Grady, Kyle. "Racial divides in The Merchant of Venice." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/racial-divides-in-the-merchant-of-venice. [Date accessed].
Racial divides in The Merchant of Venice
A demonstration to students of how early modern attention to race often appears at the margins.
The Merchant of Venice is an ideal play to begin showing students how the early modern English attention to difference plays out in the margins. It is clear in the text that the English sensibility in the early modern era is one already attentive to identities that don’t fit neatly into discreetly constructed categories and one that sees the reinscription of those divides as important to both its domestic organization and to its colonial ambitions. In Shakespeare’s Venice, managing those categories—and how people fit into them—appears especially important for ensuring that its legal, economic, and social systems maintain and reproduce a particular hierarchy, especially in an increasingly intercultural context.
Further learning
Recommended
Othello and Barbary's blues
Justin P. Shaw is interested in how appropriation can mean theft as well as “making something new.” Using a framework of Black music and the history of appropriation of the Blues to shed light on Desdemona’s memory of Barbary’s song in Shakespeare's Othello, Shaw asks the question: where is the line between tribute and theft?
.jpg)
