Question: When was the play written that Shylock is based on?

The Merchant of Venice is a 16th-century play by William Shakespeare in which a merchant in Venice must default on a large loan provided by an abused Jewish moneylender.  Though classified as a comedy in the First Folio and sharing certain aspects with Shakespeare's other romantic comedies, the play is perhaps most remembered for its dramatic scenes, and it is best known for Shylock and the famous "Hath not a Jew eyes?"  speech.  Also notable is Portia's speech about "the quality of mercy".  Critic Harold Bloom listed it among Shakespeare's great comedies.  It is believed to have been written between 1596 and 1599. <SEP>  The performance garnered him a Drama Desk nomination for Best Actor in a Musical.  The cast included Lisa Vroman, Charles Pistone, Dennis Parlato, Ann Brown and Joel Fredricks. Shylock is a musical based on Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice", adapted and composed by Ed Dixon debuted at the York Theatre in 1987 with Dixon in the title role.  Kathline Rubbico was musical director with sets and costumes by James Morgan and lighting by Marcia Madeira.  Lloyd Battista was the director.  According to Dixon, "Shylock" was an attempt to sympathetically explain the motivations of the eponymous character. <SEP> The Shoemakers' Holiday, or the Gentle Craft is an Elizabethan play written by Thomas Dekker.  It is considered one of Dekker's greatest works, and is certainly his most well-known.  It was first performed in 1599 by the Admiral's Men.  It falls into the subgenre of city comedy.  It contains the poem, The Merry Month of May. The play was first published in 1600 by the printer Valentine Simmes.  The first edition prefaces the play with an "Epistle to the Professors of the Gentle Craft," and the Prologue spoken before Queen Elizabeth when the play was acted at Court.  (The Admiral's Men performed at Court on 1 January 1600; this was probably the date of the performance of "The Shoemaker's Holiday"). Philip Henslowe's Diary records a payment of £3 to "Thomas Dickers" for the play; since this is at most half of Henslowe's usual fee for a play, one or more other payments, not recorded in the Diary, are likely.  This play followed in the tradition that Dekker had created for himself of depicting everyday life in London.  Due to this skill, in The Shoemaker's Holiday and other plays, Dekker was later called the "Dickens of English theater", due to his commitment to portraying the lives of Londoners.  Dekker based his play on a prose tract titled "The Gentle Craft", by Thomas Deloney, printed in 1598. <SEP> Although traditionally Titus Andronicus has been seen as one of Shakespeare's least respected plays, its fortunes have changed somewhat in the latter half of the twentieth century, with numerous scholars arguing that the play is more accomplished than has hitherto been allowed for.  In particular, scholars have argued that the play is far more thematically complex than has traditionally been thought, and features profound insights into Ancient Rome, Elizabethan society, and the human condition.  Such scholars tend to argue that these previously unacknowledged insights have only become apparent during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as only now has the ultraviolent content of the play achieved a sense of relevance.  For example, in his 1987 edition of the play for the "Contemporary Shakespeare" series, A.L. Rowse writes; "in the civilised Victorian age the play could not be performed because it could not be believed.  Such is the horror of our own age, with the appalling barbarities of prison camps and resistance movements paralleling the torture and mutilation and feeding on human flesh of the play, that it has ceased to be improbable."  Similarly, director Julie Taymor, who staged a production Off-Broadway in 1994 and directed a film version in 1999, says she was drawn to the play because she found it to be the most "relevant of Shakespeare's plays for the modern era;" She feels that the play has more relevance for us than it had for the Victorians; "it seems like a play written for today, it reeks of now."  Because of this new found relevance, previously unrecognised thematic strands have thus come to the forefront.