SOURCE: Rosen, Alan. “The Rhetoric of Exclusion: Jew, Moor, and the Boundaries of Discourse in The Merchant of Venice.” In Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, edited by Joyce Green MacDonald, pp. 67-79. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1997.

In the following essay, Rosen remarks on the rhetorical strategies of The Merchant of Venice's racial outsiders, emphasizing Shylock's recursive and literal mode of speaking and the Prince of Morocco's eloquence as beyond “the borders of legitimate discourse” in the play.

In the 1590s, both Jew and Moor remained for English Christians exotic infidels, whose obstinate unbelief and cultural difference continued to challenge, boldly or surreptitiously, Christian hegemony in Europe.¹ In Shylock the Jew and the Prince of Morocco the Moor, The Merchant of Venice presents these two kinds of infidels and thus brings together within this problem comedy two groups for whom Renaissance England felt a...