The Merchant of Venice mercy". Critic Harold Bloom listed it among Shakespeare's great comedies. Bassanio, a young Venetian of noble rank, wishes to woo the beautiful and wealthy heiress Portia of Belmont. Having squandered his estate, he needs 3,000 ducats to subsidise his expenditures as a suitor. Bassanio approaches his friend Antonio, a wealthy merchant of Venice who has previously and repeatedly bailed him out. Antonio agrees, but since he is cash-poor – his ships and merchandise are busy at sea to Tripolis, the Indies, Mexico and England – he promises to cover a bond if Bassanio can find a lender, so Bassanio turns
The Plays of William Shakespeare another in the dark." Raleigh then admitted that he "soon falls into the habit, when he meets with an obscure passage, of consulting Johnson's note before the others." T. S. Eliot wrote that "no poet can ask more of posterity than to be greatly honoured by the great; and Johnson's words about Shakespeare are great honour". Walter Jackson Bate, in his 1977 biography on Johnson, wrote: the edition of Shakespeare – viewed with historical understanding of what it involved in 1765 – could seem a remarkable feat; and we are not speaking of just the great "Preface" To see it