Shakespeare’s two source texts for The Merchant of Venice are well known: Il Pecorone (the pound of flesh) and Gesta Romanorum (the casket test). Shakespeare adds the term “lottery” to describe Portia’s casket-selection process, yet scholarship has paid scant attention to Shakespeare’s use of the word in cultural context: the 1567 lottery event that was Elizabeth I’s attempt to generate revenue for London’s maritime reconstruction. Elizabeth’s fundraising venture shapes two related concepts in Merchant: lottery and exchange. Shakespeare’s audience would have been familiar with the 1567 lottery’s transactional organization. Players paid for individual lots, each of which they marked with a unique, personalized poesy. The phenomenon of England’s first lottery illuminates Merchant’s emblematic associations; in the play’s discursive system, Shylock’s famously cryptic reference to “a wilderness of monkeys” would have evoked a central image used in the lottery’s publicity campaign and, ultimately, may be understood to stand for the matter of Elizabeth’s fertility, concerns about which inspired the novel 1567 event. Shakespeare’s representation of Shylock as a sexually impotent man stands for Elizabeth’s own reproductive deficiency, and Merchant ultimately acknowledges such acts of displacement by revealing its system of bogus symbolic exchange.