The Merchant of Venice characters live in two worlds: Venice, a city of trade where a Christian merchant and a Jewish moneylender despise each other, and Belmont, a country estate where a rich heiress waits for the man who will choose the right casket.
A single loan ties the two worlds together, and nearly every character is caught up in it, as borrower, lender, wife, daughter, or servant. This guide covers every major character in The Merchant of Venice, grouped by the households they belong to, with the key lines that reveal each one. For the plot, the themes, and the play’s most famous lines, see our full guide to The Merchant of Venice.
At a Glance
Here are the major characters in The Merchant of Venice and their roles in the play.
The Merchant and His Friends
The play opens among the Christian gentlemen of Venice, a circle of friends who borrow, lend, and spend freely among themselves. At its center is a merchant who will risk his life for one of them.
Antonio
The merchant of the title is a wealthy trader whose fortune is tied up in ships at sea. His first line is a mystery he cannot solve: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.” He denies that his cargoes worry him, and he waves away the suggestion that he is in love. When his friend Bassanio asks for money to court Portia, Antonio has no cash on hand but offers everything he has: “My purse, my person, my extremest means / Lie all unlocked to your occasions.” To raise the sum, he signs Shylock’s bond, agreeing to forfeit a pound of his flesh if he cannot repay it: “Content, in faith. I’ll seal to such a bond.”
Antonio is generous to his friends and openly cruel to Shylock. He has spat on the moneylender and called him a dog, and when Shylock reminds him of it, he promises to do it again: “I am as like to call thee so again, / To spet on thee again, to spurn thee, too.” His love for Bassanio is the strongest feeling he shows. Salarino describes his tearful parting from his friend, and Solanio says, “I think he only loves the world for him.” Many modern readers and productions see that love as romantic. Facing death at the trial, Antonio calls himself “a tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest for death,” and asks Bassanio to tell Portia “Whether Bassanio had not once a love.” Critics often compare him with the other Antonio of Twelfth Night, another man devoted to a younger friend who marries.
Bassanio
Bassanio is a young gentleman who has spent more than he had. He admits to Antonio that he has “disabled mine estate,” and he proposes to clear his debts by marrying a rich heiress: “In Belmont is a lady richly left.” He even compares the plan to a schoolboy losing one arrow and shooting another the same way to find it. His motives look mixed at first, but at Belmont he chooses well. Rejecting the gold and silver caskets, he warns that “The world is still deceived with ornament,” and picks the plain lead one, which holds Portia’s picture.
Bassanio is caught between two loves, his wife and his friend. When Antonio’s letter arrives, he confesses to Portia that he was “worse than nothing,” since he had “Engaged my friend to his mere enemy / To feed my means.” At the trial, he offers to sacrifice everything, wife included, to save Antonio: “life itself, my wife, and all the world / Are not with me esteemed above thy life.” Portia, disguised beside him, notes dryly that his wife “would give you little thanks for that.” He then gives away the ring he swore never to part with, and he must plead his way back into her favor in the final act.
Gratiano
Gratiano is the talker of the group. He tries to cheer up Antonio (“Let me play the fool”), and Bassanio says he “speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice.” Before taking him to Belmont, Bassanio warns him that he is “too wild, too rude and bold of voice.” There, he woos Nerissa while Bassanio woos Portia, and the two couples plan to marry together.
At the trial, Gratiano’s high spirits turn ugly. He curses Shylock as an “inexecrable dog” and, once Portia turns the law against him, throws Shylock’s own praise back at him: “A Daniel still, say I! A second Daniel!— / I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word.” When Antonio is asked what mercy he will show, Gratiano calls out, “A halter gratis, nothing else, for God’s sake!” He also has the last word in the play, a bawdy joke about keeping Nerissa’s ring safe.
Shylock’s Household
Shylock’s house is the play’s other Venice: a closed, watchful home that the Christians mock from outside, and that both his daughter and his servant are eager to leave.
Shylock
Shylock is a Jewish moneylender who has endured years of public abuse from Antonio. In an aside when they meet, he gives his reasons for hating him: “I hate him for he is a Christian, / But more for that in low simplicity / He lends out money gratis.” To Antonio’s face, he recalls the insults: “You call me misbeliever, cutthroat dog, / And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine.” He offers the loan without interest and asks instead, “in a merry sport,” for a pound of flesh if it is not repaid. He keeps apart from the Christians: “I will buy with you, sell with you … but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.”
The loss of his daughter changes the jest into revenge. When Jessica runs off with Lorenzo and his money, he answers the mockers with one of the play’s most famous speeches: “Hath not a Jew eyes? … If you prick us, do we not bleed?” It ends in a threat: “The villainy you teach me I will execute.” His grief is tangled with money (“I would my daughter were dead at my foot and the jewels in her ear”), yet when he hears that she traded his turquoise ring for a monkey, he remembers that he had it “of Leah when I was a bachelor.” In court, he refuses every offer (“I’ll have my bond”), and he loses much of his wealth and his religion. His last lines begin “I am not well.” Whether Shylock is a villain, a victim, or both is a question readers and productions answer in different ways, and in many modern productions he is the play’s most sympathetic figure.
Jessica
Shylock’s daughter is unhappy at home: “Our house is hell.” She feels guilty for it (“Alack, what heinous sin is it in me / To be ashamed to be my father’s child?”), but she plans to escape, promising to “Become a Christian and thy loving wife.” On the night of her elopement, dressed as a boy, she throws Lorenzo a casket of her father’s treasure and goes back inside to “gild myself / With some more ducats.”
Jessica does not seem wholly at home in her new world either. At Belmont, Lancelet tells her she is damned for being “the Jew’s daughter,” and she answers, “I shall be saved by my husband. He hath made me a Christian.” Her moonlit duet with Lorenzo, “In such a night,” recalls lovers from old stories, several of whom ended badly. Her last line in the play is “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.” She and her father never meet again after he leaves her to guard his house.
Lancelet Gobbo
Shylock’s servant is the play’s clown, spelled Lancelet in some modern editions and Launcelot in others. He enters debating with his conscience and “the fiend” over whether to run away from his master, and the fiend wins. He plays a cruel trick on his half-blind father, pretending to be someone else, before winning a place in Bassanio’s household. His jokes about Jews and conversion show how easily the Christian world makes fun of Shylock and his daughter.
Tubal
Tubal is “a wealthy Hebrew” of Shylock’s tribe who lends him the ducats. In Act 3, he returns from Genoa and gives Shylock news in alternating pieces, of Jessica’s spending and of Antonio’s losses, so that Shylock swings between despair and glee.
Belmont
Belmont is a place of music, wealth, and courtship, ruled by a woman who is bound by her dead father’s will until the right man chooses.
Portia
Portia is rich, witty, and weary of her situation: “my little body is aweary of this great world.” Her father’s will says she must marry the man who chooses the right casket, and she resents it: “So is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father.” She mocks her suitors one by one with sharp comedy, and her wit also carries the prejudice of her world. When the Prince of Morocco fails, she says, “Let all of his complexion choose me so.” When Bassanio arrives, she wants to guide him but will not break her oath: “I could teach you / How to choose right, but then I am forsworn.”
After Bassanio wins her, Portia hands him herself and everything she owns, calling herself “an unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpracticed,” and gives him a ring he must never part with. Almost at once she proves how much more than that she is. She offers to pay Antonio’s debt many times over, then sets off secretly for Venice, disguised as a young doctor of law, and saves Antonio with a reading of the bond that no man in the court had found: “This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood.” Back home, she tests her husband with the ring, and in the final scene she even holds good news for Antonio about his ships. Of all the characters, she does the most to steer the ending.
Nerissa
Portia’s waiting woman is her confidante and a sharp talker in her own right. In the first Belmont scene, she offers some homespun wisdom: “they are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing.” She marries Gratiano, goes to Venice disguised as the lawyer’s clerk, and plays the same trick with her own husband’s ring. When Gratiano insists he gave it to a boy who will never grow a beard, she replies, “Ay, if a woman live to be a man.”
Lorenzo
Lorenzo is a friend of Bassanio’s who elopes with Jessica. He praises her as “wise, fair, and true,” and at Belmont, Portia leaves the two of them in charge of her house. In the last act, he speaks some of the play’s most beautiful verse, on the moonlight and the music of the spheres (“Such harmony is in immortal souls”), and warns that “The man that hath no music in himself … Let no such man be trusted.” At the end, he learns that he and Jessica will inherit Shylock’s wealth and says, “Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starvèd people.”
The Prince of Morocco and the Prince of Arragon
Two of Portia’s suitors take the casket test and fail. Morocco, “a tawny Moor” in the stage direction, opens with “Mislike me not for my complexion,” chooses gold, and finds a skull and the verse beginning “All that glisters is not gold.” Arragon, too proud to “jump with common spirits,” chooses silver and finds “The portrait of a blinking idiot.” Each is fooled by his own idea of what he deserves.
Other Characters
The Duke of Venice presides over the trial. He calls Shylock “A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch,” challenges him (“How shalt thou hope for mercy, rend’ring none?”), and, after the verdict, spares his life. Salarino and Solanio are Antonio’s gossiping friends, who report Shylock’s cries of “My daughter, O my ducats” through the streets, and Salerio carries Antonio’s letter to Belmont. Old Gobbo is Lancelet’s father, and Balthazar is the servant Portia sends to her cousin, the lawyer Bellario, whose letter introduces her to the court under the name Balthazar.
A Closer Reading: “Which Is the Merchant Here? And Which the Jew?”
When Portia enters the court disguised as the young lawyer Balthazar, her first question is a practical one:
Which is the merchant here? And which the Jew?
It may be no more than a stranger’s formality. But it is also the question the play has been asking all along, and the answer is less obvious than Venice believes. Antonio and Shylock are presented as opposites, the Christian who lends for love and the Jew who lends for profit. Yet they are alike in ways neither would admit. Both men are outside the play’s love stories. Antonio opens the play sad without knowing why; Shylock goes to Bassanio’s supper “in hate” and dreams of “money bags.” Each hates the other openly, and that hatred shapes the bond. Antonio signs the bond with “Content, in faith”; Shylock later accepts the ruin of everything with “I am content.”
They even describe their ruin in the same terms. Antonio, expecting the knife, calls himself “a tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest for death.” Shylock, stripped of his goods, answers that taking his wealth is taking his life: “you take my life / When you do take the means whereby I live.” In the end both lie at the mercy of others: the Duke spares Shylock’s life, and Portia saves Antonio’s.
The ending keeps them apart in one way and together in another. Shylock leaves the court alone, “not well.” Antonio goes to Belmont, where the couples quarrel over rings and he stands among them as “th’ unhappy subject of these quarrels.” To settle the matter, he offers to be bound a second time: “I once did lend my body for his wealth,” he says, and now “I dare be bound again, / My soul upon the forfeit.” The merchant ends the play as he began it, pledging himself for Bassanio’s sake. Portia hands him a letter saying three of his ships have come home, and at first he can only say, “I am dumb.” Then everyone goes in together, the couples to their beds. Antonio has his ships back but no one to go in with.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the characters in The Merchant of Venice, answered briefly.
Who Is the Merchant of Venice?
Antonio, the Christian trader who borrows from Shylock for his friend Bassanio. Shylock is a moneylender, not a merchant, though he is often mistaken for the title character.
Is Shylock a Villain?
He plays the villain’s part in the plot, since he tries to take Antonio’s life. But the play also shows the abuse he has suffered, and speeches like “Hath not a Jew eyes?” give him a voice that many readers and audiences find more sympathetic than the Christians who defeat him.
How Many Scenes Is Shylock In?
Five of the play’s twenty scenes: Act 1, scene 3; Act 2, scene 5; Act 3, scenes 1 and 3; and the trial in Act 4, scene 1. He does not appear in Act 5.
Why Does Shylock Hate Antonio?
For his insults and for his business. Antonio has spat on him and called him a dog, and he lends money without interest, which, Shylock says, “brings down / The rate of usance here with us in Venice.” Antonio also says he has rescued many of Shylock’s debtors from their forfeits.
Does Portia Help Bassanio Choose the Right Casket?
The play does not say. She swears she will not, but a song is sung while he chooses, and its first lines rhyme with “lead”: “Tell me where is fancy bred, / Or in the heart, or in the head?” Some readers take this as a hint; others see it as coincidence.
Related Reading
Three pages that take The Merchant of Venice and its characters further.