Merchant of Venice Play Script (Text)

Here’s the complete Text / Script of Merchant of Venice, which is a famous play by William Shakespeare.

Merchant of Venice the play by William Shakespeare (Brief Summary, Cast and characters).

Introduction: Full, free online text – Merchant of Venice

This section contains the free online text of Merchant of Venice, the famous Shakespearean play which features several endearing and well-loved characters. The language used today is, in many ways, different to that used in the 16th-century Elizabethan era and you can clearly see in the script and text used in Shakespearean plays.

In several scenes, you will come across words/phrases in the text/script of Merchant of Venice that may not be easy to understand. There are several free online Shakespeare Dictionary where you can check the meaning of the obscure words used in the script and text of his plays, some of which are no longer in use in modern language or Dictionaries. Just note down the unusual words or text that you encounter whilst reading the online text of the play and look for its definition/meaning in the free online Shakespeare Dictionary.

Script / Text of Merchant of Venice

The script of the play is very long, so to reduce the load time for this page, and for ease in accessing specific sections of the script, we have separated the text into various Acts. You may please click on the appropriate links to access the Act of your choice.

Act I

Act II

Act III

Act IV

Act V

Because William Shakespeare never published any of his plays, none of the original manuscripts have survived. However, several unauthorised versions of his plays were published during his lifetime in quarto editions by unscrupulous publishers (copyright laws did not exist back then which could protect Shakespeare and his works during the Elizabethan era). A collection of his works did not appear until 1623 (seven years after Shakespeare’s death on April 23, 1616) when two of his fellow actors, John Hemminges and Henry Condell, posthumously recorded his work and published 36 of William’s plays in the First Folio.

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