Twenty-five facts about the Merchant of Venice
A Grail quest, a romantic comedy, Shakespeare's most performed play
A reference in the opening to a ship called the Andrew suggests Merchant was written no earlier than summer 1596. It was added to the Stationers’ Register on 22 July 1598. An account of modern literature published that September included Merchant, suggesting it was already in repertory with the Chamberlain’s Men. The Register includes a note that the Chamberlain’s permission is needed to print the play, suggesting it was being performed in the 1597-98 season.
This fits it into a group of so-called “mature comedies”, such as Much Ado, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, as well as showing affinities to Henry IV. These plays span 1597-1601. (Shylock is almost as idiomatic as Falstaff.)
Anti-Jewish sentiment was strong in 1594 when Ruy Lopez, a Portuguese Jew who was Elizabeth’s physician, was executed. He was charged with trying to poison the queen. During his trial Marlowe’s Jew of Malta was briefly popular again. Marlowe’s Jew, Barabas, had a lot to do with Lopez; Shylock did not.
There are several echoes between Barabas and Shylock—being called a dog and shrugging it off, pride in their race, passionate outcries about dying without their wealth. As M.M. Mahood says in the introduction to the Cambridge edition, Jew of Malta is a grotesque play and must have presented itself to Shakespeare less as a source than a challenge.
Like many romantic comedies of the period, Merchant is about the triumph of love and friendship over malice and cruelty. It was, in many ways, the sort of story audiences expected to see. Mahood says that to call it a fairy tale is to condescend to them.
Portia’s intervention to save Antonio would be familiar too, recalling the Virgin Mary providentially saving heroines in miracle plays. The notion that souls could be saved while they were weighed in the balance was a common one.
Bassanio’s quest recalled the Grail story: “it is a test of moral worth”.
Portia is sometimes the advocatus Dei of medieval drama, sometimes the heroine of a quest romance, sometimes a schemer from intrigue comedy. Shylock is an ogre of medieval tales, a devil of morality plays, a usurer of citizen comedy, even a Pantaloon figure.
The audience was clearly comfortable with these shifts and with the cultural expectations they were drawing on.
Some people will tell you plays like this must have been written by someone who went to Italy: wrong. Shakespeare could easily have derived his knowledge of Venice from travellers and the books they brought to London. He was likely to have met people in London’s Italian community. Court records show eight musicians named Bassani, from a Venetian family. Essex had a Venetian merchant as a spy.
Edward I expelled all the Jews from England in 1290. This wasn’t reversed until Cromwell in the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, there was a Jewish population in Shakespeare’s London. They were Spanish and Portuguese, nominally Christian, and subject to British racism. As well as a Jewish doctor, Elizabeth had a Jewish lady-in-waiting.
Elizabethans would have thought Jews were damned. They were unbaptised and under God’s curse for the killing of Christ.
The name Barabbas comes from Matthew’s Gospel. Here is Matthew 27: 15-30, Geneva Bible.
Now at the feast the governor was wont to deliver unto the people a prisoner whom they would.
And they had then a notable prisoner called Barabbas.
When they were then gathered together, Pilate said unto them, Whether will ye that I let loose unto you Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ?
(For he knew well, that for envy they had delivered him.
Also when he was set down upon the judgment seat, his wife sent to him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream by reason of him.)
But the chief Priests and the elders had persuaded the people that they should ask Barabbas, and should destroy Jesus.
Then the governor answered, and said unto them, Whether of the twain will ye that I let loose unto you? And they said, Barabbas.
Pilate said unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus, which is called Christ? They all said to him, Let him be crucified.
Then said the governor, But what evil hath he done? Then they cried the more, saying, Let him be crucified.
When Pilate saw that he availed nothing, but that more tumult was made, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just man: look you to it.
Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.
Thus let he Barabbas loose unto them, and scourged Jesus, and delivered him to be crucified.
Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered about him the whole band,
And they stripped him, and put about him a scarlet robe,
And platted a crown of thorns, and put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand, and bowed their knees before him, and mocked him, saying, God save thee, King of the Jews,
And spitted upon him, and took a reed, and smote him on the head.
When Shylock cries “my deeds upon my head” he is echoing the line from Matthew: “Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.”
There were more unconverted Jews in Italy, specifically Venice, than anywhere else. Usury was all that Jews were allowed to practice, meaning they became rich, despite usury being prohibited in the Talmud. A Jew who converted had to give all his possessions to the Church, whereas an unconverted Jew could be taxed on the unscrupulous basis that his wealth was ill-gotten.
Usury was widely condemned in England, with citations from Aristotle and the Gospels. However, an Act of 1571 relaxed the prohibition. The entire Elizabethan worldview and economy rested on finance, including merchants, explorers, and aristocrats. It was a useful hypocrisy to hiss usurers off the stage, especially when your patron was an aristocrat, but in practical terms the Elizabethans knew the value of capital that is liquid and loanable. Anti-Semitism was a valve for economic discontent.
(As an aside: modern critics are often squeamishly left-wing and talk in reserved tones about usury and capitalism. It is assumed that Shakespeare would not have charged interest on a loan he made to his future son-in-law in 1598. Why? He was happy to act as a grain hoarder, an activity Adam Smith later approved of as welfare maximising. It is economic prejudice that leads critics to condemn Shakespeare’s hoarding (as they all do). We should be open to the idea that Shakespeare knows the value of usury.)
Merchant is, with Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most performed play. After two performances in 1605, no record of it being played is known for one hundred and fifty years. In 1701, public taste swung back to romantic comedy. A doggerel version was performed as The Jew of Venice.
By 1741, the original was back on stage. Charles Macklin played Shylock for fifty years. Although Shylock is not an overwhelming part of the play he became more and more the focus. Sometimes Act V was left out. Macklin played Shylock as a terrifying figure, not a comic one.
In 1814 Charles Kean played Shylock. Hazlitt wrote: “his thoughts take wings to the East, his voice swells and deepens at the mention of his sacred tribe and ancient law.” Shylock was becoming human.
Of Kean’s performance, G.H. Lewes wrote:
From the first moment that he appeared and leant upon his stick to listen gravely while moneys are requested of him, he impressed the audience, as Douglas Jerrold used to say, ‘like a chapter of Genesis.’ The overpowering remonstrant sarcasm of his address to Antonio, and the sardonic mirth of his proposition about the ‘merry bond,’ were fine preparations for the anguish and rage at the elopement of his daughter, and for the gloating anticipations of revenge on the Christians. Anything more impressive than the passionate recrimination and wild justice of argument in his ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ has never been seen on our stage.
Henry Irving doubted this sympathetic Shylock, thinking him to be a monster, but he had to follow Kean and play sympathy. By his time, Disraeli was prime minister and the Rothschilds dominated European finance. Understanding the Jewish was more and more normal. Irving made Shylock cold and vengeful in the trial scene and then utterly shattered in defeat, giving the sense of a man more sinned against than sinning.
Victorian sets tried to reproduce the Venice of the painters. Groups of citizens were often on stage. Great cries went up off stage when Shylock left the court. All of this stage setting left less room for the words themselves. Many lines were cut to make time for scene shifting. Scenes were transposed. Shylock’s last exit was often the end of the play. Act V, when played, was diminished.
The Elizabethan Stage Society tried to play the original text, but they put Shylock in a red wig and false nose. For all their faults, the moderns really were right that Shylock was not a figure of low comedy, and the Society’s attempt to restore the original failed.
The Victorian spectacle finally died in the mid-twentieth century, by which time European politics made the play an uneasy experience. In 1970, Jonathan Miller staged Merchant at the National Theatre. He set it in the nineteenth century. Olivier played Shylock as an arriviste who discovered, when his daughter left him, racial trauma and self-hatred. The trial scene became almost unbearable. (This version was filmed and you can see it on YouTube.)
I like 17. Pragmatic Shakespeare.
I really enjoyed this read-through, but it’s fascinating to me that this is the most performed play. It just seems less straightforward than some of the other comedies. There’s this strange medieval romance kind of storyline which almost feels borrowed from a different play. Unlike say *Much Ado*, the villain is the best character (does he have the most lines?). It’s a romantic comedy, but it’s full of themes about justice and proportion and contracts. I imagine that the racism is more uncomfortable to us than it would have been to Shakespeare’s audience, but it adds complexity nonetheless to a pretty complex play.