ABSTRACT
The textual situation of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is unusually good compared with many of his other plays, since the three principal sources conform to each other and presumably conform to the author's manuscript. Venice is a place of heterogeneity and conflict, whereas Belmont is a place of homogeneity, harmony and music. The conversion is a figure producing a certain judicial space that shapes and defines the discursive activity of the courtroom, either virtual or real. First it suggests that legal court practice imitates the conceptual schema of religious conversion should simultaneously intriguing and disturbing for a legal system that tries to keep out the spectre of religion from law as any positivist legal system would and how religious institutions handle moral issues. Second, it invites questions regarding mediatisation and spectacle and third series of questions concerns the relation between society and the trial as a place of law.
