• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.457-466
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• 2005

The main narrative of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice deals with a dispute over the matter of bond in regard to moneylending, and its consequences upon the eventual default. Only the clever interference of a lawyer or judge brings the crisis to an end. In solving his dispute over the bond between Antonio, the merchant of Venice, and Shylock, the money lender and a Jew, Shakespeare offers one of the most famous trial scenes in literature. This trial scene presents the art of arbitration by Portia who was disguised as a Doctor of Law and sheds light on the nature of law, justice, equity, and divine law. What one cannot overlook in this trial scene is the importance of reading ability. After all, interpretation is the next stage of reading. Drawing just verdicts and wise arbitration while at the same time deconstructing the implicit violence and incongruity in law is based on ceaseless effort of analytic and creative act of reading.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.19
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• pp.149-179
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• 2010

This article is concerned about the symbolic meaning of the transvestism Renaissance perspective through analysis of Triumph Over Persecution work and The Merchant of Venice, and Jealous Ioan Tornese. The transvestism is frequently present in the comedies of the golden age. A woman author Maria de Zayas has a special interest in female identity with critical and defying view. Also the subject of the transvestism in Spanish literature originated in Italian tradition. In Italian literature, there were two types of disguised women, who urge for love and warrior-heroine(amazon). Both types are also listed in Spanish literature. The dress-crossing heroine of Triumph Over Persecution displays a type of heroine, who corrects a male prejudice and reset a harmonious order. Shakespeare is also one of the Renaissance writers under the influence of the Italian Renaissance novel. Heroine of Merchant of Venice symbolizes a triumphant challenge against the blocks of the patriarchal system. In spite of the social system blocks, cross-dressing women may receive in the patriarchal scenes without problems. Based on the notion of paradox and irony, the Italian novel reflects popular psychology of the time when the link between the internal identity and social outside puts into question. The cross-dressing Torneses' wife, symbolizes the mockery or renaissance deception. Their deception emphasis on an ironic way in the point view of inhuman man who consider women material belongs to the man without any free-will. The costume of the characters make it possible to change their original identity into the other. From this point of view, we can say that the transvestism in these works could be interpreted in two ways: first, the destruction of the traditional categories of women's identity and second, the burlesque contempt on the patriarchal renaissance society.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.50
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• pp.483-507
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• 2018

Shylock in Shakespeare's play, The Merchant of Venice has been considered as either a devilish villain, or as a victim who was persecuted unfairly by the Christian society in Venice. By focusing on the matter of the Other, which has been summarily overlooked in literary texts and the literary criticism, it is noted that the New Historical and Cultural criticism interpreted Shylock as the racial, religious, and economic Other in the Venetian society which at the time was dominated by Christian ideals. The purpose of this paper is to show how Shylock becomes an abjected Other, that is, the abject, based on Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection. According to Kristeva, an abjection is the process of expulsion of otherness from society, through which the subject or the nation tries to set up clear boundaries and establish a stable identity. Shylock is marginalized and abjected by the borders drawn by the Venetian Christian society, which in a strong sense tries to protect its identity and homogeneity by rejecting and excluding any unclean or improper otherness. The borders include the two visible borders like the Ghetto and the red hats worn by the Jews, and one invisible border in the religious and economic fields. By asking for one pound of Antonio's flesh when he can't pay back 3,000 ducats owed, Shylock tries to cross the border between Christians and Jews. Portia frustrates Shylock's desire to violate the border by presenting a different interpretation of the expression, 'one pound of flesh,' from Shylock's interpretation. And in doing so she expels him back to his original position of abject.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.171-190
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• 2011

Shakespeare's plays deploy an interesting array of food signs in a way to illuminate the historical process of what Stephen Mennell has described as "the civilizing of appetite"-a process in which the changes of food choices and eating habits took place in response to the changes in people's way of life and personality structure over the long-term modern period since the middle ages. Shakespeare's plays suggest that the civilizing of appetite in early modern England was heavily affected by the forces of social mobility as well as the nascent market economy. The Capulets' costly preparation of Juliet's wedding banquet is a showcase of conspicuous consumption which was a structural necessity for the ruling class in Shakespeare's time. Some fifteen years later, the same kinds of foodstuffs are included in a shepherd's shopping list for the sheepshearing festival in Winter's Tale. This is a significant coincidence to prove that food was an important source of emulation and contest among different social classes; and that the rich diet of the upper class gave impetus to social mobility. The Elizabethan subjects, especially among the elite noblemen, were interpellated by the ideology of food that equated the quality of food and the eater's social identity. Faced with bankruptcy as a consequence of his extravagant consumption habit, Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice testifies to the gripping ideology of food onto early modern people, while Poor Tom in King Lear presents a comic parody of the rich people's conspicuous waste. Also in Coriolanus and The Merry Wives of Winsor, Shakespeare uses food as a metaphor for class-motivated social struggles.