The Merchant of Venice: A Critical Reader

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research.

Key features include:
- Essays on the play’s critical and performance history
- A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play
- A selection of new essays by leading scholars A survey of resources to direct students’ further reading about the play in print and online

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice has often been labelled a ’problem play’, and throughout the ages it has been an object of both fascination and repulsion. Without neglecting the socio-political and religious issues that are at the heart of the play, this collection of critical essays invites readers to rediscover the variety of approaches that this multifaceted work calls for, exploring its gender aspects, its rich mythological background, its legal matters and the ways in which it has been adapted to the screen. Essays consider the play in relation to its sources, genre and religion, historical and socio-political context and its critical reception and performance history.

Sarah Hatchuel is Professor in Film & Media Studies at the university Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France, and President of the Société Française Shakespeare. She has written extensively on adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays (Shakespeare and the Cleopatra/Caesar Intertext: Sequel, Conflation, Remake, 2011; Shakespeare, from Stage to Screen, 2004; A Companion to the Shakespearean Films of Kenneth Branagh, 2000) and on TV series.

Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin is Professor in Shakespeare studies at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France, Vice President of the Société Française Shakespeare and director of the ＂Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l’âge Classique et les Lumières＂. She has published The Unruly Tongue in Early Modern England, Three Treatises (2012) and is the author of Shakespeare’s Insults: A Pragmatic Dictionary (2016).