ABSTRACT
Thirty years ago at the first World Shakespeare Congress in Vancouver, BC, Norman Rabkin delivered a paper that began: “Shakespeare criticism is in trouble.” 1 Calling for a more comprehensive kind of criticism as against the kinds of reductivism that tended to dominate journal articles and books, interested mainly in thematic approaches, Rabkin drew most of his examples from The Merchant of Venice. He noted that while the themes that various commentators identified were surely in the play, and the analyses were in themselves useful, still they left out as much as—or more than—they included about what was in the play, what the play is.
