SENS: The Merchant of Venice

How did Shakespeare transform Italian narrative traditions into one of his most influential and controversial plays? This volume explores the two principal Italian narrative sources of The Merchant of Venice – Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone and Masuccio Salernitano’s Il Novellino – while situating them within the wider network of literary, cultural, and ideological exchanges that shaped Renaissance England. Engaging with recent developments in Shakespeare source studies, it moves beyond a narrowly philological concept of ‘source’ to investigate the dynamic processes of intertextuality, interdiscursivity, adaptation, and cultural transmission through which Italian narrative materials were reimagined for the early modern English stage. By tracing Shakespeare’s creative dialogue with his Italian predecessors, the volume shows how inherited stories were transformed to engage with the social, economic, religious, and ideological tensions of Elizabethan England while foregrounding fundamental questions of law and justice, commerce and risk, religious difference, identity, and human relationships. Conceived as a companion to the open-access SENS digital archive, it combines close textual analysis with innovative digital scholarship to offer a fresh perspective on Shakespeare’s creative engagement with the literary and imaginative resources of the Italian Renaissance.