As the most controversial comedy play and despite being read through different theoretical positions in the hope of accounting for its heterogeneity and problematic character, Merchant of Venice (ca.1596) still requires re-readings as it is regarded as relevant to contemporary global issues such as cultural pluralism, multiculturalism, tolerance, assimilation, xenophobia, discrimination, minorization and etc. As a post-modern critical research, the present study, opting for an integrated mirco-macro analysis, aimed at investigating the play through Van Leeuwan's sociosemantic framework of representation of social actors (1996) to analyse the language of the play, theories of city and state as non-landed social institutions in the West,, the market logics along with E. Laclau's and Mouffe's logics of equivalence and difference (e.g. the title of the play is in itself an antonomasia which underscores the positions in the social structures) to conceptualize the political spaces of urban and non-urban sections of Venice and Belmont, respectively, Venice as the republican state and Belmont as a monarchical order, de Certeau's theories and some Deleuzian concepts of the multiple, becoming and the open to connect the socio-semantic categories with the wider issues of economy and politics since Merchant of Venice coincided with the creeping replacement of feudalism and agribusiness by merchant capitalism and regional and (inter)national trade in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The study concludes that although the play demonstrates the "minor" victory of the providential design of events (happy ending), it anticipates the alternative route to a new global economic paradigm and the experience of porous urban space.
