Jessica (The Merchant of Venice) 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: 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
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