Online editions of The Merchant of Venice
Folger Digital Texts —You can also download MV and other Shakespeare plays here.
Internet Shakespeare Editions —This site also publishes contextual information on Shakespeare's Life and Times, a database on performances, and links to additional resources.
Online facsimiles of Shakespeare's plays
British Library's Shakespeare in Quarto —This resource enables comparison between multiple early versions of Shakespeare's works; the MV page has some information on the play's sources & publication.
Bodleian First Folio —This is a digital facsimile of the First Folio, with multiple options for viewing and downloading. This page also provides some background information on the First Folio.
Resources for learning more about MV and Shakespeare
Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive—This archive provides “online access to performances of Shakespeare from many parts of the world as well as essays and metadata by scholars and educators in the field.”
Folgerpedia on MV —This page provides some basic background information on MV and also links to other Folger resources, including scans of the Folger's First Folio and several other early editions.
Folger MV Page —This page also has some background information and links to scans of early editions; more importantly, it includes several images that show representations of the characters from MV and a link to the Folger's larger digital image collection.
You may also find the digital image collections that the Folger Shakespeare Library has published helpful, particularly those on in the media groups on religion and on race.
Resources for finding and reading primary sources
Shakespeare Documented —This is a large collection of print and manuscript sources that link to Shakespeare's works and world; the collection can seem a bit daunting, but it is well-organized and certainly worth exploring.
Early English Books Online: Text Creation Partnership —This is a very large collection of early modern texts (currently 25,000 transcriptions are available to the public) that can be searched in several ways. In addition to the main page linked in this entry (which is probably easier to search), you might also want to look at the Oxford Text Archive's page, which allows you to read online and download files (and is probably easier to use if you already know what you're looking for).
Web tools and databases
Map of Early Modern London —This resource offers informational entries on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, both as an encyclopedia and directly on a seventeenth-century map of the city. You may be particularly interested in the MoEML entry on bookselling at St. Paul's Churchyard, a location where many of Shakespeare's works were sold.
To See or Not to See —This tool lets you see at a glance how the play is organized, who’s speaking when, and where stage directions appear. You can click on characters, acts, scenes, or speeches to get more information, including counts of lines and words by character, who’s active where and with whom, and so on. It takes a few minutes to get the hang of, but it’s really interesting to play with.
Word Tree Tool —This tool, created by Jason Davies, allows you to paste in text and look for patterns in the words that appear before and after keywords in which you are interested. It's a great way to explore uses of words you think might be interesting.
Early Print: Keywords in Context —This tool is a good way to see how a word or phrase in which you're interested might have been used by Shakespeare's contemporaries. It gives you several ways to search and, since it's built using the EEBO-TCP files, can also be used to discover and read whole texts.
Trailers and promotional materials for some recent productions of MV
The Merchant in Venice, 2016
Promotional video: A Gathering of Strangers
Globe Theatre, 2015 and 2016
Royal Shakespeare Company, 2015
Webpage —Includes a fair amount of background information on the play itself.
Almeida Theatre, 2015
RSC page for 2011 production
Shakespeare on the Lake, 2013
TNT Theatre Britain, 2015
Sheffield University Theatre Company, 2014
Welsh National Opera, 2016
Actors' commentary
Playing Shakespeare: Shylock (with Patrick Stewart and David Suchet)
Scott Wentworth on playing Shylock (from Stratford Festival, 2013)
Anthony Heald on Shylock (from Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2010; additional videos at link)
The Qualities of Mercy Project - Professor Jonathan Burton brought together different classes across the country to reflect on, respond to, and perform scenes from Merchant with an eye to how they speak to our concerns today.