Commendable silence: a crux in 'The Merchant of Venice.'

ANTONIO's speech at The Merchant of Venice I.i.113 is obviously corrupt: in the Quarto of 1600 and the subsequent early texts he is given the words `It is that any thing now'. From Rowe onwards most editors have emended, but although their conjectures have shown that there are many ways to alter the words into some kind of sense (for example, Rowe: `Is that any thing now?'; Johnson: `Is that anything new?'; Stanley Wells: `Yet is that anything now?'), no reading yet proposed is really apt to the dramatic situation. Collier, in avoiding substantive emendation, at least broke with Rowe's turning of the speech into a question, something which has misled many; but his solution, `It is that: -- any thing now' is even more strained in …