Shylock, Lottery, and Monkeys (Oh My!)
The idea of a “lottery,” a game of chance you pay to play, hoping to hit the jackpot, always takes me back to Westland Middle School. That’s when the most popular girl in eighth grade won the state lottery’s biggest prize: a whopping million dollars. She appeared in the newspaper as her family’s representative, photogenic and a little shell-shocked. The only other member of her household, her single mom, a young widow, was too shy or nervous for the event. Or at least that’s the story I remember. It was the story that I thought about, years later, when I first encountered the word “lottery” in The Merchant of Venice. Portia, the heroine of the play, must marry the man who selects the correct riddle from three ornate boxes to pass her father’s test of virtue. It seems random, and with a 33% chance of winning, quite good odds. A scholarly rabbit hole led me to an unexpected connection between England’s first-ever lottery, Shakespeare’s lottery in The Merchant of Venice, and the play’s strange allusion to monkeys—hence “Shylock’s Monkeys and the 1569 English Lottery.”