Reading Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice … Twice!

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Using the strategy laid out in Mortimer Adler’s classic How to Read a Book, this course is devoted to developing a thorough understanding of perhaps Shakespeare’s most controversial play, The Merchant of Venice, by reading it once quickly to get an overview and then again more slowly to figure out the details. Along the way, we’ll pay careful attention to both the dramatic and the religious features of the text, and also compare Shakespeare’s play with Christopher Marlowe’s contemporaneous The Jew of Malta.

Texts
  • Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
  • Marlowe, The Jew of Malta
  • Adler and Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide
    to Intelligent Reading [OPTIONAL]
TAUGHT: WINTER 2024