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'A passion so strange, outrageous, and so variable': The Invention of the Inhuman in The Merchant of Venice

The volume co-edited by Herbrechter and Callus in which this essay is published has been included in the prestigious Palgrave Shakespeare Series. It contains essays by several high-profile Shakespearean scholars and theorists (e.g. Neil Rhodes, Bruce Boehrer, Gabriel Egan, Andy Mousley, and Adam Max Cohen). Herbrechter’s introduction to the volume builds on aspects first developed and presented as an invited speaker at the interdisciplinary conference on “Humankinds: The Renaissance and Its Anthropologies”, Munich, July 2009 (subsequently published as Herbrechter 2011). Its originality lies in bringing together Shakespeare studies and posthumanism for the first time in a systematic way and explains the mutual benefits that reading Shakespeare from a posthumanist and postanthropocentric perspective today provides. Herbrechter’s contribution to the volume constitutes the first systematic posthumanist reading of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. It extends and problematises Harold Bloom’s provocative claim that Shakespeare should be credited with the “invention of the human” as far as our modern understanding of character is concerned. The posthumanist reading of The Merchant of Venice in this essay became the basis for an invited speech at the “Literature and the Long Modernity” conference in Bucharest, in November 2011. It has also led to an invitation to develop a posthumanist reading of Hamlet to be published in the forthcoming Hamlet Handbuch, ed. Peter Marx (Metzler 2013: 978-3476023520).