The Merchant of Venice
Synopsis In Belmont: Portia, a wealthy heiress, has been left three caskets in her father's will - one of gold, one of silver, and one of lead. Inside one casket is her portrait, and Portia is obliged to marry the man who chooses correctly. Suitors come from the four corners of the world to win her hand. In Venice: Bassanio, a young man about town, is determined to woo Portia for himself. In order to finance his expedition, he needs three thousand ducats - a huge amount of money. He asks Antonio, a rich merchant who loves him, to lend him the money. Antonio, however, is temporarily short of funds because his fortune is tied up in merchandise at sea and he is forced to borrow the ducats from Shylock, a wealthy Jewish moneylender. Antonio and Shylock dislike each other: Antonio because he despises the practice of usury and also because Shylock is a Jew, and Shylock because Antonio lends out money without charge, which Shylock feels damages his own business. However, on this occasion, Shylock agrees to lend the money without interest, but he proposes a strange forfeit - a pound of Antonio's flesh - if he defaults on the loan. Bassanio goes to Belmont and succeeds in choosing the right casket and winning his bride. Portia gives him a ring which he swears never to part with. Her maid, Nerissa, is similarly courted by Gratiano and gives him her ring. Shylock's daughter Jessica elopes with her lover, the Christian Lorenzo, and steals her father's money and jewels. News comes that Antonio's fortunes are lost at sea. Shylock, distraught at the loss of his daughter and his ducats, and provoked by constant Jew-baiting from the Christians, seizes on this news and determines to demand payment of the forfeit. In court, Shylock demands the fulfilment of the bond. Portia and Nerissa, disguised as lawyers, frustrate Shylock's plans and, as a test of constancy, each beg in payment the ring she gave her betrothed. The final unmasking in Belmont, and the restoring of Antonio's fortune, end the play.
Dating the play On 22 July 1598, an entry was made in the Stationers' Register for 'a booke of the Marchaunt of Venyce or otherwise called the Iewe of Venyce'. At this time, only members of the Stationer's Company were permitted to publish material for sale: any member wishing to print a book had to enter its title in advance in the Register. In September that same year, Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia was also entered in the Register. Meres's book includes a list of Shakespeare's plays, as examples of the excellence of English drama; The Merchant of Venice in one of the six comedies listed.
Antonio's reference in the play to 'my wealthy Andrew' has been interpreted as an allusion to the St Andrew or San Andres, the rich Spanish galleon captured in Cadiz harbour by the Earl of Essex in the summer of 1596. This captured prize was much in the news; it brought great wealth to the Queen's coffers and became one of the largest ships in her service. This allusion means that the play cannot have been written before the late summer of 1596. 1596-7 seems the likeliest dates for its composition, at which time Shakespeare was also working on King John and Henry IV, Part I. The play was first printed in a quarto edition in 1600. Shakespeare's sources There are many ancient legends and folk tales from around the world in which a bargain is struck with a bond of human flesh as security. One version of the story is told by the Italian, Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, in his collection of tales, Il Pecorone (which means 'the big sheep' or 'simpleton'). He wrote this in the late fourteenth century and it was printed in 1558. This Italian (and untranslated) version is Shakespeare's main source for his play. According to Ser Giovanni, the story begins with a wealthy merchant, Ansaldo, equipping his godson with a richly laden ship to trade abroad. The young man, Giannetto, finds himself in the port of Belmont where he tries to win the hand of the Lady. Success can only be won if the wooer manages to spend a whole night with her; failure is punished with the loss of all possessions. Twice Giannetto tries and fails, each time calling on his godfather to provided again for him. Only at the third attempt does he have the help of a young woman who confides that the wine offered to him is drugged. With this knowledge, Giannetto is able to win the Lady and live at his ease in Belmont, forgetting that his newfound happiness has been bought by his godfather's generosity. Ansaldo could only afford to help Giannetto make his third voyage to Belmont by borrowing from a Jew, promising a pound of his flesh if he fails to repay the money. When the unpaid debt falls due, Giannetto hurries back to Venice with money from his wife but the Jew refuses to be bought off. It is only when the Lady appears in court, in the disguise of a male lawyer, that the Jew is confounded. As she points out to him, if he takes more or less than a pound or drops any blood, his own life is forfeit. The Jew tears up the bond in frustration and Giannetto reluctantly responds to the lawyer's request of the ring given to him by his wife as a reward for his victory. Giannetto and Ansaldo go to Belmont where the Lady is very angry at her husband's loss of her ring. Finally she reveals the truth and Ansaldo is matched in marriage with the young woman who helped Giannetto avoid the drugged wine and win his own wife. Shakespeare changes the way in which his Lady of Belmont is to be won. Instead of gaining access to the Lady's bed, his successful wooer must make the right choice from among three caskets. Again, this kind of test is an age-old motif in fairy tales and legends. The most recent English version available to Shakespeare is that in the 1595 translation of the medieval collection of stories, the Gesta Romanorum. Shakespeare also trebles the pairs of wooers in the story and leaves his rich merchant figure alone at the end of the play. His confident handling of a complicated and multistranded plot is his own achievement but, still, he could learn from the fast-paced Italian comedies of love intrigue and disguise written in the sixteenth century. Antony Munday's Zelauta, or The Fountain of Fame, printed in 1580, also shows their influence and may, in
its turn, have influenced Shakespeare. Munday tells the story of two friends, in love with two girls, one of whom is the daughter of a rich usurer. They pledge their right eyes in order to borrow money from the usurer. When the usurer brings them to court they are saved by the wit of the young women, hidden behind their male disguise as lawyers. They, too, use the argument that the usurer must not shed a drop of blood in his extraction of his fleshly payment. Shakespeare was not the first Elizabethan playwright to place a Jew at the centre of his drama. In 1579, Stephen Gosson referred to a play called The Jew which he describes as showing 'the greediness of worldly choosers, and the bloody minds of usurers'. That play has not survived, unlike Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, which was first performed in 1589. Marlowe's play was a great success and must have haunted Shakespeare's imagination long after its first performance. Barabas, the unscrupulous cynic of Marlowe's grimly comic drama, is very different from Shylock, although both have nubile daughters and heaps of gold.
Stage history The title page of the first edition of the play, printed in 1600, states that it has been "divers times acted by the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants". The first recorded performance was at court on Shrove Sunday, 10 February, 1605. King James and his courtiers must have enjoyed it because it was performed again two days later. Public, rather than court, performances of Shakespeare's plays were performed in the open air, in daylight, on a simple thrust stage. No scenery and a minimum of props allowed the action to move swiftly and the audience to focus on the language. Music and costume added to the effect. Shakespeare wrote his plays with the strengths and talents of his fellow players in mind. His gifted boy players took the female roles so that the original audience had the unsettling experience of watching boys playing girls playing boys in the roles of Portia and Nerissa in the trial scene. It is impossible to know how Shylock was first played. Since the early nineteenth century, Shylock has usually been played with dignity and a measure of understanding of why he does what he does. Perhaps the role was originally played by Will Kemp, the leading comic actor in the group, and the portrayal was harshly comic and influenced by the traditions of commedia dell'arte, or, perhaps, played in the red wig and false nose worn by villainous Jewish characters in the medieval Mystery plays. Perhaps Richard Burbage, the actor building a reputation for himself in tragic roles took the part - we simply don't know. The Jew of Venice was the title given by George Granville to his adaptation in 1701. The comedian Thomas Doggett played Shylock and provoked laughter with his absurd miserliness, in a characterization more akin to the commedia dell'arte's Pantalone. So entrenched did this comic approach become over the next forty years that, in 1741, Charles Macklin felt it necessary to keep his preparations for the role secret from his fellow actors. He restored much of Shakespeare's text in his acting version and, on his
opening night, his ferocious Shylock astonished and terrified all beholders, causing young men in the packed benches to faint with fright. Macklin's success in this star role continued for many years: he acted the role until he was nearly ninety. Edmund Kean was the next great Shylock, first playing the role at Drury Lane in 1814. He electrified his unprepared audience with the intelligence and pathos of his interpretation. His Shylock could still terrify but this portrayal never let the audience forget what had brought him to this pass. Before anything else, this man was a wronged father and a deeply feeling human being. Kean's son, Charles produced the play to great acclaim fifty years later at the Princess's Theatre. His success was not so much due to the acting as to the magnificence of the sets and scenic illusion. Audiences gathered to marvel at the vivid, crowded stage, the sumptuous costumes, and the gondolas floating on real water. Henry Irving, the actor-manager of the Lyceum Theatre in the nineteenth century, had a huge success playing a dignified, superior Shylock. He studied Jewish traders in the Levant, noting their dress, movement and speech. In Irving's hands, the role became decidedly tragic, after some necessary careful editing of the text to preserve Shylock's moral high ground. According to Irving, Shylock was "the type of a persecuted race; almost the only gentleman of the play, and the most ill-used". Irving's most affecting moment was not to be found in Shakespeare's play at all. His brilliantly sentimental invention showed the weary, dignified patriarch returning home across a picturesque Venetian bridge, complete with gondola beneath it, to find his house empty and his beloved daughter gone. As with many subsequent portrayals of the role, it was this betrayal and loss that pushed Shylock into his murderous course of action. It was no easy task to keep a balance in the play between this dominant Shylock and the other main plot line of Portia and Belmont. Great actor that she was, Ellen Terry still made her mark in the role. Her Portia was the epitome of warmth and charm, so much so that, for some of her Victorian reviewers, her eagerness to be won by Bassanio was considered downright unladylike. An exception to this overwhelming trend towards sympathy for Shylock was William Poel's 1898 production for his Elizabethan Stage Society. Poel's aim in all his Shakespearean productions was to recreate the simple fluid staging of the original playing conditions. The thoroughly unsentimentalized Shylock of this production accordingly wore a red wig and false nose and presented a harshly comic reading of the part. In 1970 Jonathan Miller directed Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre in a successful production, set in the late nineteenth century, which was later filmed. Olivier's Shylock appeared initially in the dark frock coat of a late-Victorian businessman and only later, under the enormous stress of his daughter's betrayal, did he take out a prayer shawl from a drawer in his desk and wrap it around his shaking body. After his final exit from the trial scene he gave a shocking, animal howl of pain from the wings, ensuring that the remainder of the play could not escape his shadow. At the end of the play Jessica kept apart from the happy couples, as she gravely paced the stage to the sound of the Kadish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
The Merchant of Venice continues to be one of the most frequently performed of Shakespeare's plays. Dustin Hoffman played Shylock in Peter Hall's production at the Phoenix Theatre in London in 1989, transferring to New York the following year. In 1994, Peter Sellars brought his production for Chicago's Goodman Theatre to the Barbican Theatre in London. The play was set in the contemporary technological sophistication of California's Venice Beach. Banks of TV monitors showed footage of the Los Angeles race riots during the trial scene as the black Shylock demanded justice from the white Duke of Venice. In 1999 Henry Goodman won great praise for his performance as Shylock in Trevor Nunn's production at the National Theatre, set in a Venice which resembled 1930s Berlin. This production was later filmed. Jack Gold directed the play, with Warren Mitchell as Shylock, as part of the BBC series of Shakespeare's plays in 1980. In 2004, Al Pacino starred as Shylock in Michael Radford's handsome film version.