"Ed ebbono bene e buona ventura": multilayered echoes of Il Pecorone in The Merchant of Venice

In line with the ongoing reconceptualisation of source studies and new scholarly insights into Shakespeare’s refashioning of Italian literary and cultural models, this chapter focuses on the playwright’s ‘reuse’ of the novella of Giannetto in Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone, which features many parallels with The Merchant of Venice. While scholars have extensively examined the extent to which parts of the tale’s plot, motifs and character types are woven into the play’s dramatic structure, along with a wide range of other resources, this chapter dwells on hitherto largely unexplored forms of interdiscursive appropriation of Ser Giovanni’s text. Considering complex processes of transcultural diffraction and interlexicality, as most notably epitomised by the multi-layered semantic area of ‘venture’, light is shed on how echoes of Italian topoi, cultural and behavioural models are explored and repurposed in The Merchant of Venice, with a view to addressing issues that the Elizabethan audience would have perceived as crucial, within a rapidly evolving social and economic background, in the transition from a feudal economy to modern capitalism.