Here, you will find Cacodemon Shakespeare's student editions of The Merchant of Venice. This project collects digital editions of Shakespeare's plays, created by students in Professor Erika Boeckeler's Introduction to Shakespeare courses at Northeastern University. Students in these classes work in groups to prepare a single page from one of Shakespeare's plays; each group adopts an editorial stance and prepares their page accordingly, making decisions about annotation, contextualization, display, regularization, etc. Reading through a play in this project will offer many different perspectives on Shakespeare's work.
To make it easier for readers to access each distinctive student edition, this landing page includes separate links for each page from Merchant. You can also click through the text of the play sequentially from within each page.
Facsimile images are courtesy of the Rare Books & Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library (copy G.176.16). The edition we have selected is the first quarto, published in London in 1600 as The most excellent historie of the merchant of Venice : with the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Iewe towards the sayd merchant, in cutting a iust pound of his flesh and the obtayning of Portia by the choyse of three chests.
The classes that contributed to this edition include: Introduction to Shakespeare, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, and Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare (graduate level) Fall 2023.
