Abstract
‘The Merchant of Venice,’ said Allardyce Nicoll a half-century ago, ‘is frankly impossible…. The more we study The Merchant of Venice the more we see what a colossal dramatic failure it was. Here two moods, the mood of romantic fantasy and the mood of tragic reality, have met, and neither is satisfied.’1 More recently, John Wain has pronounced a similar judgment:
Time after time [Shakespeare] set out hopefully in the cockleshell boat of romantic comedy, only to see it sink under the load of actuality he tried to pack into it. The sub-plot of The Merchant of Venice, about Portia’s suitors and the caskets of various metals, is a good example. Shakespeare must originally have hoped that it would somehow stand up by the side of the story of the wicked Jew; which can only have meant that he did not, at the beginning, foresee just how much emotional power he was going to send pumping through the story of Shylock. And when he did, of course, it was too late to scrap the play and start again with a better choice of sub-plot.2
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Notes
Nicoll, British Drama (1949) pp. 128–9.
Wain, The Living World of Shakespeare (1966) p. 93.
See e.g. A. L. Rowse, The Elizabethan Renaissance / The Life of the Society (1971) pp. 158–65. Nashe, in The Vnfortunate Traveller, enumerates some of the vices that the young English traveller brings home from Italy: ‘the art of atheisme, the art of epicurising, the art of whoring, the art of poysoning, the art of Sodomitrie’ (Brett-Smith’s edition, Oxford, 1920, pp. 96–7).
See e.g. Wain, op. cit., p. 96, and G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (1968) pp. 240–5.
See Hyman, ‘The Rival Lovers in The Merchant of Venice’, SQ XXI.2 (1970), [109]–116.
See also Raymond Powell, Shakespeare and the Critics’ Debate (1980), pp. 108–10.
Cf. R. F. Hill, ‘“The Merchant of Venice” and the Pattern of Romantic Comedy’, SS 28 (1975) 75–87. Hill finds MV unusual among Shakespeare’s comedies in that love, here, is without self-interest. Portia, Bassanio, and Antonio ‘are held together in a bond of reciprocal love’. Hill’s view is attractive, but he is too unaware of underlying tensions.
Cohen, ‘The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism’, ELH 49 (1982) 765–89.
Rabkin, ‘Meaning and Shakespeare’ in Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson, eds, Shakespeare 1971 (1972) p. 94.
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© 1986 Kristian Smidt
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Smidt, K. (1986). So May the Outward Shows … The Merchant of Venice . In: Unconformities in Shakespeare’s Early Comedies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18421-7_8
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