Alifelong resident of England, William Shakespeare may have visited Venice, Italy, on tour with his acting company. Certainly many of his well-to-do countrymen made the trip, for shipping was a major business in both lands, and Venice served as a main port of trade between Asia and Europe. Whether or not Shakespeare knew any Jews is also unclear, since Jews had been expelled from England three hundred years earlier. But he was undoubtedly familiar with a 1590s scandal that involved a Jew, as well as the contents of at least one other popular play of the decade that featured a Jewish character.
The city of Venice. In the 1300s to 1500s the region that is present-day Italy consisted of separate territories ruled by various governmental bodies, including single-ruler states, the Papal States (a region controlled by the pope and the Roman Catholic Church), and a few regions that had a republican form of government. One of these republics was Venice, located in the northeastern portion of the peninsula, on the Adriatic Sea. The city, which also exerted its rule over nearby towns, was an oligarchy-a state ruled by a few noblemen who did all the voting and governing, sometimes even serving as judges in court cases.
