The Merchant of Venice (Vol. 53) | Mary Janell Metzger (essay date 1998)
Mary Janell Metzger (essay date 1998)
SOURCE: “‘Now by My Hood, a Gentle and No Jew’: Jessica, The Merchant of Venice, and the Discourse of Early Modern English Identity,” in PMLA, Vol. 113, No. 1, 1998, pp. 52-63.
[In the essay below, Metzger examines Elizabethan England's anxieties about racial and religious differences as symbolized by Shylock's daughter, Jessica, in The Merchant of Venice. Metzger contrasts the white-skinned, Christian-looking Jessica, who willingly and easily converts, with her dark-skinned father, who is forced by society to convert without ever, in fact, being accepted by society.]
Jessica, the other Jew in The Merchant of Venice, is doubly distinguished.1 Unlike her father, Shylock, she is said to be “gentle”: at once noble and gentile. Yet as the “now” quoted in my title signifies and as Jessica readily admits, she remains “a daughter to [Shylock's] blood”...
[The entire page is 8777 words long]
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