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Gary Rosenshield (essay date 2002)

SOURCE: Rosenshield, Gary. “Deconstructing the Christian Merchant: Antonio and The Merchant of Venice.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 20, no. 2 (2002): 28-51.

[In the following essay, Rosenshield examines Antonio's role as an economic ideal—a Christian merchant—in The Merchant of Venice.]

For several millennia conservative writers have seen their times as corrupted by a lust for material gain and thus inherently destructive of the moral, spiritual, and religious values of an idealized older order. This attitude frequently manifests itself in quixotic nostalgia, but just as often it elicits a rancorous response. One need only recall Dostoevksy's diatribe against the Jewish idea in The Diary of a Writer (March 1877), which he associates with the modern world dominated by finance and the stock market, in short, by a materialistic idea that signals the death...

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1. Introduction
2. Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
   1. Walter Cohen (essay date winter 1982)
3. Criticism: Character Studies
   1. Richard Abrams (essay date 1996)
   2. Bruce Boehrer (essay date summer 1999)
   3. Gary Rosenshield (essay date 2002)
4. Criticism: Production Reviews
   1. Peter Marks (review date 13 January 1999)
   2. Hal Jensen (review date 2 July 1999)
   3. Matt Wolf (review date 2 August 1999)
   4. Robert Smallwood (review date 1999)
   5. John Simon (review date 14 February 2000)
   6. Alvin Klein (review date 5 November 2000)
   7. Robert Smallwood (review date 2000)
   8. Caryn James (review date 8 October 2001)
   9. Toby Young (review date 10 November 2001)
5. Criticism: Themes
   1. Thomas Luxon (essay date January 1999)
   2. Steve Patterson (essay date spring 1999)
   3. Martin Japtok and Winfried Schleiner (essay date 1999)
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright