SOURCE: Kozikowski, Stanley J. “The Allegory of Love and Fortune: The Lottery in The Merchant of Venice.” Renascence 32, no. 2 (winter 1980): 105-15.

In the following essay, Kozikowski offers a reading of The Merchant of Venice that focuses on the play's lottery scenes as allegorical interludes depicting the rivalry of virtuous Love and capricious Fortune.

Recent criticism of The Merchant of Venice has found the allegorical approach quite useful in accounting for the play's primary moments, its characters, and its themes.¹ But even as these studies offer instructive and complementary readings, one memorable series of actions in the play—the lottery scenes—has not been related, as established Tudor allegory, to other aspects of the play. We may, in certain respects, understand this reluctance to assimilate. The lotteries seem to bear no obvious thematic relationship to the values of justice and mercy which serve to unify the play for many...