Loving and Hating (in) Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice is at once Shakespeare’s most modern play and his most problematic one. Ostensibly it’s a comedy about risk and reward (i.e., love) in the nascent economic system of global capitalism. But from its very first words, the play gives us something else entirely—something dark and unsettling, a drama of mental illness, proscribed sexuality, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, sham justice, and forced assimilation. By the end, the play seems ambivalent about itself at best. We are ambivalent about it too, as we should be.
This is an honors course in slow, intensive reading. Our objective will be to take a single text as an entry point not only to Shakespeare’s world—and to a pivotal moment in Shakespeare’s career, presaging the turn to tragedy—but also to broader questions about literary and cultural history: most centrally, what should we do with artworks from the past that convey painful or offensive ideas? After we read and watch the play once, we will proceed through project-based units on Shakespeare’s sources and archetypes, the historical context, and the play’s stage and reception history. Readings will include excerpted primary works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and secondary works by modern critics and theorists. The course is designed to be welcoming and intellectually productive not just for lovers of Shakespeare but for haters of him too.