SOURCE: Abrams, Richard. “The Gaping Pig—and Worse: Shylock's Christian Ducats.” In Afterimages: A Festschrift in Honor of Irving Massey, edited by William Kumbier and Ann Colley, pp. 163-74. Buffalo, N.Y.: Shuffaloff, 1996.

[In the following essay, Abrams examines Shakespeare's characterization of Antonio and Shylock, suggesting that Antonio's sadness is partially an affectation and that Shylock seeks love and understanding from Antonio and Bassanio. The following essay is a revision of the original published version, which was reprinted in Shakespearean Criticism, Volume 66.]

My topic is sadness in The Merchant of Venice—Jewish sadness, ultimately, though it is with Antonio's sadness that the play begins.

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.

(1.1.1-7)¹

Of course there have been attempts at explanation. Antonio anticipates losing Bassanio; he has presentiments of disaster, or “some sort of rich man's melancholy”; he is assailed by conscience for failing to live up to his Christian code.² All these explanations are suggestive and some work well in combination, but, to my mind, they give Antonio too much credit. Whether they attribute his sadness to neurotic suffering or to the operation of a higher instinct, they mark him as a man of sensibility, ratifying the character's own pretensions. By these accounts Antonio becomes not just a rich man, i.e., possibly self-made. Rather, as he tosses on his featherbed, they confirm him in his resemblance to the born-rich, especially his soon-to-be rival in love, whose princess-and-the-pea discriminatory refinement will appear in the next scene. While one might otherwise have taken Antonio merely for a successful businessman, his melancholy proclaims him the possessor of that most prized of status markers, un cor gentil. Like the pampered Portia whose “little body is aweary of this great world” (1.2.1-2), Antonio shows aristocratic veining in his propensity to distill sadness from the very air.

That Antonio's sadness may be partly an affectation is hinted early on, but by so boorish a spokesman as to have escaped a hearing. Advised that he has “too much respect upon the world,” Antonio answers, “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano—/ A stage where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one” (1.1.77-79). Notwithstanding the egalitarian bow, Antonio patently views his sadness as tragically individualizing, as a cosmically assigned affliction, not of this world. That is to say, he already models the resemblance he will later play to the hilt, his resemblance to the “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Yet not everyone is stirred by the performance. Discounting Antonio's pretensions of otherworldly woe, Gratiano whistles as though he has just come through a train wreck, “Let me play the fool”:

Why should a man whose blood is warm within
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?
.....There are a sort of men whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond,
And do a willful stillness entertain
With purpose to be dressed in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit—
As who should say, ‘I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!’

(1.1.83-94)

That Antonio postures for status becomes a distinct possibility, though even if Gratiano's instincts are right, we need not conclude that Antonio's sadness is entirely faked. Sadness you think you have, you do have; living the lie makes it true. Still, there's a gulf between the sadness that worms its way in the heart and the sadness that's dug out for bait; Gratiano again: “fish not with this melancholy bait / For this fool gudgeon, this opinion” (101-02). Antonio's inclination to capitalize on grief will become evident when he uses his predicament with Shylock to bind Bassanio; and even in his entry in scene 1, I would argue, he is already using sadness for effect. Despite its appearance of world-weary candor, Antonio's feckless apology constitutes a vigorous staking of social ground.

Addressing the “petty traffickers” of the Rialto, Salerio and Solanio, Antonio above all is courteous; he wears his sorrow lightly, prefers not to burden his companions. Yet Antonio will show identical courtesy when, joined by “worthier friends” (Bassanio, Lorenzo and Gratiano), he hurries Salerio and Solanio on their way (“Your worth is very dear in my regard. / I take it your own business calls on you” [1.1.62-63]).³ The important point to bear in mind in negotiating scene 1's genteel hypocrisies is that this is Venice, where men are damned with the accusation, “You grow exceeding strange” (67). In fending off Salerio and Solanio's unwelcome inquiries, Antonio is chiefly concerned to avoid an appearance of difference lest the appearance erode his status. As sad as Antonio may be, and as different as that makes him, he insists that his sadness is not really his, that it's an other—indeed, an “it”—to which his own response respectably replicates his interlocutors': “It wearies me, you say it wearies you.” Moreover, as Antonio dilates on his non-ownership of the thing of darkness he coincides with, his “it” takes on substance and a history:

… how I caught it, found it, or came by it
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn.

An “it” you “find” or “come by,” a sadness made of alien “stuff,” no one can decently blame you for possessing. Antonio's unconscious rhetorical tactic of hypostatization thus allows him to hold his grief at arm's length, to keep “it” from infecting him. The figure of contagion is particularly apt in that the first and last terms of Antonio's sequence betray his conception of his sadness as having been “caught” or contracted from a foreign source, “born” elsewhere. In this respect, Antonio's opening lines already display the mechanism that drives his character: his penchant for scapegoating. If one believes oneself subject to foreign contagion, one may wish to expel the infected and infecting outsider; hence Antonio's antidote to sadness—to harass Shylock.⁴ As has often been observed, Antonio's character suffers from a kind of albinism; for a title figure he is surprisingly bland and uninteresting. Yet if Antonio is customarily ineffectual, his wonted passivity throws in relief his outbursts of vehemence. Only when Antonio loses himself in persecuting Shylock does he come to life; only by pursuing the remedy of viciousness can he escape the jaws of his own melancholy.

A play whose opening announces a sadness which soon mutates to its opposite implicitly invites its audience to seek the initially-evoked sadness elsewhere; though Antonio's apology turns out to be turf-protection, his case invites comparison with other, possibly more authentic forms of sadness in the play. Consider Edgar's platitude in King Lear, “The worst is not / So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’” Edgar's point, that by representing grief you belie it, is probably best borne out in Shakespeare's plays by Richard II when he abdicates his throne. Insisting that his grief is insupportable, Richard nonetheless possesses the presence of mind to send for a mirror to “show me what a face I have / Since it is bankrout of his majesty” (R2 [Richard II], 4.1.266-67). The impression is distasteful; we feel, with Bolingbroke, that we are watching shadow-play. And though Antonio's modest sadness is a far cry from Richard's exhibitionism, if I am right to argue that, in his own way, Antonio too is engaged in wan display, we may prefer to distrust all instances of self-exhibited sadness (at least, all onstage-instances), crediting only those cases in which, as Kafka writes, the subject weeps without knowing it [“weint er, ohne es su wissen”].⁵ Thus, over against Edgar's punctual reports on his own progress toward annihilation, critics frequently set up the touchstone of Edgar's father Gloucester's despondency. When Edgar rallies Gloucester with the slogan, “Ripeness is all,” Gloucester's pathetic response, “And that's true too,” admits of no rebuttal (KL [King Lear], 5.2.8-11). The old man's surprising readiness to concede the point confirms his dejection.

The Merchant of Venice presents many instances of soreheartedness to set against Antonio's studied sorrow. After Portia hears Bassanio in court offer to sacrifice his new wife to save his friend, she returns home and remarks wearily, “How far that little candle throws his beams! / So shines a good deed in a naughty world” (5.1.90-91). Indeed, by play's end even Antonio moves in this direction; observing the ills his manipulation has caused, he comments feebly, “I am th'unhappy subject of these quarrels” (238). And there is Jessica: when Portia returns home and the gentiles gather at Belmont, she simply recedes; no one opposes her presence, but neither does anyone speak to her. Finally, there is the sadness of Old Gobbo asking the way to the house of his son and “Master Jew.” (What a world of hopes, to judge by Launcelot's name, must have been present at his christening—all disappointed!) After Launcelot teases his poor blind father by giving him incomprehensible directions, the old man tries again:

Be God's sonties, 'twill be a hard way to hit! Can you tell me whether one Launcelot that dwells with him [Shylock], dwell with him or no?

(2.2.40-42)

Accustomed to hardship, Old Gobbo takes nothing for granted. Evidently he has seen so many disappointments that he builds an expectation of them into his inquiry. Even as he tags Launcelot—for reference's sake—as dwelling with Shylock, he questions whether Launcelot dwells with Shylock. The voice is familiar. In its long exposure to an adversity which it domesticates, makes tolerable, it's the voice we've come to associate with Jewish humor.⁶

My association may not be as farfetched as it seems. The basis of Launcelot's deception of his blind father in Jacob's deception of Isaac (down to the old man's feeling his son's head to identify him) is well-established, and to this may be added a second, less well-known allusion to the Jewish Bible. Though the Quarto and Folio stagedirections and speech-prefixes of The Merchant of Venice give the old man's name as “Gobbo,” in the dialogue his name appears as “Iobbe,” “an Italianized form of Job” according to the Arden editor (xxii). Hence, the poor, patient father becomes a type of long-suffering Jewry. (And the son—what a monicker! Lancelot Job: a macaronic oxymoron of a name!) The hint of Jewish suffering in Launcelot's “true-begotten father” is suggestive and points in an obvious direction. If the sad Antonio of scene 1 gives way to the ferocious Antonio of scene 3, then Antonio's demonized counterpart reverses the movement. Though the Venetians denigrate Shylock as Antonio's opposite, an “unfeeling man,” nothing “harder” than “His Jewish heart” (4.1.63, 79-80), and though Antonio seems bent on staging his own difference from the Jewish moneylender, many critics have been duly skeptical, regarding the distinction on which Antonio's esteem depends as self-serving.⁷ Though Antonio considers his own inexplicable sadness as his personal cross to bear (“… every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one”), the emotion he lays claim to is Shylock's. To be sure, when Shylock bids for sympathy on this ground, declaring “suffer'nce … the badge of all our tribe” (1.3.106), he loses us; the exhibitionist factor, evident in “badge,” cancels any pity we may feel. But at other times Shylock is less self-conscious, not only not knowing why he is sad (like Antonio), but not even knowing that he is sad. And at these times, Shylock becomes truly affecting. He radiates a sadness that we are asked to recognize as abiding.

Take the famous speeches. If I ask my students, books closed, why Shylock hates Antonio they will tell me that Antonio kicked and spat on him. But Shylock doesn't give that as his reason—at least not at first; he seems not always in full possession of the fact of his own persecution. Instead, in explanation he offers the reasons of the stereotyped Jew: “I hate him for he is a Christian; / But more, for that in low simplicity / He lends out money gratis” (1.3.38-40). In Antonio's phrase, Shylock, repressing, may be said to be made a want-wit by his sadness.

Or consider Shylock in court when he tauntingly explains his reasons for seeking revenge:

Some men there are love not a gaping pig,
Some that are mad if they behold a cat,
And others, when the bagpipe sings i'th' nose,
Cannot contain their urine

(4.1.47-50)

Many people hear this as a justification of anger but I hear it as a plaint. Timelessly, the bagpipe wails, and old men have trouble with their bladders. More historically, Shylock's images connect to Jewish suffering via the disturbing traditional figure of the Judensau, as Gustav Ungerer has shown, building on Irving Massey's understanding of the gaping pig not as a roast pig but the living barnyard animal, “stretching [its] jaws, almost as if … trying to loosen the joint … the same position [pigs] fall into when they squeal or scream” (11). When Shylock rages he “weeps without knowing it”; like Antonio incapable of deciphering his own sadness, he cannot say where he “caught” this grief, “What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born.”

In my first example above, Shylock explains in soliloquy his reasons for hating Antonio; in my second, although he addresses the court, he might as well still be in soliloquy for all the hearing he will receive. My point, as underscored by the quantity and variety of Shylock's actual and virtual soliloquies, is not only that Shylock is often alone in the play, but that he needs to be listened to, needs to be made sense of to himself. Again and again, in a character trait scanted by criticism, Shylock looks for love in the wrong places. In scene 3, just before clenching in hatred toward Antonio, he abandons his habitual sarcasm, becoming positively expansive on his favorite subject of the patriarchs. He seems to reach out for understanding, letting an insult pass (Ant.: “And what of him [Jacob]? Did he take interest?”) as he continues his digression in a hopeful voice. For a moment we cannot be sure what Shylock wants. Then, when a preaching Antonio interrupts him a second time (“Mark you this, Bassanio, / The devil can cite Scripture”), Shylock himself tells us: “I would be friends with you and have your love” (134). Only now, of course, Shylock is beyond wanting friendship; he is being manipulative, whereas moments before, in his relaxed story-telling mood, his explanation would almost have been true. (In this vein I might also cite Shylock's often-quoted justification of his revenge. Shylock is sometimes accused of “using” his humanity to justify evil. But from a standpoint of Jewish identity, i.e., Jewish pride, Shylock's assimilationist appeal for Christian sympathy to the dullards Salerio and Solanio, whom he far outclasses, is disappointingly complaisant, “a weak disabling of [him]self” [2.1.30]. Shylock gives away too much. Hath not a Jew brains?)

And Shylock seeks understanding and love not just from Antonio but from Bassanio, all the while questioning why he should accept an invitation to Bassanio's feast (but he accepts anyway):

I am bid forth to supper, Jessica.
There are my keys. But wherefore should I go?
I am not bid for love—they flatter me—
But yet I'll go in hate

(2.5.11-14)

Moments later, stung by Launcelot's announced departure, Shylock even spends a good thought on the schnorrer's behalf: “The patch is kind enough, but a huge feeder” (44): Well, half-a-thought, but that's still a half-thought more than Launcelot spends on Shylock. Finally, even from a quarter from which Shylock might have expected kindness, he receives only pain. I am always astonished by Tubal's pleasure in twisting the knife. Though the role is often played to a different effect, in reading the scene it's hard to escape the impression that Tubal finds something not altogether displeasing in his co-religionist's suffering.⁸ (A Hasidic saying: “No man's beard ever grows grey worrying about another's troubles” [Jacobson, 19]).

The example of Shylock's intimate enemy Tubal brings us to the pivotal event in Shylock's life: his crushing betrayal by Jessica. Though Shakespeare manages the offstage scene of horrified discovery so as to induce audiences to accept at face value Solanio's report of Shylock's confused passion, and thus to conclude that Shylock rates the loss of his money at par with the loss of his flesh-and-blood—

‘My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!
Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!
Justice! the law! my ducats and my daughter!’

(2.8.15-17)

—evidence elsewhere in the play points up the meanspiritedness of this all-too-easily induced response. Critics have regularly noted the hate-filled Solanio's unreliability as a reporter of the crying old man he terms “the dog Jew” (14), and have noted, too, the evidence of Shylock's own curse on Jessica. Shylock wishes to bury his recovered jewels with his daughter, not to retrieve them (3.1.78-80): “A terrible curse—but it is a curse, and not an expression of greed. … In his self-punishing, self-pitying fury, Shylock calls down destruction on everything that he has lost” (Gross 74). To these, I would add two fresh pieces of evidence. Shakespeare's intent to entrap viciousness, to show complacency its face, appears in Salerio's adulatory description of Antonio not twenty lines later:

A kinder gentleman treads not the earth.
I saw Bassanio and Antonio part:
Bassanio told him he would make some speed
Of his return; he answered, ‘Do not so.
Slubber not business for my sake, Bassanio,
But stay the very riping of the time …’

(2.8.35-40)

Business! Although audiences stereotype Shylock as rating money above love, it is Antonio, rather, who does so; Antonio conceives Portia's wooing purely as a business proposition (a view in which Bassanio has encouraged him). Then too, to recall our earlier discussion of Shylock's characterization, from what we have already seen of Shylock's reluctance to delve his hatred of Antonio, it is unsurprising that he cannot now locate the true source of his pain: namely, that Jessica seems no longer to love him, that she has left him naked to his enemies. Instead of gazing on that Medusa, Shylock self-protectively converts his grief to grievance. His sadness, again “want-wit,” leaves him impotently raging, with “much ado to know [him]self.”

I'd go further: a moment ago I quoted John Gross describing Shylock's “call[ing] down destruction on everything that he has lost.” Gross assimilates Jessica to the ducats. Petulant, Shylock wants to see the last of her and them, to have everything he once believed his own, now, finally and decisively, out of his life and heart. I think this gets it backwards. It's not Jessica as object that Shylock assimilates to the ducats. It's the ducats he assimilates to her in what he constitutes as another failed love-relationship. Shylock's lament for his lost ducats is usually read as a lapsus linguae: for “Christian ducats” read Christian daughter. But the idea that Shylock's money has betrayed him along with Jessica, that it too has converted to Christianity (cf. Portia: “Myself and what is mine to you and yours / Is now converted” [3.2.166-67]), is not uninteresting. If Shylock's money has sustained and protected him, if his “living” has long watched over his “life” (cf. 5.1.286), then his genial guardian now goes over to the enemy. His ducats, as they once seemed, betray him by becoming Christian; they can no longer be counted on to keep the wolf from the door.

In the Christianization of his ducats conceived as a kind of a tutelary deity (a reading strengthened, incidentally, by the association of the two sealed bags of ducats with testicles, hence, the protecting spirit of the paterfamilias) Shylock finds cause for despair. In the imagined betrayal of things there may be something nearly as wrenching as the betrayal of loved ones, especially if, as Freud and many before him have believed, those “things” are at bottom a stabler substitute for loved ones, undoing our narcissistic wounds with promises of their magical support.⁹ To draw a Shakespearean analogy, among Richard II's griefs perhaps the unkindest cut is struck by Richard's horse “roan Barbary,” which in a seeming betrayal permitted Bolingbroke to ride his back, and “Would … not stumble … fall down, / … and break the neck / Of that proud man” (R2, 5.5.78ff). Richard had already given up on people some while ago (cf. 4.1.168 ff). But for a dumb beast not to live up to its anthropomorphic potential—this is occasion for a woe that for once eludes even Richard's powers of articulate self-pity (“Forgiveness, horse! Why do I rail on thee” [5.5.90]).

I want to close on a speculative and sentimental note by musing—beyond the scope of what the play allows—on what could have made poor Shylock happy. Certainly not Jessica's continuing loyalty, which he took for granted till she left him; nor, after she betrays him, could he delight much in her return. At no time can his money-bags have provided great pleasure, but only security, especially if, as argued, his money draws its main significance from its surrogacy for love. (For Shylock to take solace in possessions, though, is not a total lost cause; Leah's ring is the obvious case, and beyond that, I for one would like to know what Shylock collects.) Of course, acceptance from Antonio and his kind is out of the question; and even if it were offered provisionally (say, as a result of his enforced conversion) Shylock would have to be “a soft and dulleyed fool” (3.3.14), a dummy, to trust it. Yet lest my question by now seem frivolous, let me suggest that the play does at one point invite us to imagine Shylock brought closer to human community. Old Gobbo, who like no one else in The Merchant of Venice coins a term of respect for Shylock, is on his way to bringing “Master Jew,” a gift when Launcelot intercepts him (“My master's a very Jew. Give him a present? Give him a halter”). The unsolicited gift, “a dish of doves,” falls within Kosher law and would appear to be offered entirely without ulterior motive.¹⁰ If, in Shylock's view, even a Launcelot is “kind enough, but a huge feeder,” then to Launcelot's father bringing food, the reservation would not apply. To be sure, Shylock would not know what to say to the poor blind rustic, and he might not think much of the cooking, but I suspect he would be touched by the kindness. It is pleasant to imagine a moment of fellow-feeling growing between the two old men, but that may be hoping for too much. At worst, though, not even “old Shylock” (as he fondly calls himself) could find cause for hurt in Old Gobbo's unexpected generosity. A pity the dish of doves never arrived! It was a kindness “lost / As offered mercy is” (Cymb. [Cymbeline], 1.3.3-4).

Notes

1. My text for Merchant of Venice and other Shakespearean citations is the individual play editions of The Pelican Shakespeare, general ed., A. Harbage; the text of MV is edited by Brents Stirling.

2. For Antonio's affliction by conscience, Danson (30-34 et passim); the citation is from Barber (180); the first three views are already evidenced by 1888 in the Variorum note on the passage, and have appeared with innumerable variations since then.

3. Ralph Berry has an interesting discussion of the tempo of social pressures in scene 1, though fails to discuss Antonio's motive of avoiding stigma.

4. Gillies comments that “Antonio as the ideal Venetian (sic) is … systematic in representing Shylock as other. More than just a ‘Jew,’ Shylock is a ‘stranger,’ an ‘alien’ and an ‘infidel’. His Jewish otherness has [a] pandemic quality” (128). Further, “the confrontation between Antonio and Shylock amounts to a struggle over the political and economic heart of Venice. Thus the forum of Antonio's many assaults on Shylock is always the market-place. … Like Christ chasing the money-changers from the temple … Antonio seeks to recover the sacred core of the city from the twin abominations of ‘interest’ and intrusion” (129).

5. Franz Kafka, “Auf Der Galerie” (154-55); I thank Al Cook for rounding up the citation.

6. Old Gobbo's phrasing further tangs of Hebraism at 2.2.86-87, “Lord worshipped might he be, what a beard hast thou got!”

7. Typically, Novy writes, “But if in general Antonio denies or sublimates his own sexuality and instead supports Bassanio's pursuit of Portia, he also denies the acquisitiveness inherent in being a merchant and instead attacks Shylock, the double who shares and exaggerates his mercantile profession and marginal social status. Even in this respect, however, he generally presents himself as self-denying, patiently holding in check his hostility to Shylock everywhere but in the scene where he arranges the loan. In his verbal attack on Shylock there, his speech takes on unusual energy; this is the one scene in which Antonio does not speak about being sad. His temporary recovery resembles the relief from a sense of powerlessness and depression that modern psychologists have often found to be one function of anti-Semitic outbursts” (71).

8. In recent productions I've seen, Shylock is played (rightly, I feel) as a Jewish stereotype but then, compensatorily, Tubal is turned into nature's nobleman. The effect is reminiscent of the old television series, All in the Family, in which the producers presented a comically-bigoted Archie Bunker but then leaned over backwards to make the other characters impeccably liberal. Of Shylock's grudging fondness for Launcelot, Harley Granville-Barker writes, “he has a niggard liking for the fellow, is even hurt a little by his leaving, touched in pride, too, and shows it childishly: “Thou shalt not gormandize / As thou hast done with me,” cited by Barber (191).

9. See Muensterberger for interesting and relevant Freudian discussion of the mania of collecting. For “hallowed” consumer items bringing “a benediction to the buyer,” WT [The Winter's Tale], 4.4.594-95.

10. Hassel remarks that “As in no other Shakespearean play, characters so frequently refer to dining together that such dining becomes our sense of the natural Christian condition. Dinners are consistently focal points for celebration and companionship.” He cites nine instances, concluding, “Like Communion these dinners celebrate and reward shared love” (193). My own sense is that nothing so attractive is going on; most of Hassel's nine cases savor of “networking”: sleazy characters “do lunch.” Old Gobbo's reachingout, on the other hand, which Hassel fails to mention, seems to me convivial in the radical sense, an attempt to extend community.

This essay is dedicated to Irving Massey.

Works Cited

Barber, C. L. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company, 1967; first. ed., 1959.

Berry, Ralph. “Discomfort in The Merchant of Venice,” in Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor (Ottawa) 1 (1978-79): 9-16.

Danson, Lawrence. The Harmonies of “The Merchant of Venice.” New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978.

Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Gross, John. Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy. New York, London, etc: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

Hassel, R. Chris, Jr. Faith and Folly in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1980.

Jacobson, Howard. Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1994.

Kafka, Franz. “Auf Der Galerie.” In Das Urteil und andere Erzahlungen. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1946.

Massey, Irving. The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of Indiana Press, 1976.

Muensterberger, Werner. Collecting: An Unruly Passion. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Novy, Marianne L. Love's Argument. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. John Russell Brown. Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959.

———. The Variorum Merchant of Venice. Ed. H. H. Furness. Philadelphia: Lippincott Company, 1888.

Ungerer, Gustav. “Shylock's Gaping Pig.” In Elizabethan and Modern Studies. Presented to Professor Willem Schrickx. Ed. J. P. Vander Motten. Ghent: Seminarie voor Engelse en Amerikaanse Literatur, 1985, 267-76.