What a wide world was in that little space, (For the interpretation of the character by Macklin, Kean, Irving, and Booth, cp. Furness' Variorum Edition, pp. 371-385.)1 DATE OF COMPOSITION The Merchant of Venice is mentioned by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, 1598; in the same year Roberts entered it on the books of the Stationers' Company. This is the earliest positive allusion to the play. In Henslowe's Diary under the date August 25, 1594, mention is made of "The Venesyon Comodey" (i.e. “The Venetian Comedy") as a new play; one cannot, however, with any certainty identify Henslowe's comedy with The Merchant of Venice, though it seems likely that we have here a reference to a rough draft of the play as we know it,-a partial revision of some older play used by Shakespeare, hastily re-written to satisfy popular feeling against Dr. Roderigo Lopez, the queen's Jewish physician, who was executed on June 7, 1594, on the charge of being bribed by the King of Spain to poison the Queen (cp. The Original of Shylock, by S. L. Lee, Gentleman's Magazine, 1880; the article on Lopez in the Dictionary of National Biography; the Conspiracy of Dr. Lopez, The Historical Review, July, 1894). It is a significant fact that Lopez's chief rival was the pretender Don Antonio.2 A noteworthy imitation 1 The most valuable of all the editions of the play (published by Lippencott, 1892), edited by Horace Howard Furness. 2 Lopez was for a time attached to the household of Lord Leicester. James Burbadge, the father of Richard Burbadge, one of “the Earl of Leicester's company of servants and players" must have had many opportunities of seeing Lopez, when the doctor was attending the Earl at Kenilworth. It has been suggested that the traditional red beard of Shylock was actually derived from Burbadge's personal knowledge of Lopez. But it is now generally accepted on ample evidence that there were many Jews scattered throughout England in the Elizabethan period, though their formal re-admission was brought about by Cromwell. of the moonlight scene between Lorenzo and Jessica occurs in the play Wily Beguiled, probably written in 1596–7; similarly in a Latin play, Machiavellus, acted at St. John's College, Cambridge, at Christmas, 1597, (preserved in the Bodleian Library), there is the incident of a Jew whetting his knife, which may well have been taken from Shake speare. Finally, Shakespeare's debt to Silvayn's Orator has an important bearing on the date of the play; the English translation appeared in 1596; it is just possible, but unlikely, that Shakespeare had read the work in the original French. The play may perhaps safely be dated "about 1596"; the evidence will allow of nothing more definite. THE SOURCES In 1579 Stephen Gosson, who had himself been a writer of plays, published his School of Abuse, containing a pleasant invective against "Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth: setting up the flag of defiance to their mischievous exercise, etc., etc."; the book is a vigorous attack on the acted drama; yet he confesses that some of their plays are without rebuke; "which are easily remembered as quickly reckoned"; he proceeds to enumerate four plays; one of these The Jew, shown at the Bull, seems to have been the groundwork of Shakespeare's play, "representing," as Gosson tells us, "the greediness of worldly choosers, and bloody minds of usurers." It is clear from these words that the blending of the bond story and the three caskets was already an accomplished fact in English dramatic literature as early as 1579. There is probably a reference to this old play in a letter of Spenser to Gabriel Harvey of the same year, 1579, in which he signs himself "He that is fast bound unto thee in more obligations than any merchant of Italy to any Jew there"; and again perhaps the Jew Gerontus in The Three Ladies of London (printed in 1584), who tries to recover a loan of "three thousand ducats for three month" from an Italian merchant Mercatore may have been derived from the same source. "Gernutus" was possibly the name of Shylock's prototype; he is the hero of an old ballad dealing with the bond story. Its omission of all reference to Portia, makes it probable that this ballad preceded Shakespeare's play, though the extant text belongs to the end of the sixteenth or to the beginning of the seventeenth century.1 There are many analogues in European and Oriental literature to the two stories which constitute the main plot of The Merchant of Venice. As far as the pound of flesh and the lady-judge is concerned, the Italian story in the Pecorone of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino is alone of direct importance as an ultimate source of the play (cp. Hazlitt's Shakspere's Library, Part I, Vol. i). There can be no doubt that Shakespeare was indebted to this novel. The Gesta Romanorum-Richard Robinson's English version entitled, Records of Ancyent Historyes (1577)— contains the nearest approximation to the story of the three caskets as treated in this play.2 Shylock's argument in the trial scene (Act IV, i, 89– 102) bears a striking resemblance to "Declamation 95" in Silvayn's Orator (referred to above) "of a Jew, who would for his debt have a pound of the flesh of a Christian." The elopement of Jessica has been traced by Dunlop to the Fourteenth Tale of Massucio di Salerno, who, enamored of the daughter of a rich Neapolitan miser, carries her off much in the same way as in the play. It is not improb 1"A new song, shewing the cruelty of Gernutus a Jew, who lending to a Marchant a hundred crowns, would have a pound of his Flesh, because he could not pay him at the day appointed. To the Tune of Black and Yellow" (cp. Percy's Reliques, etc.; the text will be found in most editions of the play). This ballad must be distinguished from Jordan's ballad of 1664 (cp. Furness' Variorum ed., p. 461), in which the author took strange liberties with Shakespeare's story. 2 The various analogues of both stories are given in Furness' edition, pp. 287-331. able that the avaricious father in this tale, the daughter so carefully shut up, the elopement of the lovers managed by the intervention of a servant, the robbery of the father, and his grief at the discovery, which is represented as divided between the loss of his daughter and ducats, may have suggested the third plot in Shakespeare's drama. Finally, account must be taken of the influence exercised on Shakespeare by Marlowe's Jew of Malta; the number of parallel passages in the two plays evidences this sufficiently; there is also similarity in the situation between father and daughter ("Oh, girl, oh, gold, oh, beauty, oh, my bliss”); Barabas and his slave should be compared with Shylock and Launcelot Gobbo; Marlowe's "counter-argument ad Christianos," as Ward puts it, anticipates Shakespeare's; yet withal "Marlowe's Jew does not approach so near to Shakespeare's as his Edward the Second does to Richard the Second. Shylock, in the midst of his savage purpose, is a man. His motives, feelings, resentments, have something human in them. If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" Barabas is a mere monster, brought in with a large painted nose to please the rabble. He kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries, invents infernal machines. He is just such an exhibition as, a century or two earlier, might have been played before the Londoners by the Royal Command, when a general pillage and massacre of the Hebrews had been resolved by the Cabinet" (Charles Lamb). DURATION OF ACTION Various attempts have been made to calculate the action of the play; we know that the whole is supposed to last three months, but ten weeks have already expired in Act III, i; three months have passed between Bassanio's departure from Venice and his choice of the caskets; his stay at Belmont before the opening of Act III, ii, cannot have been long; Portia bids him "pause a day or two. I would detain you here some month or two." So many events have, however, happened during the first two acts that one gets the impression that many weeks have passed, and the three months are compressed into seven or eight days. Daniel (Time-Analysis of the Plots of Shakespere's plays) computes the time thus, though one cannot follow him in making Bassanio's sojourn at Belmont last as long as three months : Day 1. Act I. Interval-say a week. Day 3. Act II, viii-ix. Interval-bringing the time to within a fortnight of the maturity of the bond. Day 4. Act III, i. night. Day 5. Act III, ii-iv. Interval-rather more than a fort Day 6. Act III, v—Act IV. Days 7 and 8. Act V. |