ABSTRACT
Few would quarrel with the claim that Shakespeare is the greatest English poet. Eighteenth-century Germans who couldn't read English, or Shakespeare's sometimes fearsomely difficult English, read him in Wieland's prose translations. Critics and editors of The Merchant of Venice frequently explain how the play is opposing Old Testament and New Testament values, or Judaic and Christian values, especially in its climactic trial scene when Shylock's Mosaic and Judaic emphasis on revenge or restitution. After the Second World War the Merchant's fortunes had changed in various ways. To consider Shakespeare's plays as complex perspectival designs might, disconcert those who agree with Ania Loomba's argument that Antony and Cleopatra shows "proto-Brechtian features" that are no less characteristic of much non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama. The "proto-Brechtian" features are there in Antony and Cleopatra as well as the other non-Shakespearean dramatists, but the other dramatists are now not much read or performed even in English-speaking countries, whereas Shakespeare is the world's most-performed dramatist.
