SOURCE: " 'The Quality of Mercy': Law, Equity and Ideology in The Merchant of Venice," in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Vol. 27, No. 4, December, 1984, pp. 35-54.

In the following essay, Cohen probes the ideological threat to the dominant social order represented by Shylock's legal suit in The Merchant of Venice.

The interdisciplinary study of literature has received considerable impetus over the last two decades from the rise of New Historicism. Particularly in Renaissance studies, the work of Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Adrian Montrose and others has illuminated the relation of such diverse matters as exorcism, colonialism, architectural design and primogeniture to the cultural work performed by literary texts. One subject largely neglected by the New Historicists, however, is the law. This neglect may in part be attributable to the prominence of the law in older, positivist historical readings of Renaissance literature, and in turn to the...