Merchant of Venice

Written: 1596-1597; Texts: Quartos 1600, 1619, 1637; First Folio 1623 (Comedy)
Sources: The story of Giannetto in Il Pecorone by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino; Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533). Orlando Furioso (1516)(The English translation by John Harington in 1591); Bandello, Matteo (1485-1561) Novelle (1554-73) 22th story.; Edmund Spenser (c.1552-99). The Faerie Queene (1590); Francois de Belleforest (1530-83). Histories Tragiques (1568) Book 3; Whetstone, George The Roke of Regard (1576) – Claudio's rejection of Hero at her own wedding; Castiglione, Baldassare (1478-1529) The Book of the Courtier (1528)
Characters: Portia, Bassanio, Shylock, Antonio, Gratiano, Lorenzo, Salerio, Prince of Morocco, Jessica
Setting: Venice
Time: c. 1595

Shylock raises an ugly question. Was Shakespeare anti-semitic? Scholar George L. Kittredge wrote, “Shakespeare was not attacking the Jewish people when he gave Shylock the villain's role. If so, he was attacking the Moors in Titus Andronicus, the Spaniards in Much Ado, the Italians in Cymbeline, the Viennese in Measure for Measure, the Danes in Hamlet, the Britons in King Lear, the Scots in Macbeth, and the English in Richard the Third.” Others would find that reasoning specious. Ron Rosenbaum, who sees Shylock as an anti-semitic creation, cuts Shakespeare a little slack by writing, “I think, in his defense, it can certainly be said Shakespeare wasn't consumed by anti-Semitism; nothing like this shows up elsewhere in his other plays but that does not vitiate the ineradicable ugliness of its appearance in The Merchant of Venice.” Does it matter that Kittredge wrote his observation before the Holocaust and Rosenbaum wrote his after? Or does that question spur us to ask what the Elizabethan mindset was at the time Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice? Whatever the answers to those questions, most scholars of Shakespeare know better than to conclude too much about Shakespeare's biography or personal beliefs based on the characters he created in his plays or the topics he explored. For example, scholars of this play, which deals explicitly with conflicts of Christians and Jews – in fact, scholars of his entire corpus of works – still do not know whether Shakespeare was Catholic, Protestant, atheist or agnostic. Anti-semitism is unquestionably a topic of this play. Shakespeare addresses it head-on, and clearly, the Christian characters are not paragons of Christian virtues. The notes on the passages below explore some of the themes, including anti-semitism, that this play addresses.