The Merchant of Venice (Vol. 66) | Samuel Ajzenstat (essay date 1997)
Samuel Ajzenstat (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: Ajzenstat, Samuel. “Contract in The Merchant of Venice.” Philosophy and Literature 21, no. 2 (October 1997): 262-78.
[In the following essay, Ajzenstat evaluates The Merchant of Venice as a romantic comedy featuring a number of significant oppositions, the most fundamental being that between “the conditional and the unconditional.”]
The Merchant of Venice is widely interpreted as a Christian parable about the power of selfless love to raise us above the loveless inflexibilities of the legal and commercial orders.1 The account I shall offer is the precise opposite of this interpretation: The Merchant makes more sense as a play about love's inability to allow us to dispense with a loveless realm of hard necessity and, even more, about love's dependence on a loveless realm for its own survival. But the rejection of the idealistic account does not...
[The entire page is 7185 words long]
Navigate
