Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Douglas Anderson

Critical Essay by Douglas Anderson

SOURCE: Anderson, Douglas. “The Old Testament Presence in The Merchant of Venice.” ELH 52, no. 1 (spring 1985): 119-32.

In the following essay, Anderson references Shakespeare's religious sensibility to explain the “sordid conflict between religions” in The Merchant of Venice.

                    every something blent together Turns to a wild of nothing, save of joy Expressed and not expressed.

—3.2.181-83¹

Norman Rabkin argues in the first chapter of his recent book, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning, for a critical vision which embraces the whole of a play's “aesthetic experience.” Even the most fruitful interpretive scholarship runs the risk of being reductive so long as it neglects the “total and complex involvement” of all of an audience's considerable powers of appreciation, which the best literary art invariably calls into play. Meaning in literature, Rabkin suggests, is almost never simple, almost never internally consistent, almost always richer than any single line of...
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