Representations of the good merchant in The merchant of Venice, The London merchant and Nathan der Weise

Abstract

This paper focuses on the representation of the tradesman in William Shakespeare’s The merchant of Venice (1600), George Lillo’s The London merchant and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (1779). The background of the English comedy is the bustling Italian Renaissance scene, especially in Venice, where people of different countries, races, social positions and religious beliefs converge. The London merchant (1731), Lillo’s bourgeois tragedy, refers in turn to the scenario of consolidation of English urban middle class institutions nearly a century and a half later. Lastly, the Jerusalem of the Crusades, with its religious wars involving Christians, Muslims and Jews, which forms the background of Nathan der Weise, provides the convenient historical and geographical distance for the representation of the racial and the religious conflicts of Lessing’s contemporaneous Germany. The positive characterization and the leading role of the merchant in the three plays are evidence of the growing visibility of the mercantile bourgeoisie within contexts as distinct as the English Renaissance, England in the first and Germany in the last decades of the of the 18th century.