ABSTRACT
The Venice of Shakespeare and Jonson is a city whose traditional openness to trade, foreign visitors, merchants, and religious beliefs is counterbalanced by the establishment of geographical, social, and psychological boundaries. Shakespeare and Jonson were fascinated by the dramatic possibilities that such a setting could provide, although the well-grounded and established difference' between them is not erased in the treatment of the Serenissima. Shakespeare and Jonson were interested in the composite nature of the Venetian patrician-merchant and the way he negotiates his contradictory nature in the city of riches. The Inquisition in Venice tended to prosecute people on the frontier between Christian and Jew, marranos, or crypto-Jews who had reverted to their original faith or dubious conversions to Christianity. Possibly the main area where England could see itself and its vocation in the mirror image of Venice was trade.
