Shakespeare's plays, suggests both a genial relish for opulence (and we know that in these years he was making and spending abundantly) and a familiarity with a splendid and elegant society. Some motives and situations of the earlier comedies of courtly life, especially The Two Gentlemen, are repeated, but there is a wonderful advance in intimacy of knowledge as well as in ripeness of art. The critical review of Portia's lovers in i. 2. is obviously a reworking of the scene between Julia and Lucetta)(Two Gent. i. 2.), but there the maid does the criticism, here the mistress a change which makes the dialogue both more piquant and also, according to Elizabethan notions, more consistent with good manners.1 And the whole episode of Jessica, gracefully interwoven as a third story with the fortunes of Shylock and Bassanio, is far less a story of passionate love than of the charm which the world of 'high living and high thinking,' where Portia moves supreme, exercises upon the susceptible child of an alien race. The elements of the situation were perhaps due to Marlowe; there is no trace of it in the novel, and we may surmise, from Gosson's approval, that no such amorous adventure as Jessica's elopement occurred in the old play. Barabas's daughter Abigail also loves a Christian, Don Mathias; but she is her father's accomplice, not his betrayer, and the most obvious verbal similitude, his 'O girl! O gold! O beauty! O my bliss!' is spoken in ecstasy, not in anguish. She is an unhappy instrument in his desperate game, forced to love where he chooses, and deprived of her lover when it is no longer convenient to keep him alive. Abigail is a pathetic figure, though her creator, in his orgies of crime and bloodshed, has no leisure to make her pathos eloquent. Shakespeare deprived Jessica of 1 B. Wendell, W. Shakespeare, p. 148.

any such appeal. Shylock was to stand alone, in gaunt solitude, unloving and unloved. Even the beautiful intimacies of many an outwardly sordid and miserly Jewish home-a trait which can hardly have escaped Shakespeare-are denied him. / His household, upheld by fear, crumbles to pieces, and the captive spirits of grace and laughter, the 'beautiful pagan' and the 'merry devil' who robbed her 'hell' of some taste of tediousness, fly to their proper abodes. The modern world cannot quite forgive Jessica for deserting her father, still less for taking his ducats if but Shakespeare easily condones these incidents of an emancipation to which she establishes her full right by the native ease with which she moves in the new world as if to the manner born-an adept in its splendid extravagance and in its light badinage, but quick to take the impress of its serious enthusiasms and its generous virtue. It is not for nothing that the most splendid burst of poetry in the play is addressed to Jessica's ear, and the loftiest tribute to Portia uttered by her lips.

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

ACT I.

SCENE I. Venice. A street.

Enter ANTONIO, SALARINO, and SALANIO.

Ant. 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;

And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.

Salar. Your mind is tossing on the ocean;
There, where your argosies with portly sail,
Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood,
Or, as it were, the pageants of the sea,
Do overpeer the petty traffickers,
That curtsy to them, do them reverence,
As they fly by them with their woven wings.
Salan. Believe me, sir, had I such venture forth,
The better part of my affections would
Be with my hopes abroad.

9. argosies, merchant-ships, originally those of Raguza, whence the name.

I should be still

II. pageants, an allusion to the huge wooden stages on which miracle-plays and other shows were exhibited.

Plucking the grass, to know where sits the wind,
Peering in maps for ports and piers and roads;
And every object that might make me fear
Misfortune to my ventures, out of doubt
Would make me sad.

Salar.
Would blow me to an ague, when I thought
What harm a wind too great at sea might do.
I should not see the sandy hour-glass run,
But I should think of shallows and of flats,
And see my wealthy Andrew dock'd in sand,
Vailing her high-top lower than her ribs.
To kiss her burial. Should I go to church
And see the holy edifice of stone,

My wind cooling my broth

And not bethink me straight of dangerous rocks,
Which touching but my gentle vessel's side,
Would scatter all her spices on the stream,
Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks,
And, in a word, but even now worth this,

And now worth nothing? Shall I have the thought
To think on this, and shall I lack the thought
That such a thing bechanced would make me sad?
But tell not me; I know, Antonio

Is sad to think upon his merchandise.

Ant. Believe me, no: I thank my fortune for it,
My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year:
Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad.
Salar. Why, then you are in love.
Ant.

19. roads, places for anchorage.

27. Andrew, so called, perhaps, after the famous Italian

Fie, fie!

20

30

40

27. dock'd; the Quartos and Folios read docks.

28. Vailing, drooping.

29. burial, grave.

naval commander, Andrea 35. but even now, a moment

Doria.

ago.