David Hopp's "I never did repent for doing good-A Companion to Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice" is a captivating academic, yet accessible, work that will delight the Shakespeare lover with its wit, candor, and rare insight. This book provides readers with an almost personal familiarity with the play's unforgettable characters, and illustrates that the play is a seamlessly patched-together collection of plots taken from a surprising variety of sources. The core of the author's method is careful attention to the play's text, which he shares in the book's twenty-three quick-moving chapters....

In 1825, near the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson looked back on the hot Philadelphia summer of 1776 and said this about the essence of his Declaration of Independence: "Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or the elementary books of public right . . ."...