The Merchant of Venice + The Jew of Malta

Time Out New York: "The Merchant of Venice, as everyone knows, is one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”: a purported comedy that no longer strikes anyone as funny. The troubling character of Shylock, the bloodthirsty Hebrew usurer, unavoidably overshades the romantic antics of the Christian characters, which continue for a full act after Shylock is banished, broken, from the stage. In other words, the play doesn’t have just any old problem: It has what we might call, with the full historical weight of the term, a Jewish problem. (Not for nothing was it a favorite in Nazi Germany.) As Harold Bloom has argued, “One would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to recognize that Shakespeare’s grand, equivocal comedy […] is nevertheless a profoundly anti-Semitic work.”"