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(Ed.), the Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Per- Wheeler Notes Notes to the Preface 1. James C. Bulman (ed.), The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Per­ formance (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991) p. 1. An excellent edition that came too late to my attention to be used in my text is The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare's Globe Acting Edition), edited by Patrick Tucker and Michael Holden (Lon­ don: M. H. Publications, 1991). For a helpful overview of stage his­ tory and major professional productions (1940-79), see Thomas Wheeler (ed.), The Merchant of Venice: An Annotated Bibliography (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1985) pp. 257-30. Cf. Orson Welles and Roger Hill (eds), The Merchant of Venice, The Mercury Shakespeare (ed. for reading and arr. for staging) (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1939); Toby Lelyveld, Shylock on the Stage (1960; rpt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961); John Russell Brown (ed.), The Merchant of Venice (New Arden Shakespeare) (1955; rpt. London: Methuen, 1969) pp. xxxii-xxxvi; John Russell Brown, 'The Realization of Shylock: A Theatrical Criticism', in Early Shake­ speare, eds John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1961) pp. 186-209; M. M. Mahood (ed.), The Merchant of Venice, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1987) pp. 42-53. 2. On 6 October 1986 at Georgetown University I was fortunate to attend Patrick Stewart's 'Shylock and Other Strangers', a spellbind­ ing one~man, 90-minute 'lecture/performance', in which Stewart em­ phasised the thematic cash nexus of the play and the motivation of money, but he did not focus on the idea of usurious wealth or Shylock's profession of usury. 3. See D. W. Robertson, Jr, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962) pp. 340-2, 352, 355, 365. 4. See T. Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 3. Subsequent quotations are from p. 3. 5. Richard M. Restak, M.D., The Mind (New York: Bantam Books, 1988) p. 205; subsequent quotations are from pp. 261-2. 6. W. Cohen, 'The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism', ELH, 49 (1982) pp. 765-89; quotation is from p. 766. 7. Ibid., pp. 768, 773. 8. See Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989) pp. 199-205. 9. Cohen, pp. 772-3. 285 286 Notes 10. See Thomas Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury [1572], ed. R. H. Tawney (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925) p. 231; d. p. 258. 11. Cohen, p. 774. 12. Ibid., p. 776. 13. Ibid., p. 775. 14. For a list of such attempts, see Richard A. Gray, 'Case Studies in Censorship: Censoring The Merchant of Venice', RSR: Reference Ser­ vices Rev., 19, iii (1991) pp. 55-69. 15. See T. Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). I am grateful to Bruce Smith for bringing this book to my attention. 16. See, e.g., Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare 'Verbatim': The Reproduc­ tion of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1990). 17. See Chapter 1, n. 15. 18. See, e.g., Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Paul Yachnin, 'The Powerless Theater', ELR, 21 (1991) pp. 49-74. Notes to Chapter 1 1. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) p. 222. I am grateful to Father James P. Walsh, S.J., for reading an early draft of this chapter. 2. C. W. R. D. Moseley, Shakespeare's History Plays: Richard II to Henry V, Penguin Critical Studies, ed. Bryan Loughrey (London: Penguin, 1988) p. 5. 3. For Renaissance critical theory, see William Rossky, 'Imagination in the English Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic', Studies in the Renaissance, 5 (1958) pp. 49-73, esp. 58-9. Cf. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1962) Book V, II. 100-9. 4. O. B. Hardison, 'Shakespearean Tragedy: The Mind in Search of the World', Uc, 6 (1986) p. 80. 5. Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954) pp. 3-6, 370-6. 6. Ibid., p. 6. 7. Wolfflin, Principles of Art History, cited in Doran, ibid., p. 6. 8. Doran, ibid., p. 372. 9. M. M. Mahood (ed.), The Merchant of Venice, New Cambridge Shake­ speare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) p. 8. All quotations are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 10. Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of 'The Merchant of Venice' (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) p. 2. Notes 287 11. Horace, Ars Poetica, in Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (1926; rev. & rpt. London: William Heinemann, 1929) pp. 478-9, ll. 333-4, 343-4: 'omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, / Lectorem delectando pariterque monendo'. 12. See Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill, 1970) pp. 23-4; 22, 38, 46. See Spenser, 'A Letter ... to ... Sir Walter Raleigh', in The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) p. 15. 13. Milton, Areopagitica, in John Milton: Prose Selections, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes, Odyssey Series in Literature (New York: Odyssey Press, 1947) pp. 224-5. 14. Nashe, Pierce Penilesse (1592), in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols (1904-10; rpt. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958) vol. 1, pp. 213-14. All references to Nashe's works are to this edition; volume and page will be cited parenthetically in the text. 15. Sidney, p. 44. 16. Arthur Sherbo (ed.), Johnson on Shakespeare: The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958- 90) vol. 7 (1968) p. 62. 17. A. Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1981) p. 4. See also Marion Trousdale's astute analysis of a Sixteenth-century view of language and litera­ ture in Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) esp. pp. 114-18, 125-33, 146-51, 160-72. 18. Kirsch, p. 8. Cf. Barbara Lewalski, 'Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice', SQ, 13 (1962) pp. 327-8. 19. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1962) ll. 589-94, pp. 199-200. 20. Unless specified otherwise, all quotations from the Bible are to the Geneva version (1560) and will be documented parenthetically in the text. See The Geneva Bible (a facsimile of the 1560 edition), intro. by Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 21. J. R. Brown (ed.), The Merchant of Venice (New Arden Shakespeare) (1955; rpt. London: Methuen, 1969) p. xxxvii. 22. See Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge and Use of the Book of Common Prayer (1935; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1970) pp. 6-12, 58-9. Cf. Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shake­ speare's Tragedies (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1987) pp. 27-8. 23. See Noble, pp. 96, 161; Mahood, pp. 184-8; Frank McCombie, 'Wis­ dom as Touchstone in The Merchant of Venice', New Blackfriars, 64 (1982) n. 13; Naseeb Shaheen, 'Shakespeare's Knowledge of the Bible - How Acquired', ShakS, 20 (1988) p. 212. 24. Lewalski, p. 327. 25. McCombie, p. 123; Shaheen, 'Shakespeare's Knowledge', p. 212. McCombie argues that Shakespeare used the Bible even more closely 288 Notes than Noble suggests (p. 123), and elsewhere I have presented evidence suggesting even closer use for this particular play. See my essay 'Miles Mosse's The Arraignment and Conviction of Vsurie (1595): A New Source for The Merchant of Venice', ShakS, 21 (1993) pp. 11-54. This essay argues that Mosse's text is an important new source for understanding Shakespeare's use of usury in his play. 26. The term anti-Judaic conveys the sense of religious bias, the term anti-Semitic conveys more of a sense of racial bias, as well as re­ ligious bias, and anti-Zionist conveys the sense of political or na­ tional bias. 27. Danson, p. 59. In the extant vernacular drama of the Elizabethan period, there appear to be only four plays that feature Jewish char­ acters: Wilson's The Three Ladies of London (1584), Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1588; revival 1594), Greene's Selimus (1594), and Shake­ speare's The Merchant of Venice (1597). 28. For information about several Jews in Elizabethan England, two 'known' (Joachim Ganz and Nathaniel Judah) and one secret (Ferdinand Alvares), see Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious His­ tory of the Jews, 2nd edn, 16 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952-76) vol. 15, pp. 126-7; d. also, vol. 13, pp. 125-9. Richard Popkin has recently discovered that there was an actual Jewish merchant from Venice in England from 1596 to 1600. Alonso Nunez de Herrera, in the employ of the Sultan of Morocco, was in Cadiz at the time of the Earl of Essex's raid and thus became one of the forty hostages transported to England for ransom. Popkin won­ ders if Herrera could have been 'a model for Shylock'. We need more information about Herrera to answer that question, but on the basis of what is known, Herrera, a most learned expositor of the Lurianic Cabbala and a successful merchant, does not at all resemble Shylock. Popkin suggests 'the phrase "The Merchant of Venice" could well have been associated with an actual merchant of Venice in London', Herrera.
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