The (Mis) representation of Jews in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta

Abstract

Through the contexts of the plays, Marlowe and Shakespeare seemed to be the products of their culture reasonably tending to reflect the Elizabethan anti-Jewish attitudes of their time. The plays’ relationship to Anti-Semitism is an object of contention. Nevertheless, The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta are generally proved to be about usury homosocial bounding mercy Venetian trade cross-dressing or the many other social currents that run through this. The present study maintains that Marlowe and Shakespeare regarded one another as practicing dramatists and poets where the influence begins and ends