[1] The full title runs thus: "The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England, with the discouerie of King Richard Cordelions Base sonne (vulgarly named The Bastard Fawconbridge): also the death of King John at Swinstead Abbey. As it was (sundry times) publikely acted by the Queenes Maiesties Players, in the honorable Citie of London."
[XX]
"THE TAMING OF THE SHREW" AND "THE MERCHANT OF VENICE"—SHAKESPEARE'S PREOCCUPATION WITH THOUGHTS OF PROPERTY AND GAIN—HIS GROWING PROSPERITY—HIS ADMISSION TO THE RANKS OF THE "GENTRY"—HIS PURCHASE OF HOUSES AND LAND—MONEY TRANSACTIONS AND LAWSUITS
The first plays in which we seem to find traces of Italian travel are The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice, the former written at latest in 1596, the latter almost certainly in that or the following year.
Enough has already been said of The Taming of the Shrew. It is only a free and spirited reconstruction of an old piece of scenic architecture, which Shakespeare demolished in order to erect from its materials a spacious and airy hall. The old play itself had been highly popular on the stage; it took new life under Shakespeare's hands. His play is not much more than a farce, but it possesses movement and fire, and the leading male character, the somewhat coarsely masculine Petruchio, stands in amusing and typical contrast to the spoilt, headstrong, and passionate little woman whom he masters.
The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's first important comedy, is a piece of work of a very different order, and is elaborated to a very different degree. There is far more of his own inmost nature in it than in the light and facile farce.
No doubt he found in Marlowe's Jew of Malta the first, purely literary, impulse towards The Merchant of Venice. In Marlowe's play the curtain rises upon the chief character, Barabas, sitting in his counting-house, with piles of gold before him, and revelling in the thought of the treasures which it takes a soliloquy of nearly fifty lines to enumerate—pearls like pebble-stones, opals, sapphires, amethysts, jacinths, topazes, grass-green emeralds, beauteous rubies and sparkling diamonds. At the beginning of the play, he is possessed of all the riches wherewith the Genie of the Lamp endowed Aladdin, which have at one time or another sparkled in the dreams of all poor poets.
Barabas is a Jew and usurer, like Shylock. Like Shylock, he has a daughter who is in love with a poor Christian; and, like him, he thirsts for revenge. But he is a monster, not a man. When he has been misused by the Christians, and robbed of his whole fortune, he becomes a criminal fit only for a fairy-tale or for a madhouse: he uses his own daughter as an instrument for his revenge, and then poisons her along with all the nuns in whose cloister she has taken refuge. Shakespeare was attracted by the idea of making a real man and a real Jew out of this intolerable demon in a Jew's skin.