STEPHEN GOSSON in his Schoole of Abuse (1589) speaks approvingly of a play called The Jew ‘showne at the Bull … representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers, and bloody mindes of usurers’. It has been argued that the worldly choosers were those who chose the gold and silver caskets, and that the bond story exhibits the bloody minds of usurers. On the other hand, it is pointed out that dramatists before 1579 did not, so far as we know, have the technical skill to combine two plots in this way, that both Gosson’s phrases may refer to a single plot, and that ‘bloody’, a common epithet for both usurers and Jews, does not necessarily imply the use of the pound-of-flesh story.1
Two other lost plays, The Venesyon Comodye (acted 1594) and Dekker’s The Jew of Venice (of unknown date, but probably not before 1596) have been mentioned as possible sources of The Merchant of Venice,2 but nothing is known about them. Although, therefore, there may have been a dramatic source for Shakespeare’s play, it is just as likely that he dramatized the story given in Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone.3 In this tale (IV. I) Ansaldo is a wealthy merchant of Venice whose godson, Giannetto, tries on two occasions to win the lady of Belmonte, a rich widow who agrees to marry the first man who enjoys her, on condition that should he fail he should forfeit all his wealth. On both occasions Giannetto is given drugged wine and he falls asleep without enjoying the lady. He is so ashamed that he tells Ansaldo that he has twice been shipwrecked. Ansaldo borrows 10,000 ducats from a Jew, to enable him to equip a third ship for Giannetto, the condition of the loan being that if the money is not repaid on St John’s Day, he will forfeit a pound of his flesh. Giannetto, being warned by a maid not to drink the wine, pretends to be asleep, enjoys the lady, marries her, and is proclaimed sovereign. Until St John’s Day, he forgets about Ansaldo’s bargain with the Jew; and when she hears why he is so sad, his wife sends him to Venice with 100,000 ducats, following him disguised as a lawyer. The Jew refuses the ducats ‘so that he could say he had killed the greatest of the Christian merchants’. The ‘lawyer’ proclaims that she will settle any dispute and Giannetto persuades the Jew to appear before her. She advises him to accept the 100,000 ducats, but he refuses. She tells him to take the pound of flesh and then, at the last moment, warns him that if he takes more than a pound, or sheds a drop of blood, he will be executed. The Jew then asks for the money instead, which is refused him, and he finally tears up the bond. Giannetto offers the 100,000 ducats to the lawyer, but she demands his ring. On his return to Belmonte with Ansaldo, the Lady accuses Giannetto of giving the ring to one of his former mistresses. He bursts into tears and the Lady explains. Ansaldo, somewhat oddly, is married to the girl who warned Giannetto not to drink the drugged wine. Shakespeare retained the main outlines of the story, but made considerable alterations, as we shall see.
The pound-of-flesh story was known to Shakespeare in two or three other versions. In Alexander Silvayn’s The Orator, translated by L. Piot (1596), there are speeches by the Jew and the Christian which clearly influenced Shakespeare’s trial-scene.4 The Jew begins by saying: ‘Impossible is it to breake the credite of trafficke amongst men without great detriment vnto the Commonwealth’. This idea is used three times in the course of the play. The Jew refers to those who ‘bind al the bodie … vnto an intollerable slauerie’, as Shylock refers to the treatment of slaves in Venice. The Jew says: ‘A man may aske why I would not rather take siluer of this man, then his flesh’. Shylock similarly remarks:
You’ll ask me why I rather choose to have
A weight of carrion flesh than to receive
Three thousand ducats.
(IV. i. 40–2)
These points are not made in Il Pecorone; but it should be mentioned that the Jew’s speech is made after he has been warned that if he cuts more or less than a pound, he will be beheaded, and that there is no mention made of a drop of blood.
Another version of the pound-of-flesh story is to be found in Anthony Munday’s Zelauto (1580);5 but in this case the usurer is not a Jew, and he demands not a pound of flesh, but the right eyes of two victims. The motive is jealousy: one of the men had married Cornelia, a girl the usurer had himself wished to marry, and the other has married the usurer’s daughter. The two brides disguise themselves as scholars and attend the trial. The judge appeals in vain for mercy, contrasting Christian duty with Turkish practice. The disguised women intervene and the usurer is defeated by Cornelia:
If in pulling foorth their eyes, you diminishe the least quantitie of blood out of their heads, ouer and besides their only eyes, or spyll one drop in taking them out: before you styrre your foote, you shall stand to the losse of bothe your owne eyes.
(Bullough, I. 489)
John Russell Brown lists a number of parallels with The Merchant of Venice.6 The usurer, for example, is made to leave all of which he dies possessed to his son-in-law. Perhaps the most striking parallel, however, is the following:
In fayth, then fare well frost, more such haue we lost…. A colde sute, and a harde penniworth haue all they that traffique for such merchandize…. I should haue but a colde sute with my wooing. But belyke you are betrothed already: and that makes you so dayntie, if you be tell me, that I may loose no more labour.
It would seem certain that these lines are echoed in one of the casket-scenes (II. vii. 73–5):
Fare you well, your suit is cold…
Cold indeed, and labour lost,
Then farewell, heat, and welcome, frost.
Another pound-of-flesh story, a ballad about a Jewish usurer, Gernutus, is, in Professor Bullough’s opinion, probably pre-Shakespearian;7 but I incline to the view that it may be influenced by Shakespeare’s play, and also by Robert Wilson’s play, The Three Ladies of London, in which the Jewish usurer is called Gerontus. The ballad describes the Jew at the trial ‘with whetted blade in hand’, and there are a few other, fainter, parallels with Shakespeare’s version.
For the Jessica-Lorenzo plot Shakespeare took some hints from Zelauto in which, as we have seen, the usurer’s daughter becomes his heir. He was also influenced by The Jew of Malta, in which Abigail, Barabas’s daughter, falls in love with a Christian, turns nun, and betrays her father. When she first goes to the nunnery it is in order to secure for her father the treasure he has hidden there. She throws down the money-bags, as Jessica throws down a casket to Lorenzo. Barabas, hugging the bags, exclaims:8
Oh my girle,
My gold, my fortune, my felicity…
Oh girle, oh gold, oh beauty, oh my blisse!
Shylock has the same ludicrous juxtapositions when he hears of his daughter’s flight. It was, perhaps, the revival of The Jew of Malta at the time of the Lopez case, or the later revival in 1596, that led Shakespeare to write of a villainous Jew, perhaps because it was Essex, Southampton’s friend, who had denounced Lopez as a traitor.9
A third source may have contributed to the Jessica plot, a tale by Masuccio di Salerno about a young gentleman of Messina, who falls in love with the daughter of a miser from whom he borrows money, and with the help of a slave-girl, given as security, he robs the miser and elopes with the daughter.10
The casket story was even more popular than that of the pound of flesh. Both were included in the Gesta Romanorum, but only the former in the translations of Wynkyn de Worde (c. 1512) and Richard Robinson (1577, 1595). As the word ‘insculpt’ is used in the latter with regard to the posy on the leaden vessel, and by Morocco in the first of the casket-scenes – and used nowhere else by Shakespeare – it is fairly certain that this is the version he used:11 but the inscription on the leaden casket is quite different from Shakespeare’s, and the other two are interchanged.
The fusion of the casket story with the pound-of-flesh story, whether done by the author of The Jew or by Shakespeare, has several advantages. The heroine of the tale in Il Pecorone, who cheats her lovers by drugging them, and is herself cheated by her maid, would not do as a heroine, in spite of her adventure at the trial. Furthermore Giannetto lies to his generous godfather and shows a callous forgetfulness of his danger. Shakespeare removed both blemishes by substituting the casket story for the Lady of Belmonte’s method of choosing a husband. Instead of being a predatory widow, Portia is a rich heiress, bound by the terms of her father’s will. Bassanio is Antonio’s bosom friend, not his godson; he confesses the reason for his journey to Belmont, and it is Antonio’s ill-fortune, not Bassanio’s forgetfulness, that puts Antonio in Shylock’s power.
The theme of friendship plays a significant part in the play; and the nature of true love is a theme which could be naturally developed from the casket story. This may also have suggested the contrast between the values represented by Bassanio and Antonio on the one hand and Shylock on the other; between the world of Belmont and the commercial world of Venice; while the fact that Shylock was a Jew as well as a usurer enabled Shakespeare to bring out a contrast between the Old and New Testaments, as commonly and misleadingly understood. Indeed, Portia appeals to the common element in the religion of Jew and Christian.
The invention of Shylock’s daughter, suggested by Marlowe or Masuccio, or both, gives the Jew a stronger motive for revenge than the one given in Il Pecorone. It has even been argued, despite Shylock’s initial expression of hatred for Antonio, that he has no intention, at the beginning, of enforcing the bond. Shakespeare adds three further motives: hatred of Antonio as a Christian, hatred of him as an opponent of usury, and hatred of him for his ill-usage – spitting on Shylock’s gaberdine, calling him misbeliever and cut-throat dog. Shylock is not the simple villain of the sources, Shakespeare alone stressing the faith and race of the usurer. It has been suggested that the lenient treatment of Shylock after his defeat would not have satisfied an audience whose anti-semitism had been reactivated by the Lopez trial.12
Shakespeare made many other changes. Nerissa is provided with a more suitable husband than Ansaldo had been, and more suitable than Antonio would have been. Nerissa, despite some speculation to the contrary, does not reveal the secret of the caskets to Bassanio; and she is disguised as a lawyer’s clerk to enable Shakespeare to duplicate the business of the rings. Bassanio gives his ring only at Antonio’s request, a request he could not honourably refuse. The trial, moreover, takes place before the Duke; and Shakespeare dispenses with the constitutional peculiarity of Il Pecorone in which the visiting lawyer is allowed to settle disputes. It may be mentioned that Jessica disguises herself as a boy for her elopement, and that she and Lorenzo recover the audience’s sympathy – if they were in danger of losing it – by Portia’s trust and by their dialogue at the beginning of Act V.