ABSTRACT

Francis Meres mentioned the play, so it must have been performed before 7 September, 1598. An allusion to Robert Cecil the hunchback as St. Gobbo in a letter of 1596 may have no significance, since 'Gobbo' was Italian for 'hunchback', and Qx, F1 and F3 call Gobbo 'Iabbe', i.e. Job, which would suit his catalogue of sufferings in Shylock's household (11.2). Similarly the reference to the 'Wolf, ... hang'd for human slaughter' may not be to Roderigo Lopez, executed on 7 June, 1594, after being accused by Essex of trying to poison Queen Elizabeth and the Pretender to the throne of Portugal ( cf. Brown, Arden 1955, p. xxiii). But Antonio may get his name 'from the Pretender, Antonio Perez. The allusion to the 'wealthy Andrew' (l.i.27) may date the play by referring to the Spanish vessel the St. Andrew captured at Cadiz in I 596. The style certainly suggests 1596 rather than I594· Nothing is known of'the Venesyon comedey' entered in Henslowe's Diary on I 5 August, I 594·

The Merchant of Venice Usurers: The other very liuely discrybing howe seditious estates, with their owne deuises, false friendes, with their own swoordes, and rebellious commons in their owne snares are ouerthrowne: neither with Amorous gesture wounding the eye: nor with slouenly talke hurting the cares of the chast hearers.' (Ed. Arber, p. 40.)

Since The Merchant of Venice includes features which might be meant by 'the bloody mindes of usurers' (the Bond Story) and 'the greedinesse of worldly chusers' (the Casket Story), The Jew may have been Shakespeare's source. S. A. Small has tried to reconstruct thi~ old play (MLR XXVI, 1931, 281-7). Other critics such as C. Knight and T. M. Parrott have declared that no dramatist of 1579 could have combined two such plots. The defeated suitors, writes the latter, are not really guilty of greediness. But they may have been greedy in Tlze Jew, and Gosson might well have thought so anyway, because they were 'worldly chusers'. The two plots may not have been united as in Shakespeare but given as separate examples of money-love (cf. The Three Ladies of London, infra). Honigmann regards the two phrases as repetitious (MLR XLIX, 1954, 293-307), since usurers are greedy and 'worldly chusers' and often described as 'bloody' even when they seek no pound of flesh. Brown (Arden 1955) considers the theory that The Jew was the sourceplay as 'most insecure'. Unproven it certainly is, but the possibility remains. The passages given below may be no more than analogues, but as Brown declares 'it remains at least a strong probability that Shakespeare himself adapted the story as found in ll Pecorone. Shakespeare often used more than one source for a single play, and there is no reason why he should not have done so for The Merchant.'