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. With titles such as "Reading the Play: Entrances and Exits," "Interlude: The Sound of Elizabethan Prose and the Sense of Elizabeth's Prose," and "Sources: Gesta Romanorum and the Caskets," the chapters can be read together or individually as short essays. This is a book that provides an intimate, comprehensive, and challenging study of Shakespeare's provocative romantic comedy.