The Merchant of Venice: New Critical Essays (review)

In his introduction to this volume of essays, coeditor John W. Mahon states ambitiously that he aims to give readers "a full historical and critical context" (1) of The Merchant of Venice over the past four centuries. With seventeen previously unpublished essays and Mahon's nearly one-hundred-page introductory overview, New Critical Essays (a recent addition to Routledge's Shakespeare Criticism series) delivers an impressive amount of material. The scope of the collection is limited, however, by the conservative decisions of its editors, which I will discuss below. Anticipating a reader new to critical practice, Mahon introduces his audience to both The Merchant of Venice and the interpretive camps of Shakespearean criticism more broadly. With a patient, methodical style, Mahon provides an expansive survey of the play's sources, its textual and critical history, its seminal theatrical and cinematic performances, and its prominent actors since its Elizabethan debut. A substantial section of the introduction devoted to modern commentary explicates the critical divide of two decades ago when liberal-humanist criticism gave way to "theory," which Mahon examines in subsections titled "Marxism," "Gendered Approaches," and "New Historicism/Post-colonialism." The essays in the collection provide examples of textual and source criticism, "theory" approaches, and traditional readings that revisit the critical landscape before 1980, when discussions of the play's thematic harmonies and typological allegories predominated. The collection's final four essays on recent performances continue Mahon's discussion of the play's stage and screen history throughout the world. Rich with detail, Mahon's expansive descriptions of adaptations and allusions—from a Japanese Kabuki version of the play in 1885 to Vincent Price's Theater of Blood to the Reduced Shakespeare Company—aptly prove his premise of the play's "infinite wealth of meaning" (80) in popular culture

While Mahon emphasizes the broad context he brings to the play, in the first section of the introduction, titled "Basic Issues," he also foregrounds a specific historical and critical occasion for the collection. Raising the fascinating question of how the contemporary reader should understand the character of Shylock after the Holocaust of World War II, he first refutes charges of the play's anti-Semitism ("Whatever nuance of interpretation one adopts, Shylock's behavior, far more than his race or religion, makes him a villain" [3]) and, in a more provocative argument, contends that reading the play through the lens of twentieth-century genocide delimits dramatic and critical possibilities for both Shylock and his Christian counterparts. The Holocaust, he argues, "has reinforced the idea that Shylock is not only the central character of the play but its tragic hero" (2). Mahon's primary goal is to push critical inquiry beyond this perception of Shylock as a victimized "other" and the play's definitive ethical and dramatic touchstone. In a subsection of "Basic Issues" titled "The Play as Conundrum," he argues for the play's complexity outside of its evocations of the modern history of Jewish persecution: "[l]ong before the Holocaust further complicated our response to the play, Shakespeare himself initiated the problem" (10). To prove this point, Mahon calls our attention to the play's ambiguities in characterization and genre. In the Stationers' Register for 22 July 1598, for example, the play is recorded as "the Marchaunt of Venyce or otherwise called the Jewe of Venyce." Mahon explores the possibilities of this title: "It could suggest that, very early on, Shylock the Jew was recognized as an important character. . . . Could it also suggest that Antonio and Shylock, despite their obvious opposition, have much in common?" (11). The play, he notes, is described in the first quarto (1600) as a "'Historie,'" but in the second quarto (1619) as a "'comicall Historie'" (11). It is this "sense of conundrum" in the text that makes Merchant the most problematic of problem plays (11). The essays in the...