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The Yoke of Love: Prophetic Riddles in The Merchant of Venice. By AvRAHAM Oz. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1995. Pp. x + 253. $39.50 cloth.
In The Yoke of Love: Prophetic Riddles in The Merchant of Venice, Avraham Oz has set himself a challenge and passed it along to his readers. The book itself reads like a riddle, moving from a wide circle of general observations on the nature of riddle and prophecy to the particular example of Merchant. In order to unfold the riddle that is the play, the reader must first unfold the riddle that is this book. The task is not a small one.
Following a brief introduction, titled "Shylock and Prophecy," Oz proceeds through a very long first chapter, " `As We Would Hear an Oracle': Modes of Riddle and Prophecy in Shakespeare" (divided into five subchapters); to a shorter second chapter, " `Which Is the Merchant Here? And Which the Jew?': Riddles of Identity" (divided into three subchapters); thence to an undivided third chapter, "Strategy and Ideology in The Merchant of Venice"; and finally to an epilogue, an updated version of the author's 1983 essay reviewing Merchant's stage history in Israel, Oz's home. There are extensive endnotes, a selected bibliography, and an index.
According to the introduction, the book's "argument" is "the paradoxical, selfdefeating project of disinheriting a father. An inverted act of soothsaying (though not of prophecy in its wider sense), it deconstructs remembrance while saving the imaginary (as opposed to symbolic) plenitude of both present and future as refuge and storehouse of mystery" (3). This opening sets the first riddle to the reader, and it may well be that I have failed to solve it: I could not find that argument, or its conclusion, anywhere in the next 250 pages. Although there are, emphatically, many passages (including the unitary third chapter) that will reward the reader's persistence, much of this book puzzles more than it illuminates. Moreover, the text is marred by a large number of typographical errors (I stopped counting after twenty), some of which make the syntax incomprehensible, and all of which make an elusive and disjointed argument even more difficult to follow.
The first chapter takes up the...