Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice is a troubling comedy. The play's villain is Shylock, a Jewish moneylender. He gives one of his Christian tormentors a loan on the condition that if the ...

A cartoon in a New Yorker magazine issue of the late 1930s showed Adolf Hitler pinning a Nazi medal on William Shakespeare for his perceived anti-Semitic slant in his play “The Merchant of Venice.” In ...

As long as we’re on the subject, I want to take a look at a famous speech from Merchant of Venice, the speech where Shylock justifies, to two of his tormentors, his thirst for vengeance. With whom is ...

Last Saturday, roughly halfway through the first act of the Globe Theatre’s “The Merchant of Venice” at this year’s Lincoln Center Festival, your correspondent could be found, much to her astonishment ...

Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is a sinister sort of comedy. Antonio, a wealthy merchant whose monies are invested in risky ventures overseas, lends out the sum of 3,000 ducats so that his ...

For what's ostensibly a comedy, "The Merchant of Venice" has a dark heart and leaves a bitter aftertaste. Loyalty, generosity and mercy are the goods it advertises, but they come laced with bigotry ...

Chicago — Settling in for the highly acclaimed Globe Shakespeare production of “The Merchant of Venice” — landing briefly at Chicago Shakespeare Theater after stops in New York and Washington — one ...

The quality of mercy can in fact be strained, especially when it comes to the fate of a central character in one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Notwithstanding its oft-quoted proverbs and ingenious ...

The Merchant of Venice has been making the rounds. Last year it was superstar Al Pacino as Shylock in the Public Theatre’s production in Central Park (later transferred to a limited Broadway run) This ...

Al Pacino plays the original misunderstood godfather Shylock in Shakespear’s Merchant of Venice. The terms on which Michael Radford adapts this 16th-century text give no countenance to bigotry, though ...

Pretty much every lawyer in the English-speaking world has heard of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Merchant is one of Shakespeare's "problem plays." For a comedy, it isn't very funny, and the ...