The Merchant of Venice (Vol. 66) | Seymour Kleinberg (essay date 1983)
Seymour Kleinberg (essay date 1983)
SOURCE: Kleinberg, Seymour. “The Merchant of Venice: The Homosexual as Anti-Semite in Nascent Capitalism.” In Literary Visions of Homosexuality, edited by Stuart Kellogg, pp. 113-26. New York: Haworth Press, 1983.
[In the following essay, Kleinberg claims that The Merchant of Venice dramatizes “the triumph of heterosexual marriage” over homoeroticism, the latter represented by Antonio and his love for Bassanio.]
When I first read The Merchant of Venice, I was dismayed by the anti-Semitism and the materialism of the Venetian world. The play held no charm for me, and I decided that it was simply not very available for someone like myself. Twenty years later, in 1978, after a summer as an NEH fellow at Berkeley, researching the subject of sodomy in the Renaissance, I reread the play. I still found it to be about anti-Semitism under mercantile capitalism, but now just as clearly...
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