focuses of concern and others, such as performing the play in the
contemporary theater, will be treated in the ensuing chapters.

To present a historical context for The Merchant of Venice and
its issues, a selection of excerpts from historical documents pro-
vides the substance of the material contained in this book. Eliza-
bethans read and traveled a good deal and wrote about their
travels. What they saw and how they reacted, especially to Venice
and its people, may be typified in the accounts of two inveterate
travelers, Thomas Coryat and Fynes Moryson, extracts from whose
writings make interesting, vivid, and perceptive reading. How their
accounts of Venice and Italy compare with Shakespeare's re-
creation of those places in The Merchant of Venice is very worth-
while exploring. Whether Shakespeare himself ever visited Italy, we
do not know, but two of his plays, Othello as well as The Merchant
of Venice, are set largely in Venice, and several of his other plays,
such as Romeo and Juliet and Two Gentlemen of Verona, are set
elsewhere in sixteenth-century Italy. Far-off Italy and her cities
were literally wonderful places for Elizabethans to imagine, con-
template, or, like Coryat and Moryson, to visit. For many Britons
and Americans today they still are; for no matter how much Venice
and other Italian cities have changed, they still retain a good deal
of the splendor and mystery that were admired in the Renaissance.

The position of women today is far different from what it was
in Shakespeare's time, and to understand the differences we need
to know more about how women were regarded. Since marriage,
including elopement, is a major focus in The Merchant of Venice,
we also need to learn what Shakespeare's contemporaries thought
about it, how they arranged it, and what role parents played (or
wanted to play). In addition, we can learn about what qualities in
potential husbands and wives were stressed in the various hand-
books on marriage that were published. A great deal was written
about this important enterprise, because for a very long time, right
up until World War II, marriage was permanently binding; at least,
a divorce or annulment was extremely difficult if not impossible to
obtain, unlike today. Men and women, therefore, were advised to
take matrimony very seriously, which is one reason that Portia's
father in The Merchant of Venice wrote his will the way he did and
established the choice of caskets--containers, or chests, containing
objects and scrolls--as a means of finding the best suitor for his
daughter. Intermarriage between people of different faiths was an-

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