Shakespeare scholarship has marginalized Othello and Merchant of Venice from political study

Evidence

Pierre Sahel places both plays outside of his inquiry into Shakespeare’s political thought by focusing on the historical plays (Sahel, La pensee politique dans les drames historiques de Shakespeare, see also George W Keeton, Shakespeare’s Legal and Political Background; Alan Hager’s Shakespeare’s Political Animal; and Robin Headlam Wells’s Shakespeare, Politics and the State, with the exception of an important comment Wells makes comparing the Venice of The Merchant to that of Othello as the site of a “battle between civilization and unreason,” 58). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 1106