* * * * *

For reference to Historical Authorities, see end of each Act.




PREFACE.


Venice, "the famous city in the sea," rising like enchantment from the
waves of the Adriatic, appeals to the imagination through a history
replete with dramatic incident; wherein power and revolution--conquest
and conspiracy--mystery and romance--dazzling splendour and judicial
murder alternate in every page. Thirteen hundred years witnessed the
growth, maturity, and fall of this once celebrated city; commencing in
the fifth century, when thousands of terrified fugitives sought refuge
in its numerous islands from the dreaded presence of Attila; and
terminating when the last of the Doges, in 1797, lowered for ever the
standard of St. Mark before the cannon of victorious Buonaparte. Venice
was born and died in fear. To every English mind, the Queen of the
Adriatic is endeared by the genius of our own Shakespeare. Who that has
trod the great public square, with its mosque-like cathedral, has not
pictured to himself the forms of the heroic Moor and the gentle
Desdemona? Who that has landed from his gondola to pace the Rialto, has
not brought before his "mind's eye," the scowling brow of Shylock, when
proposing the bond of blood to his unsuspecting victim? Shakespeare may
or may not have derived his plot of _The Merchant of Venice_, as some
suppose, from two separate stories contained in Italian novels; but if
such be the fact, he has so interwoven the double interest, that the two