The Merchant of Venice (opera) 2013. Keith Warner directed the production, which was also supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Grand Theatre – National Opera, Warsaw. The opera libretto follows the plot of the original play very closely, generally using Shakespeare's own words. Many of the minor characters are excised. Act I introduces the melancholy merchant Antonio, his friend Bassanio who asks Antonio for money to back his wooing of Portia, the Jewish moneylender Shylock, his daughter Jessica and her Gentile lover, Lorenzo. Despite evident mutual personal animosity, Shylock agrees to lend Antonio 3000 ducats against the pledge of a pound of the
Jessica (The Merchant of Venice) the 1955 Arden Shakespeare second series edition of the play: "… nowhere in the play does Shylock show any tenderness towards his daughter …. … as a Jewess, loved by a Christian, Jessica stood in a fair way for the audience's sympathy …." In Munday's "Zelauto", Brisana (Jessica) opposes her father, Trinculo (Shylock), and eventually elopes with Rodolpho (Lorenzo); all presented sympathetically for the audience. Similarly, in Salernitano's 14th "novella", the daughter makes off with her father's money, to the same effect. "In both these examples, the father is avaricious …. It ranks him with the miserly fathers in Elizabethan