it is just possible, but unlikely, that Shakespeare had read the work in the original French. The play may perhaps safely be dated about 1596'; the evidence will allow of nothing more definite.

The Sources In 1579 Stephen Gosson, who had himself been a writer of plays, published his "School of Abuse," containing "a pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters and such-like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth: setting up the flag of defiance to their mischievous exercise, etc., etc."; the book is a vigorous attack on the acted drama; yet he confesses that some of their plays are without rebuke; which are easily remembered as quickly reckoned'; he proceeds to enumerate four plays; one of these The Jew, shown at the Bull, seems to have been the groundwork of Shakespeare's play, ' representing,' as Gosson tells us, the greediness of worldly choosers, and bloody minds of usurers.' It is clear from these words that the blending of 'The Bond Story' and 'The Three Caskets' was already an accomplished fact in English dramatic literature as early as 1579. There is probably a reference to this old play in a letter of Spenser to Gabriel Harvey of the same year, 1579, in which he signs himself 'He that is fast bound unto thee in more obligations than any merchant of Italy to any Jew there'; and again perhaps the Jew Gerontus in The Three Ladies of London (printed in 1584), who tries to recover a loan of "three thousand ducats for three month" from an Italian merchant Mercatore may have been derived from the same source. "Gernutus" was possibly the name of Shylock's prototype; he is the hero of an old ballad dealing with the bond story.' Its omission of all reference to Portia makes it probable that this ballad preceded Shakespeare's play, though the extant text belongs to the end of the sixteenth or to the beginning of the seventeenth century.*

There are many analogues in European and Oriental literature to the two stories which constitute the main plot of The Merchant of Venice. As far as the pound of flesh and the lady-judge is concerned, the Italian story in the Pecorone of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino is alone of direct importance as an ultimate source of the play (ep. Hazlitt's Shakspere's Library, Part I. Vol. i.). There can be no doubt that Shakespeare was indebted to this novel.

*"A new song, shewing the cruelty of Gernutus a Jew, who lending to a Marchant a hundred crowns, would have a pound of his Flesh, because he could not pay him at the day appointed. To the Tune of Black and Yellow" (cp. Percy's Reliques, etc.; the text will be found in most editions of the play). This ballad must be distinguished from Jordan's ballad of 1664 (cp. Furness' Variorum ed., p. 461), in which the author took strange liberties with Shakespeare's story.

"The Gesta Romanorum"-Richard Robinson's English version entitled, "Records of Ancyent Historyes' (1577)-contains the nearest approximation to the story of The Three Caskets' as treated in this play.*

Shylock's argument in the trial scene (Act IV. i. 89-102) bears a striking resemblance to Declamation 95' in Silvayn's Orator (referred to above) "of a Jew, who would for his debt have a pound of the flesh of a Christian."

A, The Great Channell.
B, Market Place of St Mark.
K, Il Lido.

C, Church of St Peter.

E, Church of St James neere the bridge Rialto.
M, The New Lazaretto.

The elopement of Jessica has been traced by Dunlop to the Fourteenth Tale of Massucio di Salerno, who, enamoured of the daughter of a rich Neapolitan miser, carries her off much in the same way as in the play. It is not improbable that the avaricious father in this tale, the daughter so carefully shut up, the elopement of the lovers managed by the inter

The various analogues of both stories are given in Furness' edition, pp. 287-331.

vention of a servant, the robbery of the father, and his grief at the discovery, which is represented as divided between the loss of his daughter and his ducats, may have suggested the third plot in Shakespeare's drama.

Finally, account must be taken of the influence exercised on Shakespeare by Marlowe's Jew of Malta; the number of parallel passages in the two plays evidences this sufficiently; there is also similarity in the situation between father and daughter ('Oh, girl, oh, gold, oh, beauty, oh, my bliss'); Barabas and his slave should be compared with Shylock and Launcelot Gobbo; Marlowe's counter-argument ad Christianos,' as Ward puts it, anticipates Shakespeare's; yet withal "Marlowe's Jew does not approach so near to Shakespeare's as his Edward the Second does to Richard the Second. Shylock, in the midst of his savage purpose, His motives, feelings, resentments, have something human in them. If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?' Barabas is a mere monster, brought in with a large painted nose to please the rabble. He kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries, invents infernal machines. He is just such an exhibition as, a century or two earlier, might have been played before the Londoners by the Royal Command, when a general pillage and massacre of the Hebrews had been resolved by the Cabinet" (Charles Lamb).

is a man.

Duration of Action.

Various attempts have been made to calculate the action of the play; we know that the whole is supposed to last three months, but ten weeks have already expired in Act III. i.; three months have passed between Bassanio's departure from Venice and his choice of the caskets; his stay at Belmont before the opening of Act III. ii. cannot have been long; Portia bids him 'pause a day or two. . . I would detain you here some month or two.' So many events have, however, happened during the first two acts that one gets the impression that many weeks have passed, and the three months are compressed into seven or eight days. Daniel (Time-Analysis of the Plots of Shakespere's plays) computes the time thus, though one cannot follow him in making Bassanio's sojourn at Belmont last as long as three months :-Day 1, Act I. ; interval-say a week. Day 2, Act II. i.-vii. ; interval one day. Day 3, Act. II. viii.-ix. ; interval—bringing the time to within a fortnight of the maturity of the bond. Day 4, Act III. i.; interval—rather more than a fortnight. Day 5, Act III. ii.-iv. Day 6, Act III. v.-Act. IV. Days 7 and 8, Act V.

Magnificoes of Venice, Officers of the Court of Justice, Gaoler, Servants to Portia, and other Attendants.

SCENE: Partly at Venice, and partly at Belmont, the seat of Portia,
on the Continent.