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Portrait of The Merchant of Venice

Shakespeare · Comedies

The Merchant of Venice

c. 1596–97

Comedy — from Ser Giovanni Fiorentino's Il Pecorone, with the casket story from the Gesta Romanorum

To fund his friend Bassanio's courtship of the heiress Portia, the merchant Antonio borrows from the moneylender Shylock and signs a bond forfeiting a pound of his own flesh. When Antonio's ships fail, Shylock — whose daughter has eloped with a Christian — demands the penalty in court, and Portia, disguised as a young lawyer, defeats him on a technicality. Listed with the comedies, it is now usually played as a problem play about prejudice and law.

How to spot them

  • ▸Venice and the fairy-tale estate of Belmont
  • ▸A bond whose penalty is a pound of flesh, to be cut nearest the heart
  • ▸Three caskets of gold, silver and lead decide who may marry the heiress
  • ▸A heroine disguises herself as a young doctor of laws to argue a trial
  • ▸A ring given as a pledge and then handed to the disguised lawyer who saved the day

Scenes, characters & lines

'Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?'

Shylock's speech in Act 3, arguing common humanity and the right to revenge

'The quality of mercy is not strained, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven'

Portia, disguised as the lawyer Balthazar, in the trial scene

'All that glisters is not gold'

The scroll in the golden casket, found by the Prince of Morocco

'In sooth, I know not why I am so sad'

Antonio's opening line

A daughter elopes with a Christian, taking a turquoise ring given by her mother

Jessica leaves with Lorenzo and trades the ring for a monkey, to her father's grief

A court finds the bond valid but forbids the shedding of one drop of blood

Portia's ruling, which turns the penalty back on the plaintiff

'How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!'

Lorenzo to Jessica at Belmont in the final act, on the music of the spheres

Key ideas

  • The trial turns on the letter of the law used against the man who insisted on it, a mercy argued for and then withheld
  • Shylock's forced conversion at the end is the crux of the modern debate over whether the play is antisemitic or about antisemitism

Quick-fire facts

  • •First printed in quarto in 1600; grouped with the comedies in the First Folio of 1623
  • •The title character is Antonio, not Shylock, who appears in only five scenes
  • •The caskets bear the mottoes about gaining, getting and hazarding; Bassanio chooses the lead one
  • •Gratiano and Portia's waiting-woman Nerissa marry alongside Bassanio and Portia, and join the ring trick played on their new husbands
  • •Edmund Kean's sympathetic Shylock in 1814 transformed the role's stage tradition; Henry Irving later made it a tragic part
  • •The play was performed in Nazi Germany as propaganda, and many postwar productions confront that history directly
  • •Michael Radford's 2004 film starred Al Pacino as Shylock and Jeremy Irons as Antonio
  • •Launcelot Gobbo, the clown, leaves Shylock's service for Bassanio's and torments his blind father, Old Gobbo

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources