Jessica (The Merchant of Venice) of Poetry". Malone responds that ""Sweet" is "pleasing", "delightful", and such is the meaning of "dulcis" in Horace." All references to "The Merchant of Venice", unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Folger Shakespeare Library's "Folger Digital Texts" edition, edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Under their referencing system, acts, scenes, and lines are marked in the text, so 2.6.34–40 would be Act 2, Scene 6, lines 34 through 40. Jessica (The Merchant of Venice) Jessica is the daughter of Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, in William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" (). In the play, she elopes with Lorenzo,
Jessica (The Merchant of Venice) 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