He attended a week of workshops and lectures and gave a public lecture at the Venice International University on the island of San Servolo entitled “Shylock and the Impossible Gift of Love”. The students at the Summer School, who came from the UK, the USA and continental Europe, attended more than forty lectures by a range of pre-eminent scholars who focussed on Shylock’s place in Venice, Shakespeare and literary history more generally and the performance of selected scenes from The Merchant of Venice by the theatre group Columbari.

“The Shylock Project” is part of an ongoing series of events planned especially for 2016, which marks both four hundred years since Shakespeare’s death and the five-hundredth anniversary of the Venetian Ghetto. They will include a professional performance of Merchant in the old ghetto (which will travel internationally) and a further summer school. Global Shakespeare is especially pleased to be part of this project with its double focus on Venice as the “home” of Shylock and pan-European collaboration in performance and scholarship.