SOURCE: Hale, John K. “Does Source Criticism Illuminate the Problems of Interpreting The Merchant as a Soured Comedy?” In The Merchant of Venice: New Critical Essays, edited by John W. Mahon and Ellen Macleod Mahon, pp. 187-97. New York: Routledge, 2002.

[In the following essay, Hale discusses Shakespeare's use of Il Pecorone as a source for The Merchant of Venice.]

The value of source-criticism within Shakespeare is ancillary, negative, and indicative. It will help us think about a play or scene. It will tell us how not to think about them. And in the absence of other hard evidence as to the genesis or intention of a play, source-criticism—by showing where and how a play began—can indicate directions of imaginative change. In fact, the pattern of what Shakespeare leaves out, picks up, extends, and adds from elsewhere indicates a great deal.

These truisms apply with particular force to The Merchant of Venice, for two main reasons. First, the play's storyline keeps very close to its main source, the story of Giannetto from Il Pecorone—from the initial borrowing of capital for a wooing journey by the young protégé of the Venetian merchant, through the sex-disguising and trial scene, to the concluding practical joke of the wedding rings. Secondly, source-study has something to put alongside the play's theatre and critical history, in which Shylock dominates. Just as Shylock's original, the “Jew of Mestri,” had not even a name, so Shylock appears in a bare five scenes and is absent from the finale: what sort of play did Shakespeare think he was writing, even if we know better about the one he did create?

Without expecting to change anyone's mind, and indeed without quite knowing my own mind,¹ I offer as a reality check the following observations about how Shakespeare went to work on the chosen materials. The chief emphasis will fall on Il Pecorone, which is a skeleton for the story and characters together—the entire central transaction, of the pound-of-flesh bond and its results.² The parties to the transaction will be called the “Beneficiary” of the bond (Giannetto/Bassanio), its “Donor” (Ansaldo/Antonio), the “prize” or “Lady” (the widow of Belmonte/Portia³), and the “Bondholder” (the Jew of Mestri/Shylock). Other sources will be acknowledged at the appropriate points of a (mainly) scene-by-scene analysis.⁴

The opening scene shows the young protégé raising the wind from his kinsman.⁵ This is exactly as in the source, except that Bassanio is doing it for the first and only time: Shakespeare cunningly alters Giannetto's three attempts at his widow, into Bassanio's being the third of three suitors tackling the moral riddle whose solution brings marriage with Portia. (He shows mental and moral penetration, whereas Giannetto had trouble achieving the physical sort.)

More simply, Shakespeare begins as usual in medias res. The emotions of Bassanio on this single occasion are those of Giannetto at the final one—embarrassment, some shame, dependency, and withal a loverlike determination. The emotions of the Donor, and indeed his prominence, have shifted, towards or even past equality. Though we instinctively call the source “Giannetto's story,” Shakespeare is launching “the Merchant of Venice,” Antonio's story. Antonio is onstage for the entire scene, with emphatic probing of his melancholy. In this, the feelings of a surrogate father (Ansaldo) are extended into a burdensome overplus of grief (which “wearies” Antonio himself, and all of the group [1.1.2] if “you” is plural) for imminent loss, which Antonio cannot express to Bassanio but which all the more clouds the giving.

The second scene is assigned to Portia, Belmont, and the strange conditions of courting her. Since the first two conditions have been introduced already, the new scene concentrates on the third: there is more to this courtship than a cash float and love-glances. Shakespeare of course splices in here his adaptation of the “Caskets” romance,⁶ but he dwells equally on her father's mysterious will for Portia. The play has much to say about fathers, and even more about people whose life's fulfillment depends—in the manner of a wager—upon a single choice, made by someone else. Because the scene holds no events, only exposition, jokes, and thematic wonderment, it makes us think around the design; to other fathers (Shylock and old Gobbo, maybe Antonio as father-figure); and to those who depend on choices by others (Antonio, three couples, Shylock, and Jessica). The source said much less about fathers, so Shakespeare's addition of them is intriguing. Risk, however, was embedded in the source, at all its points, in both its locations. The scene also sets going a connection of places (whether to differentiate them, or to align them), by which Belmont will have almost as many scenes as Venice and the action will close there—Shakespeare again giving life to what lay inert in his source.

In his third scene Shakespeare introduces the remaining figure of his source's quadrilateral transaction, the Jewish moneylender. It is striking that when (improbably but necessarily) the Donor can find no lender except the hostile Jew, the latter is not found out as a last resort by Ansaldo himself but by Bassanio, who brings him along to Antonio. Of what is the change indicative? Is it made to involve Bassanio more deeply in responsibility (a character-based explanation)? To build up the Bondholder by giving him further relationships (for enhancement of another character)? To enable him to express motivation through soliloquy, such as no previous character has needed? To strengthen the fateful transaction and its scene by building to the meeting of the play's two mighty opposites? Although one purpose does not preclude another in Shakespeare, a source-approach hints at the last-named possibility. The scene is made stronger by the change, and many other source-changes serve the same end. The previous two scenes having rearranged a mass of good detail to gain strong scenes, this third one seeks a still stronger scene, a scene not of latent tension but outright conflict, and not of things unsaid but palpable rancor, ominously patched up.

This, however, leaves unexplained why Shylock alone of the main foursome needs a soliloquy to launch him. After all, later on he will talk of his motives to any bystander, and Shakespeare will give him Tubal for more intimate confidences. In general, soliloquy near the start of action puts emphasis on apartness, aloneness, secrecy, and ill will, if Richard III's or Hamlet's are parallel. But in particular, using the source as guide, the soliloquy is Shakespeare's expansion of minimal matter from his source. The Jew of Mestri's intentions are not stated at all at the equivalent point of the novella (Bullough 469), and emerge only later, when after the crash of Ansaldo's fortunes he refuses the offer of repayment from “many merchants joined together … for he wished to commit this homicide in order to be able to say that he had put to death the greatest of the Christian merchants” (472). The changes are extremely indicative here, and helpful to Shakespeare's interpreters, including all three actors of the scene. He wants to establish motivation at once, not by and by. Nor is the motivation that of the novella, a Guinness-Book-of-Records ambition for a twisted glory. The soliloquy expresses contempt and Jewish identity (36), then religious antipathy (37), “but more” it expresses commercial resentment. Then “grudge,” against Antonio as commercial and racial enemy: “he hates our sacred nation” and so in return “cursèd be my tribe / If I forgive him.” All of these manifold motives, entwined like a snake dance, will be developed into actions later; and albeit extended by new motives such as his loss of Jessica and her looted dowry, they are here already made his guiding principles. It is simply untrue that Shylock means his “merry sport” merrily, or as a genuine overture, or that he plans revenge only after later losses, because Shakespeare has written such a strong weltering of motives into this explanatory, unsourced, initial soliloquy. In soliloquy, characters do not lie, except sometimes to themselves.

Shakespeare is putting further expansion, that is to say conscious effort, into the argument about Laban's sheep (lines 66-97). Using the Bible now as source, he shows us Shylock raising the subject of Jacob's triumph in that story of patriarchs' wagering. Antonio gives a haughty rebuttal whilst Shylock collects the laugh. Which was more Shakespeare's design is still being debated, but from our present standpoint in any case we can see both characters more deeply as a result—Shylock aggressively identifying with the most tricky of the patriarchs who was nonethelesss to carry the blessing upon Israel, and Antonio self-righteous in orthodoxy (Bassanio silent, embarrassed and impatient). A wider significance, perhaps, is that Shakespeare has picked on this precise passage of the Scripture which their religions share, with its inscrutable sheep genetics and its awkward (surely ex post facto) vindication (Genesis 31.12), in which God in Jacob's dream had explained his success as divine retaliation against Laban's exploitations of Jacob. The murky episode, in which Shylock casts himself as Jacob, makes Antonio an exploitative Laban: this accounts for Antonio's otherwise excessive anger, for he hates losing face in front of Bassanio.

The rest of the scene is all Shakespeare's own, with its excess and hubris on Antonio's part,⁷ Bassanio's fears for his benefactor and dismay at the terms of the Bond, and Shylock's steady working of the advantage first gained in the biblical altercation.

The following ten scenes, 2.1 through 3.1, are mainly short ones. Individually they may seem minor, preparing as they certainly do for the double crisis of act 3, scene 2. Nonetheless, they are better seen together first, because thus they reveal Shakespeare's persistent interweaving. The sequence interweaves the pound-of-flesh motif with the wooing motif, the two strands of the main plot, and furthermore interweaves both with several further risk-actions (Gobbo, Gratiano, Jessica). These come from diverse sources. They are not all interwoven in the same way. They do not all have the like impact. The manysidedness of this whole is the myriad-mindedness which Coleridge admired in Shakespeare. And it provides the key to full enjoyment of this play. Seen in this context, Shylock's refusal to change provides one dark contrast to the many changes for the better which characterize comedy, though it is not the sole such contrast. Just the same, comedy normally favors change.⁸

Briefly to substantiate all that, Morocco—another outsider as to race and religion—is the first to undertake the risk of the caskets test (2.1 and 7). Then in the longer 2.2, Gobbo tricks his father, only to rue it; together they sue for him to leave Shylock's service and join Bassanio's. Gratiano, too, “must” accompany him to Belmont. Jessica, not seen till 2.3, dominates the next four scenes—not joining Bassanio nor at this juncture going to Belmont, but decisively rejecting her father Shylock, religion and all. In 2.8 Antonio's losses commence, and with them the threat from Shylock, whose other losses (daughter and ducats) have enraged him. Antonio was angry and off-balance in 1.3: now it is Shylock's turn. Losses proliferate as Arragon (an outsider in religion though not in race) becomes the second to pick a wrong casket, and Shylock is torn between grief and glee; grief at his own losses, glee at Antonio's. I discern no privileging whatever of Shylock's strand over all the others within this expert web. Interaction and multiplicity are the guiding principles.

In 3.2, by contrast, hierarchy is pivotal. Bassanio's successful choosing modulates, absurdly, into Gratiano's noisy jubilation: Bassanio's choosing, which is not a lucky dip, occasions Gratiano's success, which is, a silly side bet. Then by a further excellent modulation, “Enter Lorenzo, Jessica, and Salerio, a messenger from Venice”: Salerio brings news of Antonio's mortal danger, while Jessica's sole speech confirms that danger. The spotlight moves away from the Beneficiary, and from the Lady, too, though to a lesser extent because the plot still keeps her passive, to the Donor and Bondholder. It stays with the last two for the next scene. But then with the sex-disguising of the Lady, and her getting into motion at last, attention shifts to her preparations for meeting—her sole, and incognito meeting—with the Bondholder.

What, then, is 3.5 included for? It is not enough to say it covers the lapse of time while Portia reaches Venice, since that journey can be quick or slow at Shakespeare's own wish (and any other small scene would serve the same purpose). It shows Jessica, with Gobbo again, then with Lorenzo. Jessica, to my mind, is Shakespeare's largest and most significant addition to the Bondholder's role. It is worth mentioning that she has seven scenes, her father five. She shares only one scene with him, in which she speaks to him only when spoken to (receiving several commands and one hot question—2.5.10-55). So what does this large addition contribute?

Contrasting strongly with her passive, innocent prototype Abigail,⁹ Jessica is proactive and determined. She throws down her father's money from a window like Abigail, but to her lover, not her father. She is given many of the quintessential attributes of heroines in romance comedy—male disguise, giggling about it, participation in masque, abandoning family for lover like Juliet—but like Desdemona crossing a racial gap, too. Is it her change of religion which alienates current feminist sympathies? If so, this too was taken from Marlowe's Abigail. I find it odd, then, that Jessica attracts a modern odium, for example from many of my students: Shakespeare is empowering her, at least equally with the other two cross-dressing heroines.

He is not empowering her for empowerment's sake, but to represent a strong counterweight to what her father represents. It is done subtly whenever she has a scene, or (more often) part of one. “Our house is hell,” she says to Gobbo, “and thou (a merry devil) / Didst rob it of some taste of tediousness” (2.3.2-3, her first speech in the play sings a keynote). At the other end of the play she is “never merry when I hear sweet music,” which Lorenzo diagnoses as “attentiveness”—thoughtfulness or intenseness. She has had reason to be both; and yet the two laugh together about dangerous topics like untrustworthy lovers (5.1.1-22).¹⁰ Shakespeare seems eager to qualify her for comic luck, all the more because he writes so many passages which explain that her father is disqualified for it!¹¹

It is amongst all of this added Jessica material that Shakespeare adds two passages which have most elicited sympathy for Shylock: “Hath not a Jew eyes?” and Jessica's theft of his wife's engagement ring, both in 3.1. The first is said to Solanio and Salerio, after they have concluded their jeering at him; the second is said to Tubal, whose alternating good and bad news has reduced Shylock to a suffering automaton.

The first is therefore natural anger, strongly expressed, and meant to alarm them. They have deserved all of it. The second is actually the stronger effect, because it swings between absurdity and pathos. The element common to the two passages is reductiveness, in the one case Antonio's flesh as fish bait and the meaning of life narrowed to revenge, in the other case Shylock swung between extremes of schadenfreude and self-centered misery. As Shakespeare is inventing all of this,¹² we need to ask for what purpose, or to what discernible authorial effect? So far, I discern the desire to make a strong scene, part of which is the aptness of Shylock's words to his Venetian interlocutors.

But then, next, to Tubal. What is the fellow-Jew up to? Presumably we are not to think, with friends like this who needs enemies? Perhaps Tubal is up to nothing, being an unknown quantity—there for Shylock to react to, and to his news, not himself. So we keep our eyes on Shylock, more than in the previous exchange. This helps explain why Jessica gets the blame. One could just laugh at the idea of wasting a valuable ring on a pet monkey, or relish the idea that the miser's daughter has become one of life's big spenders. Or one could sympathize with Shylock's hurt at his engagement ring being lost to him. Should we? We know nothing about his Leah, nor whether she was Jessica's mother. The passage as a whole is nonetheless showing us a strongly suffering Shylock, who is “tortured” and excessive and absurd, by turns or even all at once. The stronger this scene is, the stronger will be the showdown in 4.1. Source-criticism is alerting us to Shakespeare's extensions and additions, and these alert us to his dramaturgy; here, in the form of that “principle of episodic intensification” which is normal on the Elizabethan stage, but can lead to overinterpretation or misunderstanding. Shakespeare's wealth of specificity and ambivalent empathy in the scene can distort our perception if we do not recognize that they exist in Jessica's scenes too, and others—such as the Trial scene itself, greatest and last for Shylock, yet not for others. (The fact that Jessica is withheld means that counterweight is available later.)¹³ Hence, by the principle of episodic intensification once more, in the Trial scene Shakespeare gives his Bondholder the most rousing possible finish, trusting to his own experience and intuition to restore the balance later, by benefitting later scenes similarly. Did he succeed, is the question? And are we prepared to let him, is the question to ourselves.

The Trial scene is the one closest to the novella. The source has the same shape: pleas from “the merchants of Venice one and all” are made to the Jew, who, however, insists on getting Venetian—that is, strict—justice (Bullough 472); he is offered up to ten times the amount of the bond, without avail; the disguised heroine hears the case and urges him to quit while he is so far ahead; and when he refuses, she springs the trap; and a reverse-auction (Dutch auction) ensues. Here we begin to notice divergence in Shakespeare's treatment. In the source the bond is declared null and void, everyone “mocked at the Jew, saying, ‘He who lays snares for others is caught himself’” (Bullough 474). The Jew then “took his bond and tore it in pieces in a rage.” In the play there is less of a reverse-auction, and nothing explicit about the bond itself,¹⁴ more of mockery, a different moralitas. Responses of bystanders differ from one another (this is important and often ignored by critics). Instead of a stormy sudden exit like Malvolio's, Shylock's is prolonged. The delaying of the exit, and its qualities when at last it does come, is the heart of the problem of this play for us all.

My view can already be guessed. It is dramaturgical more than ethical. Shakespeare has seen how to milk the situation for a bewildering variety of effects, now that the hard work is all done and before the comic sequel is reached. And he does milk it.¹⁵ It is episodic intensification with a vengeance, because it creates not just a variety of strong effects but a literally bewildering variety. We are left not knowing what to think; and as the debate shows, this is not a contented relinquishing of any need to make judgment, but rather a need to make judgment which is not, and cannot, be satisfied. I take those points of divergence one by one in the same order.

The bond is not declared “null and void” in Shakespeare; rather, it is upheld to the full by Portia (“all justice,” “nothing but the penalty” she says), and woe betide Shylock if he deviate by a hair's breadth. This emphasizes the peripeteia, not suddenly, but by a reverse literalism, rubbing in the defeat. What is swift in the source, with “everyone present” mocking the loser when his plot backfires, and with the Jew tearing up his bond, is being made gradual and (among other things) educative. It is by nature hard to distinguish “teaching someone a lesson” (with deterrence and reform uppermost in the punishment) from retribution; and the slower the process, the more like a vengeance.

The case is alike regarding the Bond, the paper document as stage property, whose presence is often implied, and which must end up somewhere once Shylock has lost. Many actors of Shylock have torn it up anyway, as a good dramatic admission of defeat; but Shakespeare does not specify it, and this may well be because the trial is now passing beyond what the bond says, to something else. That something else is not a contest about bonds, but about what is to happen on the other charges to which (Portia reveals) he is liable, conspiracy against the life of a Venetian (345). Shylock is not getting more than he bargained for. Seen one way, this is fitting, being inherent in any act of hubris. Seen in the light of the sequel, his forcible conversion and stripping of assets, it looks more as if he is being punished for what he is, than for what he has done—since in a sense he has done (accomplished) absolutely nothing. Whose will is done, then? The court's? The state's? Portia's? Antonio's? Let us see who says what, in the process by which Shakespeare diversifies what “everyone present” said, into the responses of Gratiano, Bassanio, the Duke, Portia, and Antonio.

Gratiano is very vocal, jeering in the loudmouth way which Bassanio had long before disrelished and which now blossoms into racist jokes. Bassanio simply wants to give the Jew back his principal (333) but is overruled by Portia: since in 1.3 and later in the present scene he is overruled by Antonio, he seems decent, dependent, and accommodating, the sort who finds it hard to say no. The Duke pardons Shylock for two lines, then imposes conditions—as befits a lawcourt, but hardly a comic one.¹⁶ Portia is legalistic now: her celebrated appeal for mercy is absent, or muted into asking Antonio “What mercy can you render him, Antonio?” She is keeping up her role, and testing the Merchant of Venice (whose “mercy” comes last and is made the Duke's decision also). Maybe the whole play tests this merchant. It is Antonio who disposes of Shylock's possessions and insists on the enforced conversion. None of this, to repeat, was in the novella.

It is Antonio again who insists on Bassanio's surrendering his wedding ring, and neither is this in the novella. In an age which respected oaths as binding, and considering that the ring is the emblem of a marriage taken most seriously (and not even yet consummated), Antonio is asking a lot. The fact that Bassanio as Beneficiary owes him so much makes it harder to deny him, and so he ought not to have asked. Portia rightly smells a threat. Far from being misnamed after Antonio, the play is correctly seen as about his ambivalences; not simply here at the end of the trial, when he punishes Shylock not for what he does but for what he is, but at points throughout the sequel. His burdensome love of Bassanio is the last of all the obstacles which stand (like increasingly difficult obstacles in a steeplechase) between the lovers and their joy. I completely agree with Anne Barton's reading of Antonio.¹⁷

The finale expands on the joking and partying of the source's ending, but has to provide a counterweight to the complexity and intensity and unresolved emotion which Shakespeare added to the trial scene. How does it attempt this, and does it succeed?

It attempts the task, which Shakespeare has just made very hard for himself and unquestionably harder than he found it in his main source, by the following discernible sequences: a night duet for Lorenzo and Jessica (1-23); messengers, from outside the household and inside (Stephano and Gobbo, eisangelos and exangelos so to speak, 25-53); rhapsody on the music of the spheres and the music of earth (54-88). There is much talk of the time, of lights and whether dawn is come; it does not come, so that at the close it will still be suitable time for the lovers' going to bed.¹⁸ Enter Portia and her company (89), then Bassanio and his, which now includes Antonio (127), whereupon she is at long last introduced to him. Small talk follows till the rings' quarrel erupts (142), and the exploitation of this and then its elucidation fill out the last half of the finale. The first half is added from other sources, while the second expands on the novella.

The litany of lovers, I have argued, mentions instances of the tribulations of lovers, not because they apply, but because they do not. Lorenzo and Jessica can warble (respectively) of the separation of Troilus and of Dido from their faithless lovers because they themselves are not separated, hence not thinking about betrayal either. When they bring themselves into the litany, they do a crossover, woman naming man and vice versa. Ovid is being appropriated for love-expression, not subpoenaed to help cast a blight.

So these lovers are being authorized, as it were, to give us the play's backward look at the strife now ended. We could say that Jessica, not Shylock, gets the last word, so long as we recognize her exact state of mind. She says nothing at all while Lorenzo interprets the stars as symbols of celestial harmony, a music of the heavenly bodies. But when he moves on to physical music, her answer is edgy, transitional, ambivalent … What is the word for it? Maybe just realistic: music, heeded, draws us into itself, and that is the bliss it gives. And denies to “the man that hath no music in himself.” Frank Kermode's comment was that the passage “tells the audience how to interpret the action” so that “only by a determined attempt to avoid the obvious can one mistake the theme” (221, 224).

Broadly, I agree. To reinsert the thought of Shylock—except here, where Shakespeare himself does it, and does it moreover by a glancing generalization—is to superimpose one's own play on the very sufficient one the dramatist wrote. Let people do so, by all means, but let them not call it his play. His play, though multi-centered and problematical, does center where its title puts the emphasis, on Antonio.

I should have said, it does this when allowed to. If a company's best actor takes the role of Shylock, and his scenes are arranged to suit him, and if further Shylock-allusions are inserted by the director in the finale, then of course he will upstage Antonio and the other parties to the four-way transaction which the play enacts. It is self-fulfilling. But if he does upstage them we will have an unresolved, or soured, comedy—or even a tragedy.¹⁹ And so we will not be watching the play which Shakespeare wrote, nor the design which source-criticism establishes. And similarly with written interpretation: if attention starts or finishes with Shylock, in and beyond his five scenes, the play will emerge less perfect and more skewed than if we keep our attention wheresoever Shakespeare is directing it. This option is more difficult, but more rewarding. The play manifests a tense, shifting balance throughout, the balancing of four principal agents with several love stories, which—let us not forget—he chose to work out. That, and not Shylock alone, is the play's driving force.

Notes

1. I approximate to the view of M. M. Mahood, ed. The Merchant of Venice, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Introduction, pp. 24-25, where she speaks of our “multiple and shifting responses …” The text used for quotation and reference is this one, hereafter termed “Mahood.”

2. “Plot,” in Aristotle's full sense of the term: the what and the who as they merge in causality, hence governing characterization also.

3. The “golden fleece” of 1.1.169 (also 3.2.240, typically vulgarized by Gratiano).

4. The essay owes something to my essay “The Merchant of Venice and Il Pecorone, or Can Source-Study resolve the Question of Shylock?” in AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 40 (1973), (271-283), and to my book The Shakespeare of the Comedies. A Multiple Approach (Berne: Peter Lang, 1996).

5. 1.1.57, the only time kinship is mentioned: a vestige of Giannetto's story, where Ansaldo is Giannetto's godfather?

6. From the medieval Gesta Romanorum, Englished in 1577 and revised just before the play (see Mahood 4).

7. Implicit in the source, where Ansaldo “decided to sell everything he had in the world, to equip another ship” (Bullough 469).

8. As Mr. Woodhouse in Emma recognizes. He dislikes weddings because they are inseparable from change: the play accumulates changes, of gender-dress, allegiance, status, religion, ownership, matrimony, and most especially of who has the power.

9. Mahood (8) is cautious about accepting Marlowe's Jew of Malta as a source at all, speaking instead of its “pervasive presence,” and mainly in terms of contrast. Considering the Marlovian language of Morocco, “pervasive presence” seems right. But so does significant contrast as regards Abigail/Barabas and Jessica/Shylock.

10. What with the many other comedic features assigned to Jessica, it seems misguided to dwell on the allusions to false love as signs of falsity in their speakers: spoken between lovers they are more a sign of confidence and security than of skating on thin ice. The dangerous stuff can be acknowledged, by lovers who have made a dangerous alliance, without imperilling anything.

11. I understand the off-color jokes in 3.5 similarly: Lorenzo talks of being jealous of Gobbo because he is not jealous, not because he is, though it is open to some humorless or axe-grinding director to play the scene against the grain. See also Hale, The Shakespeare of the Comedies, p. 17.

12. Bullough 472: the Jew of Mestri is merely laconically adamant.

13. We never see father and daughter at ease with each other, they never say anything good about each other. She is “ashamed” to be his child, and once he notices her rebellion the feeling is strongly reciprocated. She is “dead” to him.

14. Despite stage tradition, intuitively reinstating the Jew of Mestri's impassioned gesture.

15. As he does elsewhere, to similarly problematic effect: Iago's humiliations to Othello are prolonged too, because they make good theater. Shakespeare's rigor can look like cruelty.

16. He is the harshest of Shakespeare's comedy-dukes in passing judgment.

17. In the Riverside edition. I am reminded of Jonathan Miller's solution of the ending of the Taming of the Shrew, another ending unpleasing to modern sensibilites, until it is psychologized. Just as Katharina has been exorcised of a demon by Petruchio's play-acting, so Antonio must stand aside lest he become the demon of Bassanio's married life.

18. Like, but not like, the close of A Midsummer Night's Dream: these lovers get to bed late, in the nick of time, whereas the symmetrical puppets of the previous play go at the set time, midnight. The delayed wedding night in the Merchant is part of its design, seen very clearly by the contrast with its source where consummation had to precede the wedding, the former performance qualifying Giannetto for the latter.

19. The play ended with Shylock's exit in some eighteenth-century versions (Mahood 43)—a curious opposite to the happy ending of Nahum Tate's Lear. If the latter is scorned as travesty nowadays, why not the former also? And with it, the intrusion of Shylock where Shakespeare did not put him?

Works Cited

Barton, Anne. “Introduction.” The Merchant of Venice. In The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1974. 250-53.

Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Volume 1. London: Routledge, 1957.

Hale, John K. “The Merchant of Venice and Il Pecorone, or Can Source-Study Resolve the Question of Shylock?” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 40 (1973): 271-83.

———. The Shakespeare of the Comedies: A Multiple Approach. Berne: Peter Lang, 1996.

Kermode, Frank. “The Mature Comedies.” Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3: Early Shakespeare. London: Edward Arnold, 1961. 211-27.

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. M. M. Mahood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.