ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on The Merchant of Venice as a tale of modern times. At the heart of the play is a stark social and psychological polarization, that between the raw materialism and greed of Venice’s Rialto, and the reflective, generous thoughtfulness of Belmont. Intrinsic to many of Shakespeare’s dramatic narratives is the quest to achieve sufficient self-knowledge to ensure the future of the social fabric, whether personally, in terms of integrity, humility, love, and honour, or more publicly and historically, in terms of, say, king-ship or succession. The Merchant of Venice is also, importantly, about the failure in some of such a quest, about the incapacity to hold out against forces of, for example, greed, perversion, power, hatred, and vengeance. In the crudest terms, The Merchant of Venice addresses the relationship between internal values and principles and external societal and cultural mores, rules, and conventions.
