I couldn’t find any evidence of the Merchant of Venice ever being performed at the Globe Theater in Shakespeare’s lifetime. I looked at chronologies and Globe Theater performances of all his plays. Maybe I missed something. But it appears the play was never performed at the Globe in the first two decades of 1600s.
Thank you Walken_After_Midnight. I wonder why?
I looked at several of my Shakespeare reference books. They are all consistent with the above. The first printing of the play in 1600 refers to several performances having been given up to that point, but there is no way to know where or when these might have happened. (Edit to add: no way to know with certainty, I mean. There are certainly some good guesses, just no confirmation.) The two court shows in 1605 are the only presentations for which there is a written record until the early 1700s.
As to why this might be the case, we would be necessarily speculating beyond the bare fact that surviving records of the era are spotty and unreliable.
Yep. We don’t have records of most performances at the Globe during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Either the Lord Chamberlain’s / King’s Men weren’t meticulous record-keepers (unlike rival company manager Philip Henslowe, whose diary is a gold mine for theatre historians), or those records have been lost. What we’ve got, usually, are title pages saying a play was performed by them (but not usually when), and / or accounts of particular performances that have survived either because the performance itself was notable in some way (like the two court performances of Merchant that Cervaise mentions above), or just through chance – e.g., we’ve got reasonably detailed eyewitness accounts of performances of Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale from 1611 because fashionable society doctor Simon Forman, for reasons of his own, decided to start keeping a journal of plays he attended, and lots of his papers survive.
Merchant predates the building of the Globe in 1599, but it’s highly likely that it was performed there, either continuously as part of the company’s regular repertoire, or around the time of those 1605 court performances. You’d want to have a few public performances to work out the kinks before playing it at court, especially since it’s a play with a commanding female lead (who would have to have been played by a different boy actor in 1605 than when the play was originally written in the mid-1590s). And since it seems to have gone over well enough for King James to want a repeat performance, it’s also more likely than not that they would have done it afterwards, as well. But, as with most plays from this era, we just don’t know enough to say with 100% certainty.
Perhaps Ye Olde StubHub have archived records.