The Gentleman of Venice is a Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by James Shirley, and first published in 1655.[1]
The play was licensed for performance in London by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 30 October 1639. It was acted by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit Theatre in that year,[2] though Shirley himself still seems to have been in Ireland at the time. It is possible, however, that the play was performed earlier at the Werburgh Street Theatre in Dublin, where Shirley worked as producer/director and house dramatist in the later 1630s.
In 1655, The Gentleman of Venice was published twice in alternative quarto and octavo formats by the bookseller Humphrey Moseley, who issued the play both as a solo work and bound together with Shirley's The Politician. (Moseley issued the octavo edition so that owners of his 1653 octavo collection Six New Plays could have the two newly printed works bound together with the earlier texts if they so desired.)[3] These publications were unusual in that the lists of dramatis personae were furnished with short descriptions of each of the important characters, an atypical feature in the printing of plays at that time. In The Gentleman of Venice, for example, Florelli is described as "Of a noble extraction and person, much honoured for his parts, by which he gained much reputation in the academies."