ABSTRACT
The Merchant of Venice is artfully designed to set us thinking about those peculiarities. The Merchant of Venice hints at this concern with self-knowledge in its opening scene. In The Merchant of Venice William Shakespeare is more circumspect than he was in the two later plays, and uses a politically uncontroversial hate-figure to stand for the puritan sensibility. The Merchant of Venice is in every sense an artful play full of self-conscious parallels and contrasts: there are two main plots linked by the motif of a bond; there are also two trials, two contrasting locations, two merchants, two fathers and two daughters. The Merchant of Venice portrays a world of ethnic hatred and racial intolerance. Berlin's value pluralism and Rabkin's complementarity shouldn't be confused with either Pyrrhonian scepticism or postmodern relativism. The Merchant of Venice portrays a world of ethnic hatred and racial intolerance.
