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INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

THE MERCHAnt of Venice,' like A MidsummerNight's Dream,' was first printed in 1600; and it had a further similarity to that play from the circumstance of two editions appearing in the same year-the one bearing the name of a publisher, Thomas Heyes, the other that of a printer, J. Roberts. The play was not reprinted till it appeared in the folio of 1623. In that edition there are a few variations from the quartos. All these editions present the internal evidence of having been printed from correct copies. The Merchant of Venice' is one of the plays of Shakspere mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598, and it is the last mentioned in his list.

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Stephen Gosson, who, in 1579, was moved to publish a tract called The School of Abuse, containing a pleasant invective against poets, pipers, players, jesters, and such like caterpillars of the commonwealth,' thus describes a play of his time :-" The Jew, shown at the Bull, representing the greedyness of worldly choosers, and the bloody minds of usurers.' Whatever might have been the plot of The Jew' mentioned by Gosson, the story of the bond was ready to Shakspere's hand, in a ballad to which Warton first drew attention. He considers that the ballad was written before The Merchant of Venice.' But this ballad of 'Gernutus' wants that remarkable feature of the play, the intervention of Portia to save the life of the Merchant; and this, to our minds, is the strongest confirmation that the ballad preceded the comedy. Shakspere found that incident

VOL. II.

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in the source from which the ballad-writer professed to derive his history :—

"In Venice towne not long agoe,

A cruel Jew did dwell,
Which lived all on usurie,

As Italian writers tell."

It was from an Italian writer, Ser Giovanni, the author of a collection of tales called 'Il Pecorone,' written in the fourteenth century, and first published at Milan in 1558, that Shakspere unquestionably derived some of the incidents of his story, although he might be familiar with another version of the same tale.

"It is well known," says Mrs. Jameson," that "The Merchant of Venice' is founded on two different tales; and in weaving together his double plot in so masterly a manner, Shakspere has rejected altogether the character of the astutious lady of Belmont, with her magic potions, who figures in the Italian novel. With yet more refinement, he has thrown out all the licentious part of the story, which some of his cotemporary dramatists would have seized on with avidity, and made the best or the worst of it possible; and he has substituted the trial of the caskets from another source.' That source is the Gesta Romanorum.'

In dealing with the truly dramatic subject of the forfeiture of the bond, Shakspere had to choose between one of two courses that lay open before him. The "Gesta Romanorum' did not surround the debtor and the creditor with any prejudices. We hear nothing of one being a Jew, the other a Christian. There is a remarkable story told by Gregorio Leti, in his 'Life of * Characteristics of Women, vol. i. p. 72.

Pope Sixtus the Fifth,' in which the debtor and creditor of The Merchant of Venice' change places. The debtor is the Jew,—the revengeful creditor the Christian; and this incident is said to have happened at Rome in the time of Sir Francis Drake. This, no doubt, was a pure fiction of Leti, whose narratives are by no means to be received as authorities; but it shows that he felt the intolerance of the old story, and endeavoured to correct it, though in a very inartificial manner. Shakspere took the story as he found it in those narratives which represented the popular prejudice. If he had not before him the ballad of 'Gernutus,' (upon which point it is difficult to decide,) he had certainly access to the tale of the Pecorone.' If he had made the contest connected with the story of the bond between two of the same faith, he would have lost the most powerful hold which the subject possessed upon the feelings of an audience two centuries and a half ago. If he had gone directly counter to those feelings, (supposing that the story which Leti tells had been known to him, as some have supposed,) his comedy would have been hooted from the stage.

"The Prioress's Tale' of Chaucer belonged to the period when the Jews were robbed, maimed, banished, and most foully vilified, with the universal consent of the powerful and the lowly, the learned and the igno

rant:

"There was in Asie, in a gret citee,
Amonges Cristen folk a Jewerie,
Sustened by a lord of that contree,

For foul usure, and lacre of vilanie,
Hateful to Crist, and to his compagnie."

It was scarcely to be avoided in those times that even

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