William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice (1600)

Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice (1600) pdf of the first quarto

Further Reading

• Stevens, Paul. "Heterogenizing Imagination: Globalization, The Merchant of Venice, and the Work of Literary Criticism." New Literary History 36.3 (Summer 2005): 425-437.

• Abstract: By all accounts, the distinguished economist Jagdish Bhagwati's recent rigorous and urbane defense of the material and social benefits of globalization, In Defense of Globalization (2004), is likely to become a classic. According to Ernesto Zedillo, the former President of Mexico, for instance, the book constitutes "a precise rebuttal of the most common and pernicious fallacies about globalization." In this essay, I offer a reading of Bhagwati's book through the argument of grace as it is articulated in one of his favorite Shakespearean plays, The Merchant of Venice. I do this in order to draw attention to some of the cultural problems inherent in globalization that literary criticism seems more able to illuminate than instrumentalist economics.