"THE EXCELLENT History of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreme cruelty of Shylocke the Iew towards the saide Merchant, in cutting a iust pound of his flesh. ing of Portia, by the choyse of three caskets. SHAKESPEARE. Printed by J. Roberts, 1600." And the obtainWritten by W. 4to. 40 leaves. "The most excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the lewe towards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a iust pound of his flesh: and the obtayning of Portia by the choyse of three chests. As it hath beene diuers times acted by the Lord Chamberlaine his Seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. AT LONDON, Printed by I. R., for Thomas Heyes, and are to be sold in Paules Churchyard, at the signe of the Greene Dragon, 1600." 4to. 38 leaves. The Merchant of Venice occupies twenty-two pages in the folio of 1623, viz., from p. 163 to p. 184, inclusive, in the division of Comedies. It is there divided into Acts, but not into Scenes, and has no list of Dramatis Personæ. (130) THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. INTRODUCTION. PLAGIARISM is a misdemeanor, of which the smaller order of the detective police of the world of letters are always ready to accuse an author who is either daring to rise into notice, or who is guilty of that other crime which is in their eyes the blackest of all -success. The charge is very easily made, and often can be as easily sustained to the satisfaction of the many who do not justly apprehend what constitutes originality. For the truth seems to be, that nearly all the stories that take hold on human sympathies are of indefinable antiquity. They come, we know not whence. We trace them back for centuries, and reach some great teller of tales who has had the credit of creating them; but we find that he took them from some one else who lived centuries before him, and that he only gave them another form and made them glow anew in the light of his genius. We go still farther back, and are obliged at last to give up the search as hopeless, and to believe that good stories are born of the great mother, and come up out of the earth; and so they do, in so far that they are the fruit of our common nature. Thus brought forth, they not only live, but renew their life, by entering again into the womb which brought them forth, to be born again. A story, perhaps the relation of some actual occurrence, is told by friend to friend and passes from lip to lip. It does not follow, because it was in nature, that it was true to nature. An established possibility can do no more to open a way to the human heart than a seeming improbability can do to shut it. But if the story be truthful, as well as actual, it never dies. Generation hands it down to generation, casting into forgetfulness those parts of it the interest of which is temporary or incidental, and religiously preserving all that is true forever. The germs of stories that are told now-a-days as new, are to be found in the fables of Bidpai, the Brahmin Sage, who is said to have lived two thousand years before Christ. He could have traced them through an antiquity of only a few hundred years before he found them in the Ark, where he might have believed them to be invented to wile away the time, but that he was too wise not to have given its due weight to the fact that the race was preserved, not created, in that structure. There is a serious truth hidden in our jocose habit of saying, when we hear a good jest a very good one— that it is an old Joe Miller; although Joseph is rather modern to be an originator, he having been a poor stupid actor, who lived in the early part of the last century, and died never having uttered one witty saying. But stories new and good are even rarer than good new jokes. It is but once in a century that such a one as The Bride of Lammermoor is written; and even then it is sure to be "an ower true tale." The story of The Merchant of Venice is an example in point of all these axioms of literary criticism. It is in part, at least, of Eastern origin; and all of it is of great and undeterminable antiquity. It had been told again and again, by various authors and in various tongues, centuries before Shakespeare was born; and there is some reason to believe that it had even been put into a dramatic shape and played in London long before he left Stratford yet in no one of his works has he exhibited his creative powers more lavishly, though in some the peculiar traits of his genius are more strikingly apparent. Three tales, one turning upon the giving of the bond, one upon the choice of the caskets, and one recounting the elopement of a daughter from an avaricious father, have been interwoven to form the plot of this play.' That of the bond was written in Italian by Giovanni Fiorentino, as early as 1378,* but exists in England in a MS. of a still more ancient date, - 1320, or thereabout,†—and is also found in the Latin Gesta Romanorum, a translation of which version exists in a MS. of the time of Henry VI.‡ But even a mere enumera * See Mr. Collier's Shakespeare's Library, Vol. II. † See Mr. Thomas Wright's Collection of Latin Stories Illustrative of the History of Fiction during the Middle Ages, published by the Percy Society. This very interesting translation was printed by Mr. Douce, in his Mustra tions of Shakespeare, Vol. I. p. 281. tion of the various collections of tales, published and unpublished, which contain the one that turns upon this incident of the Bond, would be both tedious and needless; and we come at once to that which bears internal evidence of having been more or less directly the channel through which Shakespeare received it. This is Il Pecorone of Giovanni Fiorentino, first published at Milan, in 1558, though written, as we have seen, nearly two hundred years before. In the Fourth Day of that work the story of Giannetto is told, which is briefly this.* Giannetto, the son of a wealthy Florentine merchant, is left by his father dependent entirely upon his own exertions and the good offices of Ansaldo, "the richest merchant of the day among the Christians" of Venice. Arrived in Venice, Giannetto finds his father's friend ready to place himself and his fortune at the disposal of his father's son. In Ansaldo's house he is treated like a favored child and heir expectant, and passes the time at tilts and tournaments and in giving entertainments. He is such a charming person and conducts himself so winningly that women and men alike yield to his fascination. Ansaldo is entirely devoted to him. A trading venture to Alexandria being proposed by two of his friends, Giannetto joins it, more to see the world, "and especially Damascus and those countries there," than from hope of profit. Ansaldo provides him with a richly laden argosy, and the little fleet sets sail. After they have been a few days at sea, Giannetto observes an inviting port, and learns from the Captain that it belongs to a beautiful widow who has been the ruin of many gentlemen. For she has made it absolute that every gentleman adventurer who arrives at the port shall be her companion through one night, during which if he can obtain from her a husband's privilege, she will on the morrow make him lord of herself and the fair country round; but if he fail he is to forfeit his ship and its cargo to his fair entertainer. Gian netto slips away from his companions in the night and makes sail for this port, the name of which is Belmont. He is received by the lady with great honor, informed of the custom of the place in regard to strangers like himself, accepts the conditions, and passes the day and evening in entertainments befitting the rank Mr. Collier has reprinted this story in the second volume of his Shake speare's Library, accompanied by a not very faithful translation, originally published in 1755. |