SOURCE: Weisberg, Richard H. “Antonio's Legalistic Cruelty: Interdisciplinarity and The Merchant of Venice.” In Un-Disciplining Literature: Literature, Law, and Culture, edited by Kostas Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades, pp. 180-89. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

In the following essay, Weisberg appraises the legalistic elements of The Merchant of Venice, and finds “non-ironic” interpretations of the play's opposition between Christian mercy and rigid Judaic law to be reductive and misleading.

Introduction

The law and literature movement now involves hundreds of scholars across the disciplines.¹ Among the movement's contributions to scholarship and teaching in literature has been its attention to several well-worked “legalistic” stories. Particular success has been achieved in the debates about Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, where an established critical perspective on Captain Vere has been challenged by recourse to legal materials and closer readings of the story's legalistic passages.²

In recent years, a similar methodology has been applied to The...