ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice has received over the centuries a great deal of scholarly and critical commentary, much of it detailed and erudite. The present essay adds to that commentary by enlarging, in some very limited respects, an interpretation of the play as the portrait of a famed contemporary society. I have written elsewhere about the degree to which, in my view, the play echoes the Venetian world of Shakespeare’s day, specifically in regard to social and commercial decline, the transfer of cultural value from the island city to the terra firma, and the characterizing behaviour of Venetian youth.1 These matters are among the play’s sources, not in the sense of fictions or historical descriptions ‘written up’ by the playwright in the course of constructing his play, but as impressions or broad understandings within which his treatment of character and narrative develops. The pertinence of such understandings is difficult to demonstrate, more difficult certainly than the citation of verbal parallels which indicate that the playwright has been before us in a given literary territory. In this essay, I shall ask the reader whether the historical materials I quote consort with a receptive reading of the play. I shall not seek to prove the author’s first-hand acquaintance with them.
