Annotated Bibliography Assignment

Bibliography by Jason Wong

By Jason Wong, member of Venetian Project Team

1. "Full text- script of the play Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare.” William Shakespeare. 11 Feb 2009 <http://www.william-shakespeare.info/script-text-merchant-of-venice.htm>.

An online, full-text source of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, transcribed into modernized English.  The website provides the entire text to numbers of Shakespeare’s other plays.  Aesthetically, the website has a simple yet gothic sort of display, with a black background, bluish grayscale images, and blue and white texts.  For each play, the text is divided into its separate acts for organizational purposes, and the site lists the cast and characters.  Also provided is a Shakespeare dictionary for deciphering any obscure words that were used in the 16th century and are defunct today.  It contains references to specific cultural foods, idioms and names used back in Shakespeare’s time period.  Furthermore, the site also lists statistics for each of Shakespeares’ plays, such as the date first printed, number of words, and date first performed.  For the Merchant of Venice section, or for any other play’s page, all the dialogues are ordered by act and scene number, but the line numbers are missing.  A search for specific quotes must be achieved through typing in a search bar.  The website is useful for reading the play without a book or for being an online text that can be copied and pasted, but it cannot substitute for a book when researching because it is impossible to quote lines without the numbers.

2. Kahn, Coppelia. “The Cuckoo’s Note: Male Friendship and Cuckoldry in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare’s Rough Magic. Ed. Peter Erickson and Coppelia Kahn. Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1985. 104 – 12.

An essay concentrating on the repercussions of one story plot on another, specifically the struggles imposed by the friendship between Bassanio and Antonio on the relationship between Bassanio and Portia, written by Coppelia Kahn.  Kahn labels the phenomenon as a ring plot, demonstrating the circular movement of the consequences one’s actions have on another.  Antonio and Portia serve as rivals, competing for Bassanio’s love, and Kahn argues that it is male love or male friendship, a prevalent precursor to marriage in Shakespeare’s plays, that complicates the marriage.  Consequently, Antonio, in a sense, commits cuckoldry because Bassanio is torn between him and Portia, and both Antonio and Portia must accept compromises in their relationship to Bassanio.  In the end, it is masculinity that wins, but women can adopt masculine fronts.  Portia, in order to save Antonio and return Bassanio to herself, disguises herself as a male lawyer to intervene on the court scene.  Kahn uses this illustration to comment further on how the male influence acts as a buttress for marriage yet continues to sustain the homoerotic friendship between Antonio and Bassanio.  In Merchant of Venice, a play in which Shakespeare very heavily utilizes homoeroticism, Kahn concludes that male friendships produce unanswered homoerotic wishes and anxious, heterosexual marriages.

3. Novy, Marianne. “Giving and Taking in The Merchant of Venice.” Love’s Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare. USA: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.  63 – 82.

An essay, written by Marianne Novy, commenting on the competing, giving and taking relationships in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and arguing that the play criticizes those who are humble and passive.  Novy writes that, in the competition for Bassanio’s love, Portia wins over Antonio because Antonio denies himself, whereas Portia asserts her sexuality.  Novy points out that it is Antonio’s depression and homoerotic behavior that limit him from pursuing a longer and deeper friendship with Bassanio, who now belongs to Portia.  Antonio and Portia represent two types of giving.  Antonio would give up his life for Bassanio while Portia employs limitations on herself.  It is Antonio’s downcast tone that impugns the sincerity or fierceness of his actions, and Portia remains constantly, emotionally ignited.  Novy does not specifically argue that Antonio is a closet homosexual, but she asserts that his homoerotic frustrations preclude him from success with Bassanio.  She argues instead that Antonio is asexual because his language contains sexual undertones directed to neither men nor women.  Portia, however, is a woman of power.  She commands control over her male suitors and exhibits a complex mental faculty.  Victory or success is a matter of identity.  The winners, Portia and Bassanio, are able to keep and act on their sexualities.

4.  Shakespeare, William.  The Merchant of Venice. New York, New York: Penguin Group, 1999.

A comedy play written by William Shakespeare.  Merchant of Venice is a tale set in Italy about lovers who journey through themes of faith in terms of trust and religion, the law and economics, selfishness versus selflessness.  The major plot opens with a depressed Antonio who soon becomes involved in a financial battle with Shylock, who hates Antonio for his Christian beliefs.  Meanwhile, Portia seeks her husband, whom she later chooses to be Bassanio, Antonio’s best friend.  Unfortunately, Shylock charges Antonio in court for being unable to fulfill his debts, but Portia, disguised, arrives to his rescue.  Bassanio rewards the disguised Portia with the ring Portia entrusted to him.  In the end, Portia starts a comedic drama or argument about how Bassanio was unfaithful, but everyone eventually reconciles.  The play features multiple levels and types of relationships, and the dialogues are deep with connotations of each characters’ feelings toward each other.  Relationships within this play can be understood in terms of circles or rings in that each circle of characters features a special aspect of intimacy or hostility, and an aspect of one circle is starkly contrasted with that of another.  Some famous lines from the play include: "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose" and "The quality of mercy is not strained.  It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath."

5. Wiseman, John.  “Regressive Imagery Dictionary.” 21 May 2007. Lemonodor. 10 Feb 2009

<http://lemonodor.com/archives/001511.html>.

An online, text analysis tool created by a university student named John Wiseman.  The tool is “a coding scheme for text analysis that is designed to measure ‘primordial’ and conceptual content.”  Wiseman defines primordial thought as the type of thinking that involves emotions and fantasies, which he equates and translates to Sigmund Freud’s id, and he defines conceptual thought as the type of thinking that is logical and based on reality; in other words, right brain thinking and left brain thinking, respectively.  The tool takes a piece of text and categorizes the words in that text into two categories: primordial and conceptual.  From those two categories, the tool is able to make conjectures about the speaker’s mentality.  For example, in comparing the speeches of Al Gore and George W. Bush in their second debate in 2000, the tool guesses that Bush was “5 percentage points more reality-based than Gore.  And he was 50% more emotional.  And feels a 33.3% greater need for sex.”  Other mental undertones or even physical sensations that the tool attempts to uncover are aggression, narcissism, affection and a hunger for glory.  The mechanism for the point system is unclear, however, so the site is therefore inconclusive or ambivalent as for the tool’s credibility.