Jewe 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 Seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. London. Printed by I. R. for Thomas Heyes.

At

This 'I. R.' was, then, probably Roberts, who, after issuing his own edition, seems to have printed a second for Heyes. Heyes's was afterwards used for the Folio. Neither of the two Quartos, however, was printed from the other. Their differences are on the whole trifling, but they have a few glaring errors in common, and were probably printed from different transcripts of a single copy of the author's MS. The second Quarto was reprinted in 1637 (Q3) with a list of the actors' names, and again in 1652 (Q4).

In spite of its great and sustained popularity in later times, the play is rarely alluded to in the seventeenth century. But we know that one of Burbadge's

most famous rôles was that of

the red-haired Jew,

Which sought the bankrupt merchant's pound of flesh.1

English comedians carried it to Germany, and some critics have suspected a rude adaptation of it in the Komödie von einem König von Cypern und von einem Herzog von Venedig, which John Green's company played in 1608 at the court of Graz in Steiermark,2 and in other places. Nine years earlier, when Shakespeare's play had been on the boards some two

1 Elegy on Richard Burbadge (d. 13th March 1618).

2 Meissner, Die englischen Komodianten zur Zeit Shake

speare's in Österreich, 1884, p. 127 f. (quoted by J. Bolte, Jahrbuch, xxi. 193). Meissner

supposes this to be substantially preserved in the extant Jud von Venetien, which contains a rude transcript of the trial-scene. But Bolte has shown that this is probably later than the Thirty Years' War (Jahrbuch, xxii. 189 f.).

or three, a curious Latin drama (Moschus, by Jacob Rosefeldt) on the bond story was acted at Jena (July 1599) in celebration of a professional wedding. It is quite credible that The Merchant of Venice should have been acted in Germany in 1597-98; but the Moschus treats the story in an independent though. fresh and lively way, and can only be regarded as a parallel.1

The Merchant of Venice was, as has been said, entered by Roberts in the Stationers' Register in July 1598. It is mentioned by Meres in his Palladis Tamia, published the same autumn, as a well-known piece. Two passages are imitated in the poor play of Wily Beguiled, which is plausibly assigned to 1597.2 Silvayn's Orator, translated in 1596, perhaps supplied suggestions for the trial-scene. External evidence supplies no further data. But the maturity of style and the extraordinary skill of the composition forbid us to place it very near even the ripest of the early comedies. It probably belongs to 1596-97.

All discussion of the origin of The Merchant of Venice has to reckon at the outset with a brief notice by Stephen Gosson of the lost play called The Jew. A converted player, bitterly hostile to the stage, he excepts from his general anathema some four plays as 'without rebuke': 'The two prose

Bas

1 Cf. the account of it by J. Bolte, the first living authority on the Humanist Latin drama, in Jahrbuch, xxi. 187 f. sanio and his wooing are wholly absent; Antonio ('Polyharpax') is a grasping merchant who himself proposes the bond in pure whim! He is saved by the intervention of his brother, an unworldly scholar who despises money-making and lives

only for learning; and the moral of his triumph is duly brought home to the academic audience.

2 The most palpable copy occurs in the dialogue of Sophos and Lelia :

Soph. In such a night did Paris
win his love.

Lel. In such a night Æneas prov'd
unkind.
Soph. In such a night did Troilus
court his dear, etc.

books played at the Belsavage, where you shall never find a word without wit, never a line without pith, never a letter placed in vaine. The Jew, and Ptolone, shown at the Bull: the one representing the greediness of worldly chusers, and bloody minds of usurers; the other, very lively, describing how seditious states . . . are overthrown; neither with amorous gesture wounding the eye, nor with slovenly talk hurting the ear of the chaste hearers.' 1

This brief notice tells us exceedingly little; but just enough to preclude the assumption that the plot of the Merchant took shape essentially in Shakespeare's hands. The author of The Jew, we can hardly doubt, had already illustrated 'the bloody minds of usurers' by the story of the pound of flesh, and 'the greediness of worldly chusers' by some variant of the three caskets, and Gosson's approval makes it evident that both morals were driven unmistakably home. Versions of the ancient pound-of-flesh story (though without the Jew) and of the caskets story, had entered English literature a century before in the English Gesta Romanorum. In a form much nearer Shakespeare, the pound-of-flesh story had been told by the Italian novelist, Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, in his Pecorone (pr. 1558), as well as, probably, in the ballad of Gernutus the Jew.2 In the novel, as in the play, it is the fascinations of a lady of Belmont which set the whole in motion. But she is a rapacious and crafty siren, who allures passing.

1 School of Abuses, 1579 (ed. Shakesp. Soc., p. 30).

2 A new song shewing the

cruelty of Gernutus the 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. Printed in Percy's Reliques. The date of the song is uncertain, but it would probably have recalled the play more closely had it not preceded it.

merchants to wager their ships that they will possess her person, and then drugs their possets. Giannetto tries his fortune among the rest, borrowing the means from his godfather, Ansaldo; twice he leaves his ship behind in the harbour of Belmont. The third time, warned by the waiting-maid, he refrains from the drug and wins his wager. But Ansaldo, to equip his final expedition, has been compelled to borrow from a Jew on the familiar condition. The news that the Jew has claimed his bond startles Giannetto from the delirium of wedded bliss. As in the play, the lady despatches him, with ample means, to redeem Ansaldo, follows him in disguise, undertakes Ansaldo's defence, saves him by the no-drop-of-blood plea, and begs Giannetto's ring as her only reward. The Jew forfeits his loan, but suffers no further punishment. The gay crosspurposes and explanations of Shakespeare's fifth Act follow, but the lady does not, like Portia, heighten the fun by hinting at familiarities of her own with the doctor.

But it is only in her later career that she recalls Portia at all. She is still the lady of a fairy tale, whose character changes when her secret is discovered; Odysseus withstands her arts, and Circe becomes the most benignant of goddesses. In the world of the Midsummer-Night's Dream such a transformation might have been natural; in the riper comic art of the Merchant fairydom, though by no means banished, is only admitted in disguise. The crude, undramatic conditions which she imposes on her suitors must in any case have disappeared under his treatment. But it is probable that the old playwright had already replaced them by another, not only free from moral offence, but aptly leading up to the exposure of the usurer with a parable

against worldly greed. Stories of 'worldly chusers' who preferred a gold to a leaden or silver casket, and found it full of dead men's bones, were current in various forms. One, as already stated, was known from the English Gesta Romanorum, and contains, at least, the germ of Shakespeare's casket-story. It had been published in Robinson's translation in 1577, two years before Gosson described The Jew.

A king's daughter, betrothed to an emperor's son, is sent by sea to be married to him. After being wrecked and swallowed by a whale, she reaches land alone, is brought before the emperor, and claims his son's hand. To test her worth, he causes three caskets to be made, one of gold, filled with dead men's bones; one of silver, filled with earth and worms; one of lead, filled with gold. The first was inscribed: Whoso chooseth me shall find that he deserveth. The second, Whoso chooseth me shall find that his nature desireth. The third, Whoso chooseth me shall find that God hath disposed to him. The maiden, considering that she deserved little, that her desires were ill, and that God never disposeth any harm,' chooses the leaden casket and is married.

.

But a trace has been pointed out of another version in which the wrong choice was made, and by a man. In his romance Mamillia (1583), Robert Greene thus enlarges on the text that virtue is the highest excellence of woman: He which maketh choyce of bewty without vertue commits as much folly as Critius did, in choosing a golden boxe filled with rotten bones' (ed. Grosart, ii. 114). This story, which Greene cites as familiar, forms a valuable link.1 So much of the groundwork of the Merchant may plausibly be held to have been laid in the old play.

1 E. Köppel, Beiträge zur Geschichte des elisabethanischen Dramas (Eng. Stud. xvi. 372).