Eleanor Phelps George Arliss who had starred as Shylock in Ames's Broadway production of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" during the Broadway season just ended. In any event, Ames offered Phelps the role of Jessica in the post-Broadway national tour of "Merchant of Venice." At the end of the University Players 1928 summer season, Phelps left Cape Cod to join Arliss and company and never returned to Falmouth. She loved "more than anything being in a play by Mister Shakespeare." Phelps appeared in motion pictures in the early 1930s with roles in "The Run Around" (1932), "The Count of Monte Cristo" (1934),
The Merchant of Venice (1923 film) German retained Shakespeare’s nomenclature, but in the American they were given new names sourced from the Italian work "Il Pecorone", a 14th-century short story collection attributed to Giovanni Fiorentino, from which Shakespeare is believed to have drawn his idea. The film purports to be a return to the original, as an excuse for its differences from the play. The characters are renamed in the extant English script. The script varies significantly from Shakespeare's original. Mordecai, The Jew of Mestri, has a young daughter, Rachela, whom he has betrothed against her will to Elias, the son of his merchant friend Tubal.