FTER Nature had conceived and brought forth the suzerain of all poetical kings, came Chance and the Genius of Blunder to preside over the birth of the printed text. The malignity of these two powerful foes, however, was relaxed in favour of a few plays. Of these "The Merchant of Venice" was certainly one. The first edition was a quarto published in 1600. This was followed in the same year by another quarto. Between them and the text of the first folio the differences are not sufficiently important to detain us here. That the play existed in 1598 is clear from its figuring in the "Palladis Tamia" of Francis Meres. How much of the plot, and how much of the central idea of a play are invented by a dramatist are not, by any means, such un important questions as many Shakespearean critics are in the habit of assuming. For, as the present writer has remarked in a treatise upon poetry, “an artist's an artist's power of thought is properly shown, not in the direct enunciation of ideas, but in mastery over motif." Whether Shakespeare could or could not have invented plots in the same way that Ben Jonson invented plots, or in the same way that Victor Hugo invented the plot of "Le Roi s'Amuse," we have but little means of guessing, for, with the exception of "The Tempest," there is, perhaps, no play of his that shows that he ever tried to do so. As a successful caterer for the public taste he knew that his clients wanted dramatic renderings of familiar plots. He gave them what they wanted, and in doing this brought into play, and developed to perfection, a dramatic faculty above that of any other poet. But it is surely wrong to say that if he had invented all the superb stories (the common property of the legendary lore of the world) which he turned into superb plays, his genius would not have appeared more gigantic than it even now appears. Although it is matter of familiar knowledge, however, that no part of the plot of "The Merchant of Venice was invented by him, this fact does not prevent certain German critics from writing long treatises upon the plot of the play-treatises in which the mere story is discussed as though it were a great symbolical invention of Shakespeare's charged with profound generalisations on "the spirit of the law," "the letter of the law," and other subjects equally interesting to the frequenters of the old Blackfriars and Globe theatres. Like all wild tales of In this kind-tales conceived not by allegorising philosophers, but by a popular imagination with wide wings and no feet, the story of the bond came from the East. I fail myself to see, as some do, its connection with the story in the "Mahábhárata" of the trial of King Usinára. But there is another Eastern story-a story told in a Persian manuscript (first brought forward in England in 1793), which is really the story of Shylock's bond, except that the Jew's cruelty is inspired by lust instead of revenge. As, however, the lost leaves at the beginning and the end of the MS. have never been found, the age of this Persian story remains still uncertain. The first appearance of “The Bond Story" in European literature seems to have been in the "Gesta Romanorum." English it first appeared in a translation of the "Cursor Mundi," made towards the end of the thirteenth century, but first published by the admirable "Early English Text Society" about a quarter of a century ago. In it the prototype of Shylock appears, but not that of Portia. Afterwards came the first English translation of the "Gesta Romanorum," which gives us the Jew but not the Belmont lady. It was, however, from the story in the "Pecorone," a fourteenth century collection of stories, by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, that the full plot of "The Merchant of Venice" was taken. Here the Ansaldo of the Italian story evidently suggested the Antonio of Shakespeare. The Jew of this story is a mere money-lender, having no personal animosity against the borrower, and the forfeiture of the pound of Ansaldo's flesh is inserted by the Jew in the bond, not to "feed fat any ancient grudge," |