INTRODUCTION. position. THIS question need not trouble us long, for there is no Date of Comevidence, external or internal, which can determine it with any certainty. The first mention that has been discovered of the play is in Meres' Palladis Tamia, published in 1598, and between that date and 1594 the various editors and commentators place its composition, the majority of them inclining rather to the earlier than the later limit. Plot. Here again we are without any certainty. Various Source of the sources are conjectured, for there are various stories more or less closely resembling the play, some of which were doubtless known to Shakespeare. Thus, the main incidents of the. Bond Story are found in the ballad of Gernutus, probably of earlier origin than the Merchant of Venice; in the Gesta Romanorum, a collection of stories presumably compiled towards the end of the thirteenth century; in Il Pecorone, a novel by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, written in 1378; in a French work by Alexander Siluayn, translated into English in 1596 under the title of The Orator, etc.; while an apologue in the Máhábhárata turns upon a similar point. Again, the Story of the Caskets is in many of its details identical with one told in the Gesta Romanorum, has incidents in common with vii one entitled Barlaam and Josaphat, originally written in Greek, and translated into Latin before the thirteenth century, and with one in Gower's Confessio Amantis. Further, a combination of the Bond and the Caskets stories appears to have preceded the Merchant of Venice in a play named The Jew and Ptolome, mentioned by Gosson. Finally, contemporary events are supposed to have been utilized by Shakespeare. Thus, according to a paper in The Gentleman's Magazine for February, 1880, by Mr. S. L. Lee, the original of Shylock was probably found in the history of one Roderigo Lopez, a Jewish doctor of considerable repute in London, who in 1594 was executed for complicity in a plot against the life of Elizabeth. The circumstances of Lopez' trial, which caused the greatest excitement in London, must have been well known to Shakespeare, who was living there at the time; and to various points in his story Mr. Lee sees allusions in The Merchant of Venice. For instance, in order to extract a confession from him, Lopez was threatened with the rack;* among his associates had been one Antonio Perez, a pretender to the Portuguese throne; he was tried by a jury,† as an alien compassing the death of one in whose land he was living;‡ at his trial, Coke, his prosecutor, laid great stress upon his being a Jew, and spoke of him as one "worse than Judas himself," while the judges, among other epithets, bestowed upon him those of wily and covetous,' 'mercenary' and 'corrupt.'§ 6 * Cp. iii. 2. 25-7. +Cp. iv. 1. 394, 5. # Cp. iv. 1. 344-51. § Cp. passim the epithets applied to Shylock by Antonio and others. |