Merchant of Venice, The, comedy by English playwright William Shakespeare, written around 1596. It is regarded by some scholars as the strongest and most successful of Shakespeare's early comedies.

The play, which is set partly in Venice, Italy, features two main characters: Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, and Portia, a wealthy heiress. The two characters’ stories are cleverly intertwined. Shylock prosecutes the merchant Antonio for failure to repay a loan that Antonio had contracted on behalf of his friend Bassanio. Shylock threatens to cut off a pound of Antonio's flesh, a penalty originally inserted in the contract as a jest. The two must resolve their situation in court. Meanwhile, Portia has proposed a riddle, stating that she can be won in marriage only if a suitor is able to guess the one chest of three in which her portrait is hidden. Her lover, Bassanio, chooses correctly. For his sake, Portia goes to the courtroom disguised as a lawyer to defend Antonio from Shylock’s demands. She defeats Shylock by pointing out that although he has a right to a pound of Antonio's flesh, he is not entitled to a single drop of his blood.

An important element of Shylock's character is his literal-mindedness. In his mind, a contract is a contract, and if it is broken the letter of the law must be carried out. Mercy cannot be permitted to soften justice. In his insistence on a pound of flesh, Shylock believes he is holding Antonio to the truth. However, Shylock’s literalness also forces him to concede to Portia’s argument that he has no claim to Antonio’s blood.

For the character of Shylock, Shakespeare drew from a long tradition of folktales that relate the story of a creditor who tries and fails to extract a pound of human flesh as payment of a debt. Like the hero-villain Barabas in English dramatist Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta (1589?), Shylock is a Jew. He is portrayed in striking contrast with the other characters, who are Christians. Shylock is frugal and preoccupied with making and keeping money; he hoards it and treasures it above his personal relationships. He views the Christians’ attitude toward money as frivolous and irresponsible. In contrast to Shylock, Bassanio uses money for love and beauty instead of for the accumulation of wealth. The chest he chooses in answer to Portia’s riddle is not the one made of silver nor the one of gold, but the one made of lead. His rejection of the gold and silver containers in favor of a lead one, within whose dull exterior lie the riches of Portia's portrait, symbolizes the fact that, for him, 'all that glisters (glistens) is not gold.'

Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock has long been fodder for debate among scholars. By Shakespeare’s time, Jews had been officially banned from England for centuries. Because of this, they had come to represent to many citizens of the time a sinister unknown. Shylock’s inability to grant mercy to Antonio and his tendency to value the letter of the law over benevolence are generally abhorrent to modern audiences. However, Shakespeare was too intelligent and too much of an artist to make his Shylock purely one dimensional; the character is complex and justifiably cautious in a world that does not welcome him. Much of the interest and tension of the play lies in the fact that he is simultaneously villainous and sympathetic.