The Merchant of Venice (The New Cambridge Shakespeare), Second Edition

The Merchant of Venice has been performed more often than any other comedy by Shakespeare.Molly Mahood pays special attention to the expectations of the play’s first audience, and to ourmodern experience of seeing and hearing the play.In a substantial new addition to the Introduction, Charles Edelman focuses on the play’s sexualpolitics and recent scholarship devoted to the position of Jews in Shakespeare’s time. He surveys theinternational scope and diversity of theatrical interpretations of The Merchant in the 1980s and 1990sand their different ways of tackling the troubling figure of Shylock.