1597

This the year in which The Merchant of Venice is supposed to have been first performed.

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Although arguments about textual sources for specific plays are always speculative at best, critics generally observe that Shakespeare probably based aspects of his Merchant of these following texts: Shylock's bond comes from the first story of the fourth day in Ser Giovanni's prose collection Il Pecorone, which was printed in Milan in 1558; Boccaccio and Gower had used the motif of the lover who wins his lady by choosing the correctly in a casket lottery as early as the fourteenth century; and the plot-thread of the savage creditor who tries to collect a pound of flesh comes from the East, prior to the Middle Ages.

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