Jessica (The Merchant of Venice) "Il Pecorone" () 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" (). 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
Antonio (The Merchant of Venice) to an individual's sexual identity but only to specific sexual acts any individual might engage in. As Bray writes: "To talk of an individual of this period as being or not being 'a homosexual' is an anachronism and ruinously misleading. The temptation to debauchery, from which homosexuality was not clearly distinguished, was accepted as part of the common lot ... homosexuality [as understood in 15th-century England] was a sin 'to which men's natural corruption and viciousness [were] prone' " (16–17, Rainolds qtd. in Bray, 17). Antonio (The Merchant of Venice) Antonio is the title character in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of