Launcelet Gobbo

Play

The Merchant of Venice

Summary

Launcelet Gobbo is Shylock's clownish servant who decides to leave his master's employ for Bassanio's more festive household. His famous internal monologue weighing the advice of his conscience against that of "the fiend" is a comic set-piece of Elizabethan stand-up. He also plays a trick on his nearly blind old father, Old Gobbo. Launcelet provides the play's broadest, most purely farcical comedy, a counterpoint to the darker material in the Shylock plot.

Notable Quotations

"Certainly my conscience will serve me to run from this Jew my master." *(II.ii)*

"Thus when I shun Scylla your father, I fall into Charybdis your mother." *(III.v)*

Cross-references

• The Merchant of Venice — the play
• Comedies — genre
• character_shylock — his former master, whom he flees
• character_bassanio — his new master