Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice continues to fascinate and also to elude its critics. In this play, Shylock the Jew insists on his legal right, in lieu of moneys owed, to ˜a pound of flesh' cut from the breast of the Christian merchant, Antonio “ so it goes in the financial district along the Rialto “while in Belmont, the play's other locale, suitors for the hand of the fair, rich Portia must venture a risky choice among caskets of gold, silver and lead. As the play entangles its flesh-bond with its casket-trial plot “ both old stories, brought here to a life at once fantastical and all too real “ we must ponder uncomfortable conjunctions. What do Venice and Belmont, money and love, outcast and community, justice and mercy have to do with one another anyway? Everything or nothing; and most critics, pursuing what Barbara Lewalski once termed the play's ˜thematic harmonies' (p. 44), have sought to determine which. Midway through his probing hundred-page essay, with which he introduces the Shakespeare Criticism Series' collection of new essays on the play, John W. Mahon considers the limits of such approaches: he asks whether they do not insist on ˜harmonies' which a ˜consideration of the characters as staged' will undermine (p. 44). In other words: what is possible on the page may not be possible on the stage. Indeed, a focus on Shakespeare's drama as performed “ one of the Series' avowed goals “ brings a special force to our grasp of the Merchant of Venice. After all, our work as viewers of this play is to follow Shylock as, to the perpetual bafflement of our sense of the play's anti-Semitism, he sheds the role to which the Quarto text at times, rather coldly, calls him: ˜the Jew.' In one of the four essays in this volume to focus on questions of performance history, Jay L. Halio urges actors and directors to resist the impulse to ˜simplify' and, instead, to highlight the ˜ambivalence' that touches mos