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The Merchant ‘in’ Venice and The Shylock Project: Fiction, History, and the Humanities

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Abstract

The 2016 production of The Merchant of Venice staged a comedy famous for its antisemitic expressions in a place of symbolic significance to Jews, whose tragic history has resulted from exactly such sentiments. How, then, do we reconcile the experience of fiction with the claims of history? Certain of the production’s values created the sense of an aesthetically self-contained artifact, yet the performance also took place against the looming, inescapable realism of the ghetto itself – a tension that can be felt, too, in activities related to the production. Illuminated here is the power of humanities public events to reinvigorate, through questioning, the life of the human community.


Open access

Published June 10, 2021 | Language: en

Keywords Fiction • Aestheticism • Mercy • Antisemitism • Ghetto • Humanities • History

Copyright © 2021 Kent Cartwright. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-503-2/006


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