The Merchant of Venice

• 1. Introduction

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  The Merchant of Venice, a play by William Shakespeare, hinges on a single clause in a loan agreement: if the borrower defaults, the lender may cut exactly one pound of flesh from the borrower's body. That condition was not written as a threat. It was offered, and accepted, as a joke. By the time the play's court scene arrives, no one is laughing. What begins as a romantic comedy about a young man wooing an heiress turns into one of the most contested works in the English language, a play that scholars have called both a profound antisemitic document and a passionate plea for the equal humanity of all people. The questions it raises have never been settled: Was Shakespeare exposing prejudice or feeding it? Is Shylock a villain or a victim? And what does it mean that audiences for more than four hundred years have been unable to agree?

• 2. The Pound of Flesh

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  Bassanio, a young Venetian of noble rank, needs 3,000 ducats to court the wealthy heiress Portia at Belmont. He has already squandered his estate, so he turns to his friend Antonio, a prominent merchant whose capital is tied up in ships sailing to Tripolis, the Indies, Mexico, and England. Antonio cannot provide the money directly, but he agrees to stand as guarantor for a loan. The lender is Shylock, a Jewish moneylender whom Antonio has previously abused in public, spitting on him and calling him names. Shylock is at first reluctant, citing that abuse. Then he offers terms that seem almost generous: no interest at all, only the condition that if Antonio cannot repay by the agreed date, Shylock may take a pound of Antonio's flesh from wherever he chooses. Antonio, reading this as a display of goodwill, signs. When Antonio's ships are reported lost at sea, the bond comes due. Shylock, by then enraged that his daughter Jessica has eloped with the Christian Lorenzo, converted, and taken a large portion of his wealth including a turquoise ring given to him by his late wife Leah, refuses every offer of money in its place. He appears before the court of the Duke of Venice demanding his pound of flesh, and the Duke, though wishing to spare Antonio, cannot simply void a legal contract.

• 3. Portia's Disguise

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  Portia is introduced as a wealthy heiress whose late father has bound her suitors to a riddling test: three caskets of gold, silver, and lead, only one of which contains her portrait. The Prince of Morocco chooses gold; the Prince of Arragon chooses silver. Both leave empty-handed. Bassanio chooses lead, guided in part by a song sung in Portia's household about how "fancy" is born in the eye rather than the heart, and wins her hand. Once she hears that Antonio faces death, Portia sends her servant Balthazar to consult her cousin Bellario, a lawyer in Padua, and then travels to Venice herself. In the Duke's court she arrives disguised as a young male doctor of the law named Balthazar, with Nerissa alongside her dressed as a law clerk. Her famous speech asking Shylock to show mercy falls on deaf ears. So Portia pivots to the law itself. She notes that Shylock's bond entitles him to flesh, not blood. Should a single drop of blood be shed, his lands and goods are forfeit under Venetian law. He must cut precisely one pound, no more and no less; if the scale shifts by even a hair's weight, he dies and all his goods are confiscate. Shylock, stripped of his legal footing, collapses. Portia then invokes a Venetian statute under which an alien who attempts the life of a citizen forfeits his property, half to the state and half to his intended victim. The Duke spares Shylock's life, and Antonio requests that his half-share be held in trust until Shylock's death, when it would pass to Lorenzo and Jessica. Antonio also demands that Shylock convert to Christianity and bequeath his entire estate to the same couple. Shylock accepts with the words "I am content."

• 4. Sources and Dating

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  Shakespeare is believed to have written The Merchant of Venice between 1596 and 1598. The playwright Francis Meres mentioned it in 1598, confirming it was already known on the stage by then. A reference in the play to the ship called the Andrew is thought to allude to the Spanish vessel St. Andrew, captured by the English at Cadiz in 1596, placing composition most likely in the 1596-97 period. James Roberts entered the play in the Register of the Stationers Company on the 22nd of July 1598 under the title "the Marchaunt of Venyce or otherwise called the Jewe of Venyce." On the 28th of October 1600, Roberts transferred his right to the stationer Thomas Heyes, who published the first quarto before the end of that year. The 1600 edition is regarded as accurate and reliable, and it is the foundation of the text that appeared in the 1623 First Folio. The play's central situations were not Shakespeare's invention. The forfeit bond appears in the 14th-century Italian tale Il Pecorone by Giovanni Fiorentino, published in Milan in 1558. The trial scene has parallels in The Orator by Alexandre Sylvane, published in English translation in 1596. The three-casket story comes from Gesta Romanorum, a collection of tales compiled at the end of the 13th century. Shakespeare wove these separate threads into a single plot, but the ingredients had circulated across Europe for generations.

• 5. Shylock on Stage

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  For most of the play's early performance history, Shylock was played as either a repulsive clown or a monster of pure evil. The record of the earliest surviving performance places it at the court of King James in the spring of 1605. By 1701, George Granville staged an adaptation titled The Jew of Venice with Thomas Betterton as Bassanio, and Thomas Doggett played Shylock comically, perhaps even farcically, for the next forty years. In 1741, Charles Macklin returned to the original text at Drury Lane in a production judged highly successful. But it was Edmund Kean, in the first half of the 19th century, who broke the comic tradition and began playing Shylock as a figure deserving sympathy. Kean's interpretation built his reputation as an actor, and from his time forward nearly every major actor who took the role followed the sympathetic approach, with the notable exception of Edwin Booth, who played Shylock as a simple villain. Henry Irving's portrayal of an aristocratic, proud Shylock, first seen at the Lyceum in 1879 with Ellen Terry as Portia, was called "the summit of his career." Jacob Adler, the most notable interpreter of the early 20th century, played Shylock in Yiddish-language translation, first in Manhattan's Yiddish Theatre District on the Lower East Side and later on Broadway, where he performed the role in Yiddish in an otherwise English-language production. In a 1902 interview with Theater magazine, Adler argued that Shylock is a wealthy man, "rich enough to forgo the interest on three thousand ducats," and that Antonio "has insulted the Jew and spat on him, yet he comes with hypocritical politeness to borrow money of him."

• 6. Antisemitism and Its Discontents

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  English Jews had been expelled under Edward I in 1290 and were not permitted to return until 1656 under Oliver Cromwell, meaning Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice for an audience that had almost no direct experience of Jewish people. John Donne, a contemporary of Shakespeare and Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, gave a sermon in 1624 perpetuating the Blood Libel, the entirely unsubstantiated lie that Jews ritually murdered Christians. In Venice and elsewhere, Jews were required to wear a yellow or red hat in public at all times and were confined to a ghetto. The play's title page in the quarto suggests it was sometimes known as The Jew of Venice in its own day, linking it to Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta from the early 1590s. The Nazis found the play useful. Shortly after Kristallnacht in 1938, The Merchant of Venice was broadcast over German airwaves for propagandistic ends. Productions followed in Lubeck in 1938, Berlin in 1940, and elsewhere within Nazi territory. Notably, Nazi authorities worried that Shylock's speeches would generate too much audience sympathy, and they excised his final speech in many productions. American literary critic Harold Bloom wrote in 1998 that "one would have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to recognise that Shakespeare's grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-semitic work." Yet Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shylock is given "more theatrical vitality, quite simply more urgent, compelling life, than anyone else in his world." That tension, between what the play seems to endorse and what it cannot help revealing, is what the British playwright Richard Cumberland tried to address as early as 1785, when a character in his Observer series argued that "the odious character of Shylock has brought little less persecution upon us, poor scattered sons of Abraham, than the Inquisition itself." Cumberland's response was to write a play called The Jew in 1794, in which his sympathetically drawn Jewish character Sheva became the first known attempt by a dramatist to reverse the stereotype Shylock had done so much to entrench.

• 7. The Speech That Will Not Rest

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  Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech arrives in the middle of the play when Salarino asks why Shylock would want a pound of flesh, since flesh can feed nothing. Shylock answers that it will feed his revenge, and then pivots to a catalogue of everything Antonio has done to him: disgraced him, hindered him by half a million, laughed at his losses, mocked his gains, scorned his nation, thwarted his bargains, cooled his friends, and heated his enemies. "And what's his reason? I am a Jew." What follows is an argument for shared human biology that reaches across the centuries: "Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?" The speech concludes not with a call for peace but with a promise of revenge modeled on Christian example: "The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction." Critics who read the speech as redemptive emphasize its opening equality argument. Critics who resist that reading emphasize its closing threat. Both readings draw on the same words. In Nazi Germany, concerns that the speech would elicit too much sympathy led to its excision. In the 2002 film The Pianist, Henryk Szpilman reads it to his brother Wladyslaw in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation. In Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List, SS Lieutenant Amon Goth quotes it when deciding whether to rape his Jewish maid. The speech has escaped the play entirely, becoming a text that the world reaches for when it needs to articulate what it feels like to be treated as less than human. As part of the 500-year anniversary of the Venetian Ghetto, which coincided with the 400-year anniversary of Shakespeare's death, The Merchant of Venice was performed in the ghetto's main square in 2016 by the Compagnia de' Colombari.