SOURCE: “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice,” in Renaissance Drama, Vol. XXIII, n.s., 1992, pp. 87-111.

In the essay below, Hall focuses on lines in Act Three of The Merchant of Venice which describe Launcelot's impregnation of a black woman. Hall argues that this brief passage underscores a major theme of the play: the fear of racial intermingling that occurs when a country such as Elizabethan England makes imperialistic inroads into other countries.

Samuel Purchas introduces his popular collection of travel narratives, Purchas His Pilgrimes (the 1625 sequel to Richard Hakluyt's Principal Voyages), by recounting the virtues of trade. He equates the benefits of navigation with Christian charity and leads his reader into the collection proper by envisioning a world converted to Protestantism:

… and the chiefest charitie is that which is most common; nor is there any more common then this...