Fury in the Words

Harry Berger, Jr., is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent books include Figures of a Changing World: Metaphor and the Emergence of Modern Culture and A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare's Venice (both Fordham).

"One of the great masters of close reading in the history of modern Shakespeare criticism, Harry Berger Jr., has finally published his double interpretations of The Merchant of Venice and Othello as A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare's Venice...[Berger], like others reviewed in this section, demonstrate close reading as itself a gift, an act of mutually enriching exchange between scholar and text in a play of benefits that moves outwards to new readers." -Julia Reinhard Lupton, Studies in English Literature (Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama) "The energy, penetration, and inventiveness of Berger's thought in this book are astonishing. Embarrasment has rarely seemed so dangerous a thing. By myriad directions and indirections he leads the reader back into the surprise and the strangeness of the Venetian plays, and of Shakespeare's mind at large. A masterwork." -- -Kenneth Gross author of Shylock is Shakespeare and Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life "A Fury in the Words shows Berger's sophisticated conceptual framework and intensive close readings in their most lucid, accessible, and human form. Berger's analysis takes us slowly, step by step, deep into the inner logic of the characters' language and helps us to make rigorous sense of the psychological motivation their words imply." -- -Peter Erickson Northwestern University "The great benefit of Berger's juxtaposition of 'Merchant' and 'Othello' is to highlight the contrast between Portia-Bassanio and Othello-Desdemona relationships." -- Peter Erickson -Shakespeare Quarterly