Shylock speaks of his “sacred nation,” but no one replies with the old anti-Semitic accusation that the Jews are to be hated because they murdered Christ. There are, then, different degrees of prejudice in the play, just as there were different degrees of respect and disrespect for Jews in Shakespeare’s Europe. Some, but not all, of the Christians in the play spit upon Shylock simply because he is a Jew. They are the same Christians who don’t spend much time going to church, giving money to the poor, or turning the other cheek.

Barabas, the Jew of Malta in the play written by Marlowe a few years before, answers to the stereotype of the Jew in love with his moneybags (though he does also love his daughter), whereas Shylock famously appeals to a common humanity that extends across the ethnic divide:

He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what’s the reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?

In Elizabethan England the test for a witch was the pricking of her thumb: if it did not bleed, the woman was in league with the devil. Shylock’s “If you prick us, do we not bleed” is a way of saying “do not demonize the Jews—we are not like witches.” “The villainy you teach me I will execute,” he continues: if you do demonize me, then I will behave diabolically. The alien, the oppressed minority, sees no alternative but to fight back: “And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” This is the point of parting between the Jewish law of “an eye for an eye” and the Christian notion of turning the other cheek and showing the quality of mercy. The consequence of Shylock’s insistence on the law of revenge, his failure to show mercy when Portia gives him the opportunity to do so, is his forced conversion. This sticks in the throat of the modern audience because it shows a lack of respect for religious difference, but for most of Shakespeare’s original audience it would have seemed like an act of mercy. Despite his willingness to murder Antonio, he is still given the opportunity of salvation.

The representation of Shylock as monstrous villain has played a part in the appalling history of European anti-Semitism. But such a representation necessarily occludes the subtler moments of Shakespeare’s characterization. A ring is not only the device whereby Portia and Nerissa assert their moral and verbal superiority over their husbands, but also the means by which Shylock is humanized:

TUBAL    One of them showed me a ring that he had of your daughter for a monkey.

SHYLOCK    Out upon her! Thou torturest me, Tubal. It was my turquoise, I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.

The role of Shylock has been a gift to great actors down the ages because it gives them the opportunity not only to rage and to be outrageous, but also to turn the mood in an instant, to be suddenly quiet and hurt and sorrowful. When Shylock gleefully whets his knife in the trial scene, he presents the very image of a torturer. But he is tortured himself, simply through the memory of a girl called Leah whom he loved and married, and who bore his daughter (who has deserted both him and his faith) and who died and of whom all that remained was a ring that he would not have given for a wilderness of monkeys.

* “The Argument of Comedy” originally appeared in English Institute Essays 1948, ed. D. A. Robertson (1949), and has often been reprinted in critical anthologies. Frye himself adapted it for inclusion in his classic study, Anatomy of Criticism (1957).

ABOUT THE TEXT

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format “quartos” published in Shakespeare’s lifetime and the elaborately produced “First Folio” text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else.

The Merchant of Venice is one of three comedies where the Folio text was printed from a marked-up copy of a First Quarto (the others are Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing). The standard procedure for the modern editor is to use the First Quarto as the copy text but to import stage directions, act divisions, and some corrections from Folio. Our Folio-led policy means that we follow the reverse procedure, using Folio as copy text, but deploying the First Quarto as a “control text” that offers assistance in the correction and identification of compositors’ errors. Differences are for the most part minor.

The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including The Merchant of Venice, so the list here is editorially supplied.