From this epitome the reader can draw no other conviction but that Shakespeare or (to speak cautiously) some earlier playwright on whose work Shakespeare improved, took two of the three inwoven plots of the Merchant of Venice, (a) the pound-of-flesh business, and (c) the ring imbroglio, straight out of this selfsame tale in Il Pecorone. As for the intermediate (b) or casketplot, a brief reflection will convince him that this too

the lover's testing-is implicit in the same original, though, clearly for dramatic purposes, it had to be altered. The original here is in fact at least as old as the story of Odysseus and Circe. A mariner enters a strange port. The Lady of the Land, a witch, espies his anchoring from her palace windows of Belmonte-περισκέπτῳ èvì xwpw, a place of wide prospect. The usual or typical story tells of an adventurer from the sea who is entertained and taken to bed by the enchantress, on the terms that if he fell asleep in the night, he is turned into a swine or some other beast or forfeits his manhood or, at any rate, his cargo, and to ensure his default he is given a night-draught of drugged wine. But clearly this story of

magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faëry lands forlorn

cannot be presented dramatically. And so our playwright, whoever he was, cast back to medieval legend for another old lover's test, which he could easily borrow from the Gesta Romanorum, or indeed from anywhere -the test of the three Caskets. More shall be said presently upon this ages-old tradition of the suitor's choice which, usually a matter of triads, haunts mythology and fairy-tale wherever we explore them; as does the luck of the youngest of three brothers, and the enchantress and the Laidly Worm who is transformed into a lovely bride by a kiss. The reader will have noted that in the story of the Lady of Belmonte in Il Pecorone she is, as

though it were taken for granted, thus transformed. From a witch she turns, at touch of lip, to a devoted and capable wife.

III

So here one has three motives which mingle well enough in a medieval tale but do not consort at all as themes for a drama. We need raise here no question of a Shakespeare who wrote from another man's work, or revised or re-revised it. Inquisition by Shakespearian scholars on the lines to-day being followed will assuredly lead, or help to lead, to a clearer text. But the plays remain, for truly critical purposes, as we have them: and anyone who, with a tolerable ear, has listened to Shakespeare's music all his life, may be excused for example for doubting if more confident men be really able to sift out Shakespeare from Fletcher in Henry VIII or The Two Noble Kinsmen-and still, all debts acknowledged, one must affirm that the Shakespeare a reader or a man in the theatre enjoys, and the only one on whom a critic can employ his skill to help towards judgment and enjoyment, is the Shakespeare we have and not any guessed partitions of him. To put this particularly of the Merchant of Venice, everyone knows that Stephen Gosson writing in 1579 in his Schoole of Abuse and referring to some plays above any moral reproach, mentions one called by him The Iew, 'showne at the Bull' and 'representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers and bloody minds of Usurers'; and that a deal of speculation has been spent upon Shakespeare's indebtedness to this old play; and Gosson's description of it may be taken, even probably, to cover the casket-scenes and Shylock's bond in some 'original' derived from Il Pecorone. But what can that speculation, however likely, amount to for any purpose but to employ idleness? We have the Il Pecorone tale; and The Merchant of Venice in which Shakespeare made a drama of it, leaving to us, whatever

reservations we make, a mightily effective play. It is also for those curious about his genius, a strangely intriguing play: for Shakespeare, more than any dramatist, could defeat definition among tragedy, comedy and romance. Years after this experiment he invited us to laugh at Polonius pulling his beard and solemnly differentiating 'tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoralcomical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragicalcomical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.' We are dealing with a dramatist who more than any other has overridden all these categories with a negligent smile, and that (be it remembered) through and after encounters at "The Mermaid' with Ben Jonson, hectoring layer down of the law as derived from Aristotle and transmitted in practice through Seneca and Plautus1. We may therefore in dealing with The Merchant of Venice, as in dealing later with Antony and Cleopatra-in both of which plays we know, as accurately as may be, his sources-ask how he did it.

IV

He did it almost always, if one may use the term, with an instinctive economy. Chaucer has something of this gift in handling his 'originals,' but Shakespeare has it in a superlative degree. No one reading the Life of Antony in North's Plutarch alongside of Antony and Cleopatra can miss to marvel at the frugality of the converting touch. So we take it, understanding (as we have surely a right to do) that this overworked, constitutionally indolent man, apparently careless of his dramatic work,

1 Cf. Meres, 'As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines; so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage' (followed by a reference to The Merchant) with Polonius' apostrophe 'Seneca cannot be too heavy nor Plautus too light.'

once done, just operated upon the story as genius suggested throughout.

Now the first, or Shylock-Antonio story, is evident Tragedy. The Merchant corresponds at every point to the Aristotelian demand upon a tragic hero. He is a good man who, not by vice, but through some error, comes to calamity. So, up to a point-a definite pointShakespeare conducts his drama up towards pure tragedy. He opens upon Antonio's gloom and foreboding of some heavy fate, obviously meant to be communicated at once to the audience

In sooth I know not why I am so sad,
It wearies me, you say it wearies you;

But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,

I am to learn

-this upon a broken line and a pause through which we follow his moving. And this actual business of tragedy persists, through revel and carnival and masquers, noise of hautboys, choosing of caskets-to music and the music of a right woman's voice confessing and surrendering to love, straight to the point where Portia asks

Why doth the Jew pause?

If the Jew had not just been held at pause by that mastering question, if his hatred and revenge, racial and personal, had carried him an inch over that question, if, so to say, this very grand Hebrew had divorced his ducats from his daughter and cried out, 'Revenge I will have: afterwards tear me limb from limb,' under the law of Venice Portia's quibble had gone by the board, and the play must necessarily, from that instant, have reverted to the tragic conclusion its opening lines portend.

V

We must now consider Shylock: but we cannot consider him individually until we have laid our account

with the attitude of our ancestors in Elizabeth's time towards the Jew in general, because that attitude differed so greatly from our modern tolerance. Legally, he was excluded from our country; and there is nothing like unacquaintance to foster hatred in general. The race has always, from Jacob's time, prospered on usury; and the Church backed, if it did not incite, the law, by its official execration of that practice as a sin against nature1. To be sure, a nation, prosperous as England was during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, exporting its wool to all known foreign markets and holding the most of the world's carrying trade on long voyages at sea, could not, and in fact did not, dispense with systems of credit and exchange. And even earlier, in the fourteenth century, we find a learned professor, Benvenuto da Imola, declaring 'he who practiseth usury goeth to hell, and he who practiseth it not tendeth to destitution.' Nevertheless, the enterprising English Merchant adventured under Canon Law, and after the way of men would relieve his conscience by putting his sin on a scapegoat. What scapegoat so obvious as the Jew, who notoriously bred money from money in Lombardy and elsewhere, and was a descendant of the murderers of Christ?

If we would put ourselves in the mind of the average spectator of the first performance of The Merchant of Venice, we can perhaps hardly fetch better illumination for ourselves than from the following passage of Thomas Coryate (1577-1617), recounting how he, a visitor to Venice, found it neither improper nor impertinent to accost a Rabbi in the street, and suddenly to invite him to change his religion.

For when as walking in the Court of the Ghetto, I casually met with a certain learned Jewish Rabbin that spake good Latin, I insinuated myself after some few terms of com

1 See Dante, Inferno, XI, where the inhabitants of Cahors, notorious usurers, share the same circle with the men of Sodom.