SOURCE: "An Analogue and Possible Second Source to the Pound-of-Flesh Story in the Merchant of Venice," in Notes and Queries, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1983, pp. 117-8.

In the following essay, Laroque suggests the Jewish usurer in the English Faust book as a secondary source for Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.

An interesting prose version of Shylock's 'merry bond', which is not acknowledged by Geoffrey Bullough, John Russell Brown or Kenneth Muir in their studies of the sources of The Merchant of Venice,¹ is found in chapter xxxiii of The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus, translated from German into English in 1592.²

The title of the episode reads 'How Dr. Faustus borrowed Money of a Jew, and laid his own Leg in Pawn for it' and it tells of one of Faustus's magical tricks to get money at the expense of a Jewish usurer...