Read The Merchant of Venice by email.
The trial arrives unbroken, and Shylock never comes back.
A merchant signs for three thousand ducats against a pound of his own flesh, and a woman in a doctor of laws’ gown collects on the wording. Twenty-three mornings between Venice and Belmont — a courtship and a debt running in step, and a trial that takes ten unbroken minutes.
Four or five minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Three weeks from now, you will have read Shakespeare.
23 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1596
- Installments
- 23
- Each installment
- 4–5 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 22,375
- Reading time
- 1 hour 33 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 3 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 9 days
- At 20 minutes a day
- 5 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read The Merchant of Venice?
Two plots run against each other and Shakespeare alternates them scene by scene, so the serial form is the play’s own: a bond falling due in Venice, a riddle about three caskets being solved at Belmont, and an Act II of nine short scenes cutting between the two. Before committing twenty-four mornings to it, know what it is. This is an antisemitic play, not a play that happens to contain an antisemite: in the spoken text the characters call Shylock “Jew” fifty-seven times against twenty uses of his name, and the court that spares his life takes his money and then his religion. Shakespeare also wrote him “Hath not a Jew eyes?” in Act III, which is the difficulty and not a resolution of it.
The verse arrives as verse — speaker names in small capitals, stage directions in italics, lines breaking where the pentameter breaks. Three of the twenty scenes are too long for one email, cut at a stage direction marking an entrance or an exit rather than at a word count, taking whichever combination leaves the longest part shortest. Act IV Scene 1 is the trial, 3,894 words, and it cuts once — at “Enter Portia, dressed like a doctor of laws.” Everything after that cut is the trial itself: 2,474 words, about ten minutes, with no break anywhere in it. It is the longest morning of the twenty-four, and it is the one scene here that should not be interrupted.
Installment 1 is the playbill — twenty-one persons of the play, and a setting the edition gives as partly at Venice and partly at Belmont — then Antonio on a Venetian street opening the play with “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad,” and never finding out why. Three and a half weeks of borrowed money coming due follow. The morning after the trial is 193 words of Portia in a street collecting a ring under false pretences; the last two mornings are moonlight in a garden at Belmont, three couples, and a joke about jewellery. Shylock is in none of it. He walks out at the end of Act IV and the play does not mention him again, which is the coldest structural fact in the catalogue and worth noticing as it happens.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read The Merchant of Venice?
About an hour and a half straight through (22,375 words). By email, it’s 23 daily installments of four to five minutes — about three and a half weeks, or faster at a premium pace of two or three scenes a day.
Is this the complete, unabridged text?
Yes — all twenty scenes in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition, including the whole of the trial and the forced conversion at the end of it, where Antonio’s condition is that Shylock “presently become a Christian.” Nothing is trimmed, modernized or softened: the play’s antisemitism is Shakespeare’s, and it is all still here.
How does a play work as email?
One scene per email, in play formatting: speaker names in small capitals, stage directions in italics, verse lines kept as verse. The median installment is 828 words, three or four minutes — Act II alone is nine short scenes. Three of the twenty scenes split at an entrance or an exit, the trial among them, and the trial’s second part runs 2,474 words with nothing interrupting it.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
Each recap covers only the previous scene, so nothing arrives before the play delivers it. The bond is the deliberate exception: its terms are read out on the third morning and then nothing is done about them for two and a half weeks, which is the design — you spend most of the run inside a comedy knowing exactly what is waiting at the end of it.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous scene at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.