Shakespeare's Textual Traces. Patterns of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice

Focusing on the relevance of Italian models as a crucial component in English Renaissance drama, this work engages in the ongoing critical debate which in the last two decades has moved on towards increasingly more comprehensive and dynamic notions of text, intertextuality and interdiscursivity.Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is here examined in the light of wide-ranging patterns of trans-national exchanges between sixteenth-century Venice and England. The major centre of attention is the migration of both literary and non-literary texts and discourses which offer new insights into the variety of socio-cultural, theological and economic conflicts embedded in the discussions on money-lending and trade inElizabethan England, where the moral and legal justification of interest was a vital issue in the transition from feudal economy to modern capitalism