PREFACE

By ISRAEL GOLLANCZ, M.A.

THE EDITIONS

Two Quarto editions of The Merchant of Venice were printed in the year 1600, with the following title-pages:(i.) The Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreme cruelty of Shylocke the Jew towards the said Merchant, in cutting a just pound of his flesh. And the obtaining of Portia, by the choyse of three Caskets. Written by W. Shakespeare. Printed by J. Roberts, 1600. This Quarto had been registered on July 22, 1598, with the proviso "that yt bee not printed by the said James Robertes or anye other whatsoeuer without lycence first had from the Right honorable the lord chamberlen." This edition is generally described as "the first Quarto." (ii.) The most Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Jew towards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a iust pound of his flesh: and the obtayning of Portia by the choyse of three chests. As it hath beene divers times acted by the Lord Chamberlaine his servants. Written by William Shakespeare. At London. Printed by I. R. for Thomas Heyes, and are to be sold in Paules Church-yard, at the signe of the Greene Dragon. 1600. This, the second Quarto, had been entered in the Stationers' Registers on October 28 of the same year "under the handes of the Wardens and by consent of master Robertes." It seems therefore likely that "I. R." are the initials of the printer of the first Quarto, though the same type was not used for the two editions, which were evidently printed from different transcripts of

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the author's manuscript. Quarto 1 gives on the whole a more accurate text; in a few instances it is inferior to Quarto 2.

The second Quarto was carelessly reprinted in 1637, the only addition being a list of "The Actors' Names"; in one instance it improved on the previous editions (“in measure reine thy joy," III, ii, 112, instead of “rain”). A fourth Quarto, probably the third with a new title-page, appeared in 1652. Prof. Hales has suggested that the publication of this Quarto was connected with the proposed re-admission of the Jews into England, which was bitterly resented by a large portion of the nation; "the re-exhibition of Shylock in 1652 could scarcely have tended to soften this general disposition.'

The text of the first Folio edition (1623) represents that of the second Quarto with a few variations, the most interesting being the change of "the Scottish lord" into "the other lord," evidently in deference to the reigning king.

During the first half of the eighteenth century a "low comedy" version, The Jew of Venice, by George Granville, Viscount Lansdowne, supplanted Shakespeare's play, and held the stage from the date of its appearance in 1701; Macklin's revival of The Merchant of Venice at the Drury Lane in 1741 dealt a death-blow to Lansdowne's monstrosity, and restored again to the stage

"The Jew

That Shakespeare drew."

THE ORIGINAL SHYLOCK

In the Funeral Elegy of the famous actor, Richard Burbadge, "who died on Saturday in Lent, the 13th of March 1618," there is a valuable reference to Burbadge's impersonation of Shylock:

"Heart-broke Philaster, and Amintas too,

Are lost for ever; with the red-haired Jew,

Which sought the bankrupt merchant's pound of flesh,
By woman-lawyer caught in his own mesh;

What a wide world was in that little space,
Thyself a world-the Globe thy fittest place."

(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.