Merchant of Venice. - Repositories

196 NOTES
sense a story, The Orator, a French work translated into English
and printed in London just before The Merchant of Venice
was published, may have had some effect upon Shakespeare's
play. This book discusses various questions of science and
law, among others " Of a Jew, who would for his debt have a
pound of the flesh of a Christian."
(2) The Three Caskets.—In one or another form, The
Three Caskets was also in Shakespeare's day an oft-told tale.
As early as the year 800 it was written in Greek by a monk of
Syria, and before 1200 was translated into Latin. Then the
story seems to have passed from one group of narratives to
another, appearing in Italian in the Decameron of Boccaccio,
and later in the Golden Legend (a collection of the biographies
of saints), and appearing again in English in the Gonfessio
Amantis, a poem written by Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer.
(3) The Jessica Story. — The story of Jessica and of her
elopement with Lorenzo is traced by some (Dunlop) to another
old Italian tale. I give a quotation from the Variorum of Dr.
Furness : " ' It is the story of a young gentleman of Messina,
who becomes enamoured of the daughter of a rich Neapolitan
miser. As the father keeps his child perpetually shut up, the
lover has recourse to stratagem. Pretending to set out on a
long journey, he deposits with the miser a number of valuable
effects, leaving, among other things, a female slave, who prepossesses
the mind of the girl in favour of her master, and
finally assists in the elopement of the young lady, and the
robbery of her father's jewels, which she carries along with
her. ... It is not improbable that the avaricious father in
this tale, the daughter so carefully shut up, the elopement of