The Merchant of Venice: Texts and Contexts

390 Pages·2002·36.1 MB·English

by  William Shakespeare (auth.)

of
The Merchant Venice
Texts and Contexts
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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of
The Merchant Venice
Texts and Contexts
Edited by
M. LINDSAY KAPLAN
Georgetown University
palgrave
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE by William Shakespeare, Edited by
M. Lindsay Kaplan
The Library of Congress has catalogued the paperback edition as follows:
2001094884
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f e d c b a
ISBN 978-1-349-63494-1 ISBN 978-1-137-07784-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-07784-4
Cover art: Civitatis Orbis Terrarum. By permission of The Folger Shakespeare
Library; Illustration from the codice De Sphaera. Courtesy of the Ministerio per
I Bene e le Attivita Culturali. Biblioteca Estense U niversitaria.
Acknowledgments and copyrights can be found at the back of the book on pages J6I-62,
which constitute an extension of the copyright page
About the Series
Shakespeare wrote his plays in a culture unlike, though related to, the cul
ture of the emerging twenty-first century. The Bedford Shakespeare Series
resituates Shakespeare within the sometimes alien context of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries while inviting students to explore ways in which
Shakespeare, as text and as cultural icon, continues to be part of contempo
rary life. Each volume frames a Shakespearean play with a wide range of
written and visual material from the early modern period, such as homilies,
polemical literature, emblem books, facsimiles of early modern documents,
maps, woodcut prints, court records, other plays, medical tracts, ballads,
chronicle histories, and travel narratives. Selected to reveal the many ways in
which Shakespeare's plays were connected to the events, discourses, and
social structures of his time, these documents and illustrations also show the
contradictions and the social divisions in Shakespeare's culture and in the
plays he wrote. Engaging critical introductions and headnotes to the pri
mary materials help students identify some of the issues they can explore by
reading these texts with and against one another, setting up a two-way traf
fic between the Shakespearean text and the social world these documents
help to construct.
Jean E. Howard
Columbia University
Series Editor
v

About This Volume
The texts collected in these pages offer a wide range of perspectives from
which to consider the issues raised in The Merchant of Venice. Some of these
texts were written and published before the composition of the play, some did
not appear until afterward, and some would never have been available for
Shakespeare's perusal. But they all provide a sense of the range of opinions
and controversies contemporary to the writing and performance of the play. I
have also included texts written by Jews in the period to widen the interpre
tive frame in which the play could be considered. For all of these texts, my
aim has been to provide perspective on the play as well as deepen its complex
ities and examine its assumptions. The views presented here raise many ques
tions, and I opted in the introductory notes to help articulate those questions
rather than try to provide the answers. My hope is that students will bring
their own interpretive power both to these texts and to the play and struggle
to find satisfctory answers to The Merchant of Venice's challenging questions.
EDITORIAL POLICY
The text of The Merchant of Venice reproduced here is that edited by David
Bevington in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, fourth edition (New York:
Addison Wesley Longman, 1997), complete with his notes and glosses, with
VII
VIII I ABOUT THIS VOLUME
a few changes in glosses and in lineation. Most of the texts I selected for this
volume are the first or only editions, though I occasionally chose editions
closer to the date of the play when available. I have modernized the spelling
and punctuation of these texts and provided glosses to explain some refer
ences as well as archaic terms and phrases. I have relied on the Oxford English
Dictionary for definitions of obscure terms and phrases. Although I have
modernized spelling generally in the texts, I have left varieties of spelling for
names that are spelled differently in different texts or in the titles of texts
(such as Steven or Stephen Ibara or Ibarra, or Coryats Crudities), since
spelling was not fixed in the period. I have also included texts in modern
editions and provided additional glosses where needed. With regard to
dates, I use the more neutral B.C.E. (before the common era) and C.E. (com
mon era) rather than B.C. and A.D. For the manuscript of the Lopez exami
nation, I have modernized the date to 1594, though the original was given
in the old style, February 1593/4. The Dictionary of National Biography
(DNB) provided me with the biographical material in the shorter introduc
tions to the excerpted text, unless otherwise indicated.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am fortunate to have had the help of a number of students, colleagues,
and friends in preparing this volume. Kate Appleton and Claire Leheny
provided much needed research and transcription assistance, and Andrew
Dinan provided the translation for Andrew Willet's De Universali. I owe a
large debt of thanks to all of the readers for the project, who offered useful
and insightful advice, but especially to Fran Dolan and Jean Howard, who
gave invaluable, lengthy responses to the manuscript on more than one
occasion. I am also grateful to Kim Hall, Michael Ragussis, Jason Rosen
blatt, Bruce Smith, Yehudah Mirsky, Gail Kern Paster, and Leon Wieseltier
for suggesting texts and offering practical advice and sympathetic ears. Ruth
Lubarsky's excellent Guide to English Illustrated Books, ISJ6-r6oJ made it
much easier to select illustrations for this volume. The Folger Library staff
was especially supportive and helpful to me in my research. I thank George
town University for sabbatical leave and the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Studies for grants
that supported this work. Special appreciation goes to Carrie Thompson at
Bedford/St. Martin's for her cheerful and effective efforts on my behalf,
to Kate Cohen for her wonderful copy editing, to Emily Berleth at Bedford/
St. Martin's, and to Leslie Connor, Project Manager at Publisher's Studio/
Stratford Publishing. Final thanks go to Karen Henry, who patiently
ABOUT THIS VOLUME I IX
encouraged me throughout the lengthy process of compiling this volume
and provided needed advice at crucial moments.
I am especially grateful for the support my mother, Anne Kaplan, and my
sister, Rachel Kaplan, provided throughout. Deepest gratitude goes to my
husband, Norman Eisen, who gave me the love and encouragement that got
me through the most difficult moments of this project. My work on this
volume was interrupted by the death of my beloved father, Jerome Eugene
Kaplan (z"l). When I returned to working on this play, which represents
troubled relations between fathers and daughters, I had numerous occasions
to consider how blessed I was and am to have had such a loving, supportive,
and generous father, whose unique relationship to Judaism strengthened
and fostered my own. My daughter, Tamar Yohanna, was born just as I was
completing this manuscript. As a new mother I am grateful to have my
father's example of good parenting to follow. This edition is dedicated to his
memory.
Yehudah Yitzchak ben Elihu v'Chana (z"l)
"And this [is the blessing] for Yehudah: and [Moses] said, 'Hear, G-d, the
voice ofYehudah, and bring him to his people; let his hands be sufficient for
him, and be You a help to him from his foes."'
Deuteronomy 33=7
M. Lindsay Kaplan
Georgetown University