ABSTRACT
The textual situation of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596/1598) is unusually good compared with many of his other plays, since the three principal sources conform with each other and also presumably conform with the author’s manuscript (rather than a prompt book). 1 Yet it is not easy to know how to read the text of the play, nor is it a simple matter to stage and perform it. Although the play is presented as a comedy both paratextually 2 and in most theatrical performances, 3 and contains plenty of jest, good humour and verbal wit, the play also
been viewed by many critics as troubling and difficult to accommodate with our sense of a happy resolution. 4 However, I will argue that the play strongly conforms to the laws of genre and of comedy. The principal support for this claim is that the strengthening of community presented and enacted in The Merchant of Venice operates by way of social inclusion, whereas in tragedy the strengthening of social bonds typically would take the form of exclusion and/or symbolic sacrifice of the protagonist in the form of a victim or scapegoat.
