Reading <i>The Merchant of Venice</i> Dialogically

Seen through the eyes of contemporary Shakespeare criticism, three perhaps four of Shakespeare's plays stand out as ideologically problematic or 'politically incorrect': The Merchant of Venice, Othello, The Tempest and perhaps The Taming of the Shrew. The specific ways in which these plays address, or are seen to address, issues of antiSemitism, race, colonialism, and gender respectively, have elicited a wide range of politically charged responses, both in criticism and performance. None perhaps more so than The Merchant of Venice. The play's dominant action of castigation and forced conversion of Shylock the Jew will inescapably jar post-Holocaust sensibilities to such an extent that critical responses almost inevitably find themselves bogged down in negotiating strategies of dismissal or apology, or both. One of the most recent, and most sophisticated instances of such a negotiation is found in Harold Bloom's chapter on The Merchant of Venice in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1999). The initial and provocative point made by Bloom is this: