A Doomed Fate?: Characterizing the Relationship Between Jessica and Lorenzo Anonymous College

From the very beginning, it seemed like Lorenzo and Jessica might not make a strong couple. Like any good Shakespearean match, these two were destined to have obstacles to face during the course of their relationship. Lorenzo is Christian and Jessica is Jewish, but on top of that Shylock, Jessica’s father, is vehemently opposed to this pairing. As a result, Jessica steals from her own father and runs away from home to elope with Lorenzo. The most interesting aspect of lines 1-24 of Scene 5 is Jessica and Lorenzo’s comparison of themselves to famously doomed lovers. It seems that if one was confident in their love for another, they would not want to begin by juxtaposing their affections with love stories that ended in death or despair. In these lines, Shakespeare is giving us information about this relationship that he knows our naivety would force us to overlook. It seems that the relationship between Jessica and Lorenzo could go one of two ways. They could be the successful star-crossed lovers readers have been rooting on for centuries, or they could be star-crossed lovers that disappoint our romantic fantasies yet again.

Shakespeare is certainly not one to just give us what we want without a lesson learned. In fact, in...