The Merchant of Venice Read Free Page B

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. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus “Prince of ARAGON , suitor to Portia”).
    Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays, of which
The Merchant of Venice
is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (“another part of the city”). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page, where they are given at the beginning of each