cation C. R. W. Pope read, "E'er shall it in safety rest; "Warburton, "Ever shall it safely rest" - which was a very ingenious and acceptable correction, and it also had the support of Mr. Collier's folio of 1632. Mr. Stanton is the author of a very happy suggestion which was made public through the Illustrated News: Every hall in safety rest." But C. R. W.'s correction is at once the simplest and the most consistent with the form and spirit of the context. "THE EXCELLENT History of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreme cruelty of Shylocke the Iew towards the saide Merchant, in cutting a iust pound of his flesh. ing of Portia, by the choyse of three caskets. SHAKESPEARE. Printed by J. Roberts, 1600." And the obtainWritten by W. 4to. 40 leaves. "The most excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the lewe towards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a iust pound of his flesh and the obtayning of Portia by the choyse of three chests. As it hath beene diuers times acted by the Lord Chamberlaine his Seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. AT LONDON, Printed by I. R., for Thomas Heyes, and are to be sold in Paules Churchyard, at the signe of the Greene Dragon, 1600." 4to. 38 leaves. The Merchant of Venice occupies twenty-two pages in the folio of 1623, viz., from p. 163 to p. 184, inclusive, in the division of Comedies. It is there divided into Acts, but not into Scenes, and has no list of Dramatis Personæ. (130) THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. INTRODUCTION. PLAGIARISM is a misdemeanor, of which the smaller order of critics - the detective police of the world of letters are always ready to accuse an author who is either daring to rise into notice, or who is guilty of that other crime which is in their eyes the blackest of all success. The charge is very easily made, and often can be as easily sustained to the satisfaction of the many who do not justly apprehend what constitutes originality. For the truth seems to be, that nearly all the stories that take hold on human sympathies are of indefinable antiquity. They come, we know not whence. We trace them back for centuries, and reach some great teller of tales who has had the credit of creating them; but we find that he took them from some one else who lived centuries before him, and that he only gave them another form and made them glow anew in the light of his genius. We go still farther back, and are obliged at last to give up the search as hopeless, and to believe that good stories are born of the great mother, and come up out of the earth; and so they do, in so far that they are the fruit of our common nature. Thus brought forth, they not only live, but renew their life, by entering again into the womb which brought them forth, to be born again. A story, perhaps the relation of some actual occurrence, is told by friend to friend and passes from lip to lip. It does not follow, because it was in nature, that it was true to nature. An established possibility can do no more to open a way to the human heart than a seeming improbability can do to shut it. But if the story be truthful, as well as actual, it never dies. Generation hands it down to generation, casting into forgetfulness those parts of it the interest of which is temporary or incidental, and religiously preserving all that is true forever. The germs of stories that are told now-a-days as new, are to be found in the fables of Bidpai, the Brahmin Sage, who is said to have lived two thousand years before Christ. He could have traced them through an antiquity of only a few hundred years before he found them in the Ark, where he might have believed them to be invented to wile away the time, but that he was too wise not to have given its due weight to the fact that the race was preserved, not created, in that structure. There is a serious truth hidden in our jocose habit of saying, when we hear a good jest a very good one that it is an old Joe Miller; although Joseph is rather modern to be an originator, he having been a poor stupid actor, who lived in the early part of the last century, and died never having uttered one witty saying. But stories new and good are even rarer than good new jokes. It is but once in a century that such a one as The Bride of Lammermoor is written; and even then it is sure to be "an ower true tale." The story of The Merchant of Venice is an example in point of all these axioms of literary criticism. It is in part, at least, of Eastern origin; and all of it is of great and undeterminable antiquity. It had been told again and again, by various authors and in various tongues, centuries before Shakespeare was born; and there is some reason to believe that it had even been put into a dramatic shape and played in London long before he left Stratford: yet in no one of his works has he exhibited his creative powers more lavishly, though in some the peculiar traits of his genius are more strikingly apparent. Three tales, one turning upon the giving of the bond, one upon the choice of the caskets, and one recounting the elopement of a daughter from an avaricious father, have been interwoven to form the plot of this play. That of the bond was written in Italian by Giovanni Fiorentino, as early as 1378,* but exists in England in a MS. of a still more ancient date, — 1320, or thereabout,†— and is also found in the Latin Gesta Romanorum, a translation of which version exists in a MS. of the time of Henry VI. But even a mere enumera * See Mr. Collier's Shakespeare's Library, Vol. II. † See Mr. Thomas Wright's Collection of Latin Stories Illustrative of the History of Fiction during the Middle Ages, published by the Percy Society. This very interesting translation was printed by Mr. Douce, in his Illustrations of Shakespeare, Vol. I. p. 281. |