In the Library
The Merchant of Venice
William Shakespeare, 1600
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 20
- Length
- Length 22k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
The quality of mercy is not strain’d, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
Three thousand ducats, three months, and a bond signed as a joke: if the debt goes unpaid, the lender may cut a pound of flesh from wherever on the borrower's body he pleases. Then the ships do not come home. Shakespeare built a comedy around a knife and a set of scales, and then did something no comedy should survive: he gave the villain the truest speech in the play. Hath not a Jew eyes, Shylock asks, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, and the theatre goes quiet, because he is right, and every Christian on that stage has spent the play proving it. Against him Portia sets the other great speech, mercy falling as the gentle rain from heaven, and you will spend the rest of your life deciding whether Venice earns it. Belmont ends in moonlight and music, with one man missing from the singing.