This collection of essays is aimed at students who are working on The Merchant of Venice and who are looking for new ways of thinking about the play and new ways of thinking about their own practice as critics.

Acknowledgements.- General Editor's Preface.- Introduction; M.Coyle.- Comedy and The Merchant of Venice; G.Holderness.- Re-reading The Merchant of Venice; K.Ryan.- The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism; W.Cohen.- Shakespeare and the Jews; J.Shapiro.- Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice; K.F.Hall.- Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and the Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice; K.Newman.- Love in Venice; C.Belsey.- How to Read The Merchant of Venice Without Being Heterosexist; A.Sinfield.- Historical Differences and Venetian Patriarchy; J.Drakakis.- Transformations of Authenticity: The Merchant of Venice in Israel; A.Oz.- Further Reading.- Notes on Contributors.- Index.

This collection of essays is aimed at students who are working on The Merchant of Venice and who are looking for new ways of thinking about Shakespeare's most controversial play and new ways of thinking about their own practice as critics. The collection offers a spectrum of the more recent writings on the play that open up its historical, cultural and political significance, and serve to demonstrate some of the ways in which contemporary criticism is both based upon critical theory and is also about the practice of criticism. This is an illuminating and helpful collection of essays by some of the liveliest critics working on Shakespeare today.

CATHERINE BELSEY Chair of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at the University of Wales, Cardiff WALTER COHEN Professor of Comparative Literature and Dean of the Graduate School at Cornell University JOHN DRAKAKIS Professor of English at the University of Stirling KIM F. HALL Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University GRAHAM HOLDERNESS Professor of Cultural Studies, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Language and Education, and Director of Research Policy at the University of Hertfordshire KAREN NEWMAN University Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Brown University AVRAHAM OZ Head of the Department of Theatre at the University of Haifa KIERNAN RYAN Professor of English Language and Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London and Emeritus Fellow of New Hall, University of Cambridge JAMES SHAPIRO Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University ALAN SINFIELD Professor of English at Sussex University