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The Merchant of Venice is the last on a list of Shakespeare's plays given by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, 1598. In the same year it was entered as follows on the Register of the Stationers' Company:

"22 Julii, 1598 James Robertes.] A booke of the Marchaunt of Venyce, or otherwise called the Jewe of

Venyce. Provided that yt bee not prynted by the said James Robertes, or anye other whatsoever, without lycence first had from the Right honorable the lord Chamberlen."

The company of players to which Shakespeare belonged, and for which he wrote, was "the Lord Chamberlain's Servants"; and the above order was meant to prohibit the publication of the play until the patron of the company should give his permission. This he appears not to have done until two years later, when the following entry was made in the Register:

...

"28 Octobris, 1600, Thomas haies.] . . . the booke of the merchant of Venyce."

Soon after this entry, or before the end of 1600, the play was published by Heyes in quarto form; and another edition, also in quarto, was issued the same year by Roberts.

Philip Henslowe, a theatrical manager of the time, in his Diary, in which he kept his accounts, with the dates of plays that he brought out, etc. (a book of great value to students of dramatic history), records, under the date "25 of aguste, 1594," the performance of "the Venesyon comodey," which is marked ne, as a new play. Some critics take this to be The Merchant of Venice, since the company of players to which Shakespeare belonged was then acting at Henslowe's theatre; but it is quite impossible that the play could have been written as early as 1594. The more probable date is 1596 or 1597.

THE SOURCES OF THE PLOT

In the plot of The Merchant of Venice two distinct stories that of the bond and that of the caskets-are skilfully interwoven. Both are found in the Gesta Romanorum, a Latin collection of fictitious narratives, which had been translated into English as early as the time of Henry VI. It is probable, however, that Shakespeare was indebted, directly or indirectly, for the incidents connected with the bond to a story in Il Pecorone, a collection of tales by Giovanni Fiorentino, first published at Milan in 1558, though written almost two centuries earlier. In this story we have a rich lady at Belmont, who is to be won on certain conditions of a nature unsuited for dramatic purposes; and she is finally won by a young merchant, whose friend, having become surety for him to a Jew under the same penalty as in the play, is rescued by the adroitness of the married lady, disguised as a lawyer. She receives, as in the play, her marriage ring as a gratuity, and afterwards banters her husband, as Portia does, upon the loss of it. An English translation of the book was extant in Shakespeare's time.

Possibly the dramatist was somewhat indebted to The Orator, translated from the French of Alexander Silvayn (London, 1596). Portions of the 95th Declamation in this book are strikingly like some of Shylock's speeches at the trial. It is doubtful whether the old. ballad of Gernutus, which some critics believe that

Shakespeare used, is earlier or later than the play; but even if it was earlier, it is improbable that he was indebted to it, or to sundry other versions of the story, in prose or verse, which editors and commentators have discovered.

There is good reason, however, to believe that the bond and casket legends had been blended in dramatic form before Shakespeare began to write for the stage. Stephen Gosson, a Puritan author, in his Schoole of Abuse (1579), excepts a few plays from the sweeping condemnation of his "plesaunt invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters, and such-like caterpillers of a Commonwelth." Among these exceptions he mentions "The Jew, . . . representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers, and the bloody minds of usurers." We have no other knowledge of this play of The Jew; but the nationality of its hero and the double moral, agreeing so exactly with that of The Merchant of Venice, render it probable that the plots of the two dramas were essentially the same, and that Shakespeare, in this instance as in others, worked upon some rough model already prepared for him. The question, however, is not of great importance. "Be the merit of the fable whose it may, the characters, the language, the poetry, and the sentiment are his, and his alone. To no other writer of the period could we be indebted for the charming combination of womanly grace, and dignity, and playfulness which is found in Portia; for the exquisite picture of friendship between Bassanio

and Antonio; for the profusion of poetic beauties scattered over the play; and for the masterly delineation of that perfect type of Judaism in olden times, the character of Shylock himself" (Staunton).

Similarly, Mr. Grant White, after referring to Shakespeare's indebtedness for the materials of his plot to the old story-tellers, and probably for their combination in dramatic form to an earlier playwright, asks: "What then remains to Shakespeare? and what is there to show that he is not a plagiarist? Everything that makes The Merchant of Venice what it is. The people are puppets, and the incidents are all in these old stories. They are mere bundles of barren sticks that the poet's touch causes to bloom like Aaron's rod; they are heaps of dry bones till he clothes them with human flesh and breathes into them the breath of life. Antonio, grave, pensive, prudent save in his devotion to his young kinsman, as a Christian hating the Jew, as a royal merchant despising the usurer; Bassanio, lavish yet provident, a generous gentleman although a fortune-seeker, wise although a gay gallant, and manly though dependent; Gratiano, who unites the not too common virtues of thorough good nature and unselfishness with the sometimes not unserviceable fault of talking for talk's sake; Shylock, crafty and cruel, whose revenge is as mean as it is fierce and furious, whose abuse never rises to invective, and who has yet some dignity of port as the avenger of a nation's wrongs, some claim upon our sympathy as a father outraged by his only child; and

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