The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

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The Merchant of Venice

Merchant of Venice, The
Shakespeare's perennially popular, and perennially controversial, comedy of religious conflict was entered in the Stationers' Register on 22 July 1598, and is mentioned in Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia soon afterwards. The Merchant of Venice cannot have been more than two years old then: the passage in which Shylock cites the story of Jacob and Laban (1.3.70–89) shows the influence of Miles Mosse's tract The Arraignment and Conviction of Usury (1595), and the play is unlikely to have been written before 1596, since a reference at 1.1.27–9 to ‘wealthy Andrew’ probably alludes to a Spanish ship, the St Andrew, captured in the Cadiz expedition that summer. Internal, stylistic evidence links the play's metre and vocabulary to those of the Henry IV plays, and it was probably composed during the same period, around 1596–7.

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The Stationers' Register calls the play The Merchant of...

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