ABSTRACT
This chapter the importance to feminism of theologically informed inheritance-law analysis by treating two of Shakespeare's plays. Both The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest may read to underscore that the problem of the rule of the fathers Will vis-vis women's interests is inseparable from the problem of Last Wills rule over succession to power in the coming generation. The chapter's positing of Merchants structure, in contrast to Lewinski's, is both indebted to and moving away from recent discussions of a Jewish Shakespeare, by Richard halpern, Douglas Anderson, and others. It shows The Tempest as an exploration of pathos concealed behind fatherly aspirations for dead hand control. The critic Leslie Fiedler finds Shakespeare long obsessed with themes from the Apollonius of Tyre romance cycle. Jacobs's night wrestling with the angel, read as a struggle that ends with no clear winner, is argued in the chapter to be crucial to Merchants poetic structure.
