The Merchant Of Venice: Third Series: 16 (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series)

On a good day, geriatrics like me, spoiling for the deletions of Alzheimer’s disease, can still recall the long chequered overcoat, and the 1970 theatrics of the flute player who stood on one leg in front of his band Jethro Tull. In that “dark backward and abysm of time”, that flautist, Ian Anderson, was an example of a “wry-necked fife” mentioned by Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice”; a player who looked away from his silver instrument, as flute players always do. This was explained clearly over a hundred years ago, in the very first Arden edited by Withers and Croll (available now copyright free as a reprint). Shylock described the sound as “vile squealing”. This was not a personal opinion of the Jew so much as disgust with anything performed by “Christian fools”. John Drakakis in The Third Arden manages, by saying too much, only to mislead. His note at 2.5.30 concludes: “Thus the depraved sound (“vile squealing”) is made by the musician craning his neck to the side (like the wryneck) in order to play his instrument”. The virtues of silence are propounded by Gratiano early on in this play. Mark Twain rephrased them when he said: 'It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt'.There is a great difference in being short-changed by the thin second Arden, updated from 1955 - 1984 with a variety of covers; and being taken in by this, the bloated third. The second, John Russell Brown’s, is better in many respects. At 1.3.163 Shylock points out that a pound of human flesh is not so “estimable” as the same weight of “muttons, beeves or goats”. Drakakis focuses on “muttons” and he reminds us that The Duke in “Measure for Measure” “would eat mutton on Fridays”. The note reads: “While the dominant sense here is “sheep”, the secondary meaning of “prostitutes” reinforces the scandalous nature of the Jew’s financial dealings as perceived by Christians in the play.” Really?At 2.2.40, in an extended gloss on the word “hit”, the note reads: “A possible covert reference to the myth of the foetor judaicus – alleged to be a distinctive Jewish male body odour similar to that of a he-goat.” Repeated from 1.3.82, this is egregious and gratuitous. Most of the overweening sexual insights, my attenuated experience being allowed for, are ill-advised. At 2.9.27 Drakakis insists that the “martlet” that “builds in the weather on the outward wall” is a “swift”. This is ornithological guano. It is unusual to parade singularity as learning. Where is the editorial oversight that the Ardens used to call upon?The first Arden gathered its notes to a section at the end; a practice that, while it kept the text unsullied, made for a difficult reading experience. The Arden soon developed its signature page layout with the notes nearly always below the passage itself. This is a good solution where notes are brief. The notes now however are rarely brief and “long notes” return to the back pages. A Fourth Arden might usefully publish the text itself in a separate volume along with, where possible, a facsimile of all original Shakespearian texts. A companion volume would contain all the notes. The two books could be consulted side by side. The “scholarly” Arden has accumulated so many bad habits that each new edition of each play, already an obstacle course, is made more difficult to navigate. After some of the obtuse diversions of Drakakis like “The 14 Fists of McCluskey”, it is enlightening to consult the voluminous Victorian Variorums; the humour and readability is astonishing.Here is an insight no Drakakis has seen: In the beautiful passage where Lorenzo on a moonlit bank is diverting Nerissa with talk of night’s starlit dome above, he says: “Look how the floor of heaven is inlaid with patines of bright gold.” Lorenzo, hopefully ignoring Nerissa’s “ring”, is describing what he sees above him, the roof of the sky. Beyond this, above the dome, is the floor of Heaven which is paved with gold. The passage in question describes what is hidden from us on earth. All that we see as starlight is the backside of the myriad rivets that secure tiny gold plates to the floor of Heaven. On the other side all is light. An underside where the rivets would be visible would be familiar to Elizabethan audiences. In Canterbury Cathedral, several medieval archibishops, are buried as close as possible to the place where Becket was martyred, betraying what might be seen as Harold Bloom’s “Anxiety of Influence”. Nothing now remains of the large illustrious monumental brass plates that were inset into the stones, but scattered about like constellations within the intricate indents that remain, the brass rivets that held the laiton plates in place are polished by the feet of the pilgrims of today.At 1:3.80, trying to illustrate how the craft of money-lending might be attributed to Jewish ingenuity, Shylock describes how Jacob, one of his Old Testament forebears, sought to influence the breeding of sheep. The Hebrew patriarch wanted to produce sheep pied in colour, so he “peeled me certain wands” and placed them where his ewes, easily diverted from the rigours of copulation, might get the idea. Drakakis, in his notes does not offer an explanation. Willow or hazel “wands” and similar twigs harvested by the sheep-biting shepherds of The Holy Land, when newly cut, can be easily stripped of their bark. Raised in backwoods no less holy, boys and girls like me soon learn how attractive pied patterns can be cut up and down the wand with a pen-knife; by here removing the soft bark, and there leaving it in place. The interference that Jacob ran for the genome of his flock must be judged by the standards of us latter day saints; much as we allow the “quantitative easing” of the money lenders of today. My black and white words, might yet influence the generation of the Fourth Arden.

This new edition of 'The Merchant' provides, in addition to the extensive apparatus of notes standard to the Aren editions, an excellent and thorough introduction with many and divers perspectives on the text and its afterlives. Invaluable.

The Arden General Editors have done their brand no service with this version of The Merchant of Venice, edited by Professor John Drakakis.The value of the Arden editions for the general reader lies in the introductions and in the footnotes. While this introduction does have many useful and interesting points to make, it is one of the most boring and repetitious pieces of prose that I have come across in a long time. Can the Arden editorial board not find a copy editor capable of doing a decent job?As for the footnotes, I take as an example Professor Drakakis' explanation of the last line of Act 1 Scene 3, where Antonio assures Bassanio that "My ships come home a month before the day."We already know that Antonio is going to seal a bond promising to repay Shylock's loan in three months. In lines 153 - 155 of this scene, Antonio spells out the expected timetable in terms that leave no room for doubt:"Within these two months, that's a month beforeThis bond expires, I do expect returnOf thrice three times the value of this bond."The "return" refers to the money, or the profit, that Antonio will receive when his ships come home. In the last line of the scene, Antonio is merely reminding Bassanio of this fact.But Professor Drakakis tells us that the phrase "my ships come home a month before the day" means something altogether different, namely that Antonio's ships will come home a "month before their due date of arrival." So, Antonio has told us that his ships are due back in two months, and we are now expected to believe that, in the course of 25 lines during which he remains on stage with Shylock and Bassanio, and nobody else comes in, he has somehow received intelligence to the effect that his ships are a month ahead of schedule. How Antonio received this news, Prof Drakakis does not explain. For him to assert that Antonio really means that his ships will come home a month before he has just said they are due, is a mistake that defies belief.

thankyou!

Excellent book with loads of information and help with the old language. Brilliant for a levels and university courses. 10 out of 10

A regular but not specifically scholarly student of Shakespeare, I've found these Arden editions invaluable for their illuminating introductions, insightful footnotes and (often unexpectedly) useful appendices. Before studying a play in my weekly class I read the introduction first, to set the scene for myself. And I have over a dozen of these Arden Third Series plays. But this introduction does not seem designed to help the student. Too esoteric, reading more like a PhD thesis, I abandoned the introduction halfway through reading it when I realised I couldn't understand or follow what the Editor is on about, and resorted to the Second Series 1955 edition of John Russell Brown's whose introduction doesn't seem designed to shut out all but the scholarly.