Jessica is the daughter of Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (c. 1598). In the play, she elopes with Lorenzo, a penniless Christian, and a chest of her father's money, eventually ending up in Portia and Bassanio's household. In the play's dramatic structure, Jessica is a minor but pivotal role. Her actions motivate Shylock's vengeful insistence on his "pound of flesh" from Antonio; her relationships with Lorenzo and Shylock serve as a mirror and contrast to Portia's with Bassanio and with her father; her conversion to Christianity is the end of Shylock's line's adherence to the Jewish faith.
Literary critics have historically viewed the character negatively, highlighting her theft of her father's gold, her betrayal of his trust, and apparently selfish motivations and aimless behaviour. Since the end of the 20th century their views have been more moderate and nuanced, pointing to an alternative reading that allows her actions to be motivated by love and generosity, and being driven by Shylock's own tyrannical and immoral behaviour.
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Role in the play
The central plot of The Merchant of Venice is relatively straightforward: Antonio borrows money from Shylock to help his friend, Bassanio, court Portia, but, through misfortune, is unable to repay and is subjected to an onerous default (a literal "pound of flesh" cut from his body). In addition, the play contains subplots regarding Bassanio's courtship of Portia; Launcelot Gobbo's humorous interactions with his father, and his change of allegiance from Shylock to Portia and Bassanio; and Jessica and Lorenzo's elopement, with Shylock's savings, his casket of ducats.
The role of Jessica is a relatively minor one. She speaks a grand total of 660 words over the play's five acts. In the dramatic structure of the play, the role is, however, pivotal: her elopement with Lorenzo, taking her father's casket of gold ducats, motivates Shylock's vengefulness towards Antonio; she serves as a mirror highlighting the differences between Shylock's Jewish household and Portia's Christian one; and serves as the means by which Shylock is forcibly converted to Christianity.
Her first appearance on stage is in act 2, scene 3, in a brief scene with Launcelot Gobbo. Gobbo is leaving Shylock's service to give his allegiance to Bassanio, and Jessica bemoans the loss of his company in a household that is "hell". She speeds him along, to avoid her father seeing their interaction, with a gold ducat as a parting gift and a letter to Lorenzo. After Gobbo leaves, she muses to herself on what flaws are in her character that makes her ashamed to be her father's daughter, and that although she is related to him by blood she is alienated by his behaviour. She concludes the soliloquy determined to marry Lorenzo and convert to Christianity.
In act 2, scene 4, Gobbo bears the letter, containing Jessica's plans to elope with Lorenzo and as much of her father's valuables as she can find, to Lorenzo. He is pleased by the letter and its contents, and bids Gobbo return to let her know that he has received the letter and will not fail her. In act 2, scene 5, however, Gobbo is intercepted by Shylock, who berates him for his change of allegiance. Gobbo seizes on Shylock's repeated mentions of Jessica's name as a pretense to call her. When she arrives, Shylock gives her the keys to his house and the responsibility of keeping it safe while he dines with Antonio and Bassanio. Upon learning there will be a masquerade, he enjoins her to shutter the windows and not "gaze on Christian fools with varnished faces". He then bids Gobbo precede him to let Antonio and Bassanio know he will attend their dinner. Having no other option, Gobbo whispers to Jessica to "look out at window for all this. / There will come a Christian by / Will be worth a Jewess' eye." before leaving. Shylock catches the interaction and asks Jessica what Gobbo said, but Jessica deceives him and claims he was simply saying goodbye. Shylock then complains of Gobbo's sloth and vociferous appetite, claiming he is well rid of him and glad he now serves Bassanio, whom he dislikes. He leaves for the dinner, and Jessica soliloquises:
Character sources
The generally accepted sources for The Merchant of Venice are Giovanni Fiorentino's Il Pecorone (c. 1380s) and Richard Robinson's English translation of the Gesta Romanorum (1577), but neither of these contain the Jessica–Lorenzo plot, nor give their Shylock-analogues a daughter. For these elements Shakespeare probably mined Masuccio Salernitano's Il Novellino (1476) and Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (c. 1590).
In the 14th story of Il Novellino we have most of the elements of the Jessica–Lorenzo plot: a daughter guarded by a rich but miserly father; the lovers eloping with her father's gold and jewels; the father's despair, in equal measures, for the loss of both daughter and treasure; and the lovers' eventual marriage and happiness.
For the Jessica–Shylock relationship, John Drakakis, the editor of the Arden Shakespeare's third series edition, highlights the verbal connection between The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta with Barabas's words when Abigail rescues his gold and Shylock's at Jessica's theft of his Ducats.
Another version of the play's plot can be found in Anthony Munday's Zelauto: The Fountain of Fame Erected in an Orchard of Amorous Adventures (1580). In this version it is Munday's Jessica analogue, Brisana, who pleads the case first in the courtroom scene, followed by Cornelia, the Portia analogue.
But the Jessica–Lorenzo plot ultimately stems from medieval archetypal plots and characters. The Christian in love with a Jewess appears frequently in exemplum from the 13th to the 15th century. Beatrice D. Brown, in her 1929 article, "Mediaeval Prototypes of Lorenzo and Jessica", finds the most direct match in "… MS. Royal 7 D. 1, a collection of theological pieces probably compiled by a Dominican friar at or near Cambridge in the thirteenth century." It contains a spendthrift Christian lover, the fair Jewess, the rich old father, the lovers robbing the father, and the father's conflicted grief over his daughter's betrayal and the loss of his treasure. However, in this story the Christian lover flees alone with the treasure.
Writing two decades later, James L. Wilson finds a better parallel in The Sultan of Babylon, an English story rooted in The Matter of France and the chanson de geste The Song of Roland. Here Laban—the Sultan of Babylon, a Saracen ruler—captures the Christian knights Oliver and Roland and intends to execute them. His daughter, Floripas, proceeds to murder her governess for refusing to help feed the prisoners; bashes the jailer's head in with his keychain when he refuses to let her see the prisoners; manipulates her father into giving her responsibility for them; brings them to her tower, and treats them as royalty; does the same for the remaining ten of the Twelve Peers when they are captured too; helps the Peers murder Sir Lucafere, King of Baldas when he surprises them; urges the Peers to attack her father and his knights at supper to cover up the murder; when her father escapes and attacks the Peers in her tower, she assists in the defence; then she converts to Christianity and is betrothed to Guy of Burgundy; and finally, she and her brother, Fierabras decide that there is no point trying to convert their father to Christianity so he should be executed instead. All this is justified to the audience simply because Floripas converts to Christianity and Laban is a Saracene:
Name
The name "Jessica" was unknown until Shakespeare invented it; it is believed to derive from the Biblical Iscah (Yīskā, Iesca, Iescha), a niece of Abraham. In the First Folio the name was spelled Iessica, as "J" and "I" were not distinguished at the time.
Critical history
Literary critics have historically viewed the character negatively, highlighting her theft of her father's gold, her betrayal of his trust, and her apparently selfish motivations and aimless behaviour. In her 1980 survey, "In Defense of Jessica: The Runaway Daughter in The Merchant of Venice", Camille Slights calls out Arthur Quiller-Couch's opinion in the 1926 The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare as an extreme but representative example:
In the interim between the signing of the bond and its falling due this daughter, this Jessica, has wickedly and most unfilially betrayed him. … Jessica is bad and disloyal, unfilial, a thief; frivolous, greedy, without any more conscience than a cat and without even a cat's redeeming love of home. Quite without heart, on worse than an animal instinct—pilfering to be carnal—she betrays her father to be a light-of-lucre carefully weighted with her sire's ducats.
Slights sees this as a consequence of sympathetic readings of Shylock, where the play is seen primarily as exposing Christian hypocrisy, and his actions merely natural responses to ostracism and prejudice. In such a reading Jessica's actions amount to abandoning her father and betraying him to his enemies. By the last half of the 20th century this "sentimentally sympathetic reading" was starting to be rejected, but without a corresponding reassessment of Jessica. She was still viewed as inhabiting primarily negative values, in contrast with the positive values associated with Portia, Bassanio, and Antonio. Writing in 1977, Raymond B. Waddington thinks that:
The relationship of Jessica and Lorenzo to the primary lovers, Portia and Bassanio, consistently is contrastive and negative: they undergo no tests of character or faith; they are obedient to no bonds; they take all, rather than giving all; they hazard nothing.
Slights contradicts this view, pointing out that it conflicts with "a natural audience response" and argues that "we must question judgments that deny the most obvious emotional force of Shakespearean plots and characters." Shakespeare's plays usually extend and deepen existing dramatic conventions, and Jessica must be seen in a context of classical and Elizabethan conventions for such characters. Slights highlights comedies where children rebel against a miserly father, or romances where daughters defy a repressive father for love. These conventions would be familiar for both Shakespeare and an Elizabethan theatre audience, and, indeed, modern audiences tend to accept Jessica's actions as natural within the context of the plot. Her escape from Shylock's repressive household to Belmont a quest for freedom, and from misfortune to happiness.
18th-century editors
The first critical notice of Jessica in the 18th century was made by William Warburton, who commented on the line in act 5, scene 1: "Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starvèd people." Warburton's comment was that "Shakespear is not more exact in any thing, than in adapting his images with propriety to his speakers; of which he has here given an instance in making the young Jewess call good fortune, Manna." Unfortunately, as Samuel Johnson explains rather drily—in a note to Warburton's note—in his 1765 edition: "The commentator should have remarked, that this speech is not, even in his own edition, the speech of the Jewess." The lines in question are usually assigned to Lorenzo.
The next was by Edmond Malone in his 1790 edition. The editor of the Second Folio (1632) had emended the line "If a Christian do not / play the knave and get thee, I am much deceived", substituting did for do. This changed the meaning, as an acerbic Malone points out:
I should not have attempted to explain so easy a passage, if the ignorant editor of the second folio, thinking probably that the word get must necessarily mean beget, had not altered the text, and substituted did in the place of do, the reading of all the old and authentick editions; in which he has been copied by every subsequent editor. Launcelot is not talking about Jessica's father, but about her future husband. I am aware that, in a subsequent scene, he says to Jessica, 'Marry, you may partly hope your father got you not;' but he is now on another subject.
Malone's position turned out to be somewhat controversial. In his revised edition in 1821, multiple notes appeared in response. The first, by George Steevens, offers an alternate reading of the passage: "I suspect that the waggish Launcelot designed this for a broken sentence—'and get thee'—implying, get thee with child. Mr. Malone, however, supposes him to mean only—carry thee away from thy father's house." As does another by John Monck Mason:
Notwithstanding Mr. Malone charges the editor of the second folio so strongly with ignorance, I have no doubt but that did is the true reading, as it is clearly better sense than that which he has adopted. Launcelot does not mean to foretell the fate of Jessica, but judges, from her lovely disposition, that she must have been begotten by a christian, not by such a brute as Shylock: a christian might marry her without playing the knave, though he could not beget her.
Different iterations
In John Greer St. Ervine's 1924 sequel to The Merchant of Venice, The Lady of Belmont, Jessica is portrayed as a lascivious woman of weak character.
In Nazi Germany, Jessica was altered to be Shylock's Goyish ward, as the marriage between her and Lorenzo contradicted Nazi ideals of racial purity.
