2005 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Critical Assessments
Published in:
The Merchant of Venice
Many groups of people lay claim to the ideological ownership of Shakespeare. Was he a Tory, a socialist, feminist, anti-Semitic, Roman Catholic, or, indeed, someone else altogether? The whole history concerning Shakespeare and his works has been a tale of ownership and/or rejection. It is a process that simultaneously sees him as transcendent of history and a man fashioned in the image of the time.