The Merchant Of Venice

William Shakespeare

Yale University Press

2006

208 páginas

6h 56m

ISBN-13: 9780300115642

In this lively comedy of love and money in sixteenth-century Venice, Bassanio wants to impress the wealthy heiress Portia but lacks the necessary funds. He turns to his merchant friend, Antonio, who is forced to borrow from Shylock, a Jewish moneylender. When Antonio's business falters, repayment becomes impossible—and by the terms of the loan agreement, Shylock is able to demand a pound of Antonio’s flesh. Portia cleverly intervenes, and all ends well (except of course for Shylock).

Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary, pronunciation, and prosody and provides alternative readings of phrases and lines. His on-page annotations give readers all the tools they need to comprehend the play and begin to explore its many possible interpretations. Raffel provides an introductory essay, and in a concluding essay Harold Bloom examines Shylock, one of Shakespeare's most bewilderingly original characters.

Burton Raffel is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities Emeritus and professor of English emeritus, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His most recent of many edited and translated publications is Das Nibelungenlied, published by Yale University Press. He lives in Lafayette. Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University, is the author of many books, including The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine.