Post-revisionist English Reformation studies have focused on new interpretation possibilities of social, political and cultural loci to religious negotiations in post-Reformation English History and Literature, avoiding Whiggist and revisionist polarized approaches to the Literary History of English Reformations. This article deals with the textual materiality of The Merchant of Venice (Q1, 1600) as an event that locates cultural and political negotiations, and expectations, regarding religion conformity in Elizabethan England. It especially intends to analyze the rhetorical motives used in Q1 to represent menaces to sacred kingship, and to figure its adversaries (namely 'Puritans' and 'Papists'), also including a study of propositions about iconoclasm of merits, melancholy, amiticia and caritas on the ways of fashioning the main characters' manners.
England; religion; drama; anti-Puritanism; anti-Catholicism.