Jessica (The Merchant of Venice) 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 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, and her
Hamlet's Father Hamlet is sent to Hell for the harm he's caused and will be with his father for eternity. Orson Scott Card has modernized other Shakespeare plays, including "The Taming of the Shrew", "The Merchant of Venice", and "Romeo and Juliet", "so that modern audiences can understand them instantly and easily while still remaining "[sic]" all the flavor of blank verse in Elizabethan English." In his foreword to the "Hamlet's Father", Card says that he could never identify with Hamlet: "I have little interest in a dithering hero; nor am I much inspired by revenge plots." He wrote the story in