Write an essay in which you use ideas from Bauman’s “The Dream of Purity” to make an argument about The Merchant of Venice. You might look, for example, at Shakespeare’s Venice as a place that attempts to allow for Shylock, a “stranger” because he is a Jew, to live; to him, of course, the Christians are strangers. (Remember, though, that Shakespeare knew nothing about the Jewish ghetto.) Questions to consider: how does the play explore their mutual sense of each other as unclean? How might characters’ words and actions be understood in light of Bauman’s argument about purity, filth, and matter out of place?
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