the New Casebooks series published by St Martin’s Press, reprinted ten essays from the previous decade. Shylock (Bloom, 1991) in the Major Literary Characters series presents over two centuries of differing reactions to the character. A controversial monograph by Shapiro (1996), Shakespeare and the...