The most influential writer in
all of English literature, William Shakespeare was born
in 1564 to a successful middle-class glover
in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Shakespeare attended grammar school,
but his formal education proceeded no further. In 1582 he
married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her.
Around 1590 he left his family behind and
traveled to London to work as an actor and playwright. Public and
critical acclaim quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became
the most popular playwright in England and part-owner of the Globe
Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603) and
James I (ruled 1603–1625),
and he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted Shakespeare’s
company the greatest possible compliment by bestowing upon its members
the title of King’s Men. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired
to Stratford and died in 1616 at the age
of fifty-two. At the time of Shakespeare’s death, literary luminaries
such as Ben Jonson hailed his works as timeless.
Shakespeare’s works were collected and printed in various
editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century,
his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was
well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works
led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, but the dearth
of biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s
personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded
from this fact and from Shakespeare’s modest education that Shakespeare’s
plays were actually written by someone else—Francis Bacon and the
Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates—but the support
for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory
is not taken seriously by many scholars.
In the absence of credible evidence to the contrary,
Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the thirty-seven plays
and 154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy
of this body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeare’s plays
seem to have transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming
so influential as to affect profoundly the course of Western literature
and culture ever after.
The Merchant of Venice was probably
written in either 1596 or 1597,
after Shakespeare had written such plays as Romeo and Juliet and Richard
III, but before he penned the great tragedies of his later years.
Its basic plot outline, with the characters of the merchant, the poor
suitor, the fair lady, and the villainous Jew, is found in a number
of contemporary Italian story collections, and Shakespeare borrowed
several details, such the choice of caskets that Portia inflicts on
all her suitors, from preexisting sources. The Merchant
of Venice’s Italian setting and marriage plot are typical
of Shakespeare’s earlier comedies, but the characters of Portia,
Shakespeare’s first great heroine, and the unforgettable villain
Shylock elevate this play to a new level.
Shylock’s cries for a pound of flesh have made him one
of literature’s most memorable villains, but many readers and playgoers have
found him a compelling and sympathetic figure. The question of whether
or not Shakespeare endorses the anti-Semitism of the Christian characters
in the play has been much debated. Jews in Shakespeare’s England
were a marginalized group, and Shakespeare’s contemporaries would
have been very familiar with portrayals of Jews as villains and
objects of mockery. For example, Christopher Marlowe’s The
Jew of Malta, a bloody farce about a murderous Jewish villain,
was a great popular success and would have been fresh in Shakespeare’s
mind as he set about creating his own Jewish character. Shakespeare
certainly draws on this anti-Semitic tradition in portraying Shylock,
exploiting Jewish stereotypes for comic effect. But Shylock is a
more complex character than the Jew in Marlowe’s play, and Shakespeare
makes him seem more human by showing that his hatred is born of
the mistreatment he has suffered in a Christian society. Shakespeare’s
character includes an element of pathos as well as comedy, meaning
that he elicits from readers and audiences pity and compassion,
rather than simply scorn and derision.
