The Merchant of Venice

The same Venice, the same question: what happens to the outsider the city needs but does not accept? Shylock and Othello both serve Venice and are destroyed when they step outside the role Venice assigns them.

A community that destroys the outsider while claiming to enforce justice and moral order. Both plays use a legal proceeding to expose the gap between a society's stated values and its actual behavior.

A trial that reveals a community's prejudice — the legal system as a mirror of who the community is willing to protect and who it is willing to sacrifice.

Shakespeare's other great study of a character who is simultaneously sympathetic and dangerous, whose most famous speech is both universal wisdom and a deeply contextual performance.

Economic exclusion as a tool of racial and ethnic oppression — both works dramatize what happens when a marginalized community tries to claim the same economic rights as the dominant culture.

The relationship between justice and mercy, law and compassion — and the question of whether a person who has been wronged is entitled to wrong others in return.