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Lancelot's cutting words leave Jessica distressed enough to pass this information on to Lorenzo as soon as he enters the scene - probably because they reinforce what Jessica herself is most anxious about at the beginning of the play: that she is a "daughter to" her father's "blood" (2.3.18). For the rest of the play's closing scene (which consists of more than two hundred lines), "attentive" Jessica remains quiet, most notably when Nerissa delivers the news of the inheritance Portia won from Shylock in court and promised to Jessica and Lorenzo upon the "rich Jew['s]" death (5.1.290-93). Its skeptical potential, though, is something Shakespeare could exploit in his dramas, reminding us that even if Jessica and Shakespeare's other quiet women can follow Hamlet in affirming "the rest is silence" (5.2.395), they also in context reveal there is ultimately no rest I in i silence just as there is no full closure in comedy and no satisfying resolution for epistemological doubt. Ephraim perceives "spiritual and emotional isolation" in Jessica's "silent presence", arguing that "Shakespeare creates a final image of disconnection between the Christian reader and the Hebrew scripture" and that Jessica is "far removed from the Christians' rhetoric of spiritual devotion and praise" ( I Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage i , 151). [Extracted from the article] |
