SOURCE: "The Ideology of The Merchant of Venice;' in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 20, No. 3, Autumn, 1990, pp. 431-64.

In the following essay, Ferber surveys the play from an ideological standpoint and examines how several varying ideological discourses inform the play's issues and themes. An early version of this essay was presented in 1979 to the Marxist Literary Group at Yale.

Nearly all recent discussions of The Merchant of Venice have agreed with Auden that the play is a "problem play,"¹ filled with gaps, strains, seams, ironies, silences, subversions, and symptoms of discomfort. The last word on the play's unity and "harmonies" seems already to have been said,² and the reigning spirit of literary criticism today is skeptical, analytical, deconstructive, relentless in its search for ironies. The inconsistencies and paradoxes that have been turned up, however, often seem arbitrary, either because they are not folded back into a general assessment...