ABSTRACT
Shakespeare himself had recourse to the shape of ancient Roman history in his four Roman plays that opportunistically sampled various moments: the fall of Rome at the hands of the Goths; the tension between "republican" and "imperial" Rome; and the internal divisions within republican Rome. The Merchant of Venice negotiates its way through the differences and similarities between English and Venetian mores, casting a critical eye on the latter's republican claims. While there are elements of the dialectic between the "toleration" and "exorbitance" that Gillies identifies in Shakespeare's two Venetian plays, the nature of the recurrent political debate surrounding the concept of "republicanism", as Pocock's more general remarks imply, indicates something much more specifically political. What has been in recent years the legitimate emphasis upon post-colonial discourse to unpick the problems of this tragedy has inadvertently neglected the critique of republicanism that both Venetian plays contain.
