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For part of the plot of ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ in which two romantic love stories are skilfully blended with a theme of tragic import, Shakespeare had recourse to ‘Il Pecorone,’ a fourteenth-century collection of Italian novels by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino. [66c] There a Jewish creditor demands a pound of flesh of a defaulting Christian debtor, and the latter is rescued through the advocacy of ‘the lady of Belmont,’ who is wife of the debtor’s friend. The management of the plot in the Italian novel is closely followed by Shakespeare. A similar story is slenderly outlined in the popular medieval collection of anecdotes called ‘Gesta Romanorum,’ while the tale of the caskets, which Shakespeare combined with it in the ‘Merchant,’ is told independently in another portion of the same work. But Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant’ owes much to other sources, including more than one old play. Stephen Gosson describes in his ‘Schoole of Abuse’ (1579) a lost play called ‘the Jew … showne at the Bull [inn] … representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers and bloody mindes of usurers.’ This description suggests that the two stories of the pound of flesh and the caskets had been combined before for purposes of dramatic representation. The scenes in Shakespeare’s play in which Antonio negotiates with Shylock are roughly anticipated, too, by dialogues between a Jewish creditor Gerontus and a Christian debtor in the extant play of ‘The Three Ladies of London,’ by R[obert] W[ilson], 1584. There the Jew opens the attack on his Christian debtor with the lines:

Signor Mercatore, why do you not pay me? Think you I will be mocked in this sort?

This three times you have flouted me—it seems you make thereat a sport.

Truly pay me my money, and that even now presently,

Or by mighty Mahomet, I swear I will forthwith arrest thee.

Subsequently, when the judge is passing judgment in favour of the debtor, the Jew interrupts:

Stay, there, most puissant judge. Signor Mercatore consider what you do.

Pay me the principal, as for the interest I forgive it you.