Lorenzo
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: A young Christian Venetian, friend of Bassanio and Antonio, suitor and then husband of Jessica, manager of Belmont during Portia's absence, and the speaker of one of Shakespeare's most-celebrated lyric speeches — the "look how the floor of heaven" passage of 5.1.
- Key Traits: Articulate, musically inclined, poetically gifted, capable of producing some of the play's most beautiful pastoral writing — and, beneath the lyric surface, willing to organise Jessica's theft from her father, content to convert his wife by marriage, and to "wrong a Jew" while believing he has the right to do so.
- The Core Conflict: A young Christian whose romantic project is the elopement with a Jewish heiress, which involves the simultaneous gain of a wife, a fortune (taken from Shylock), and a religious conversion — and whose lyric register at Belmont must somehow accommodate what the lyric register cannot quite acknowledge about how he got there.
- Key Actions: Appears in 1.1 with Bassanio and friends; plans the elopement with Gratiano in 2.4 and reads Jessica's letter ("she hath directed / How I shall take her from her father's house"); receives Jessica from the window in 2.6; arrives with her at Belmont in 3.2; manages the household in Portia's absence in 3.4 and 3.5; opens 5.1 with the "in such a night" lyric exchange and the "look how the floor of heaven" speech; receives the news in 5.2 of the deed of gift giving him and Jessica half of Shylock's confiscated estate.
- Famous Quote:
"Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings."
(Act 5, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Ends the play married to Jessica, the joint recipient (with her) of half of Shylock's confiscated estate, and integrated into Portia's Belmont household. Receives the news of the inheritance from Portia with the line "Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starved people" — a comparison the play does not, finally, comment on.
The Letter and the Plan
Lorenzo's most consequential single scene is 2.4. He has received a letter from Jessica, delivered by Launcelot; he is meeting his friends in the street to arrange a masque; the letter contains the operational plan for the elopement, including the casket of money and the page's suit Jessica will wear.
Original
I must needs tell thee all. She hath directed
How I shall take her from her father's house,
What gold and jewels she is furnished with,
What page's suit she hath in readiness.
If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven,
It will be for his gentle daughter's sake:
And never dare misfortune cross her foot,
Unless she do it under this excuse,
That she is issue to a faithless Jew.
(Act 2, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I have to tell you everything. She's told me
How I shall take her from her father's house,
What gold and jewels she is carrying,
And what her pageboy clothes she has prepared.
And if her Jewish father gets to heaven,
It will be only for his daughter's sake.
And never will she ever be unlucky,
Unless the reason for it is because
She is the daughter of a faithless Jew.
The speech is one of the play's most exposing pieces of writing for the Christian principal. Lorenzo is, in his own confidential explanation to Gratiano, articulating three distinct positions in three contiguous sentences. First, the operational: Jessica has organised the theft and the disguise; he is the recipient of her plan. Second, the religious: the only possible route by which Shylock could enter heaven would be the daughter's intercession (a comparison that uses the medieval Christian theological figure of the saintly intercessor to convert Jessica into a kind of Christianised Marian figure before her actual conversion has occurred). Third, the deterministic: Jessica's Jewishness is a kind of latent misfortune that may catch up with her despite her conversion. The third position is the most exposing. Lorenzo is, even at the moment of planning to marry Jessica and accept her conversion, articulating a view that her Jewish parentage is a structural threat to her future happiness. Hazlitt's reading of the character — "we should like... Lorenzo, if he had not married a Jewess, though he thinks he has a right to wrong a Jew" — captures the structural complication exactly. The speech reveals, in twelve lines, a young man whose lyric capacity will, three acts later, produce the play's most-celebrated pastoral writing, and whose actual moral economy is built on the assumption that "wronging a Jew" — taking his money, taking his daughter, presiding over his religious displacement — is, on Christian principles, permissible.
The Elopement and the Casket
Act 2, Scene 6 is the play's most direct portrait of the elopement-and-theft, and Lorenzo's role within it is structurally specific. He stands in the street with Gratiano and Salarino; he calls Jessica from the window; he receives the casket of money she throws down; he waits while she "gilds" herself with more ducats. The scene has been discussed across two centuries, and the principal critical question is what it tells us about Lorenzo as a romantic figure.
Original
LORENZO: Beshrew me but I love her heartily;
For she is wise, if I can judge of her,
And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true,
And true she is, as she hath proved herself,
And therefore, like herself, wise, fair and true,
Shall she be placed in my constant soul.
(Act 2, Scene 6)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Damn me, but I love her, heart and soul.
For she is wise, in my own estimation,
And fair, if all my eyes show me is true,
And true, since she has proven so to me.
So she will live, this wise, fair, faithful woman,
Within my truthful, never-changing soul.
The speech is Lorenzo at his most direct, and it has divided readers. The triple "wise, fair, and true" formula is a recognisable Renaissance romantic construction — Shakespeare uses similar formulations elsewhere — and the line reads, on the surface, as Lorenzo's sincere declaration of love for Jessica. What gives the speech its quiet complication is the qualifying construction. Jessica is "wise, if I can judge of her" — Lorenzo's epistemic warrant — "fair... if that mine eyes be true," and "true... as she hath proved herself." The hedging is structurally exact. He is telling Gratiano that Jessica's qualities depend on his own perception of them, and the qualities are precisely the qualities a man marrying for love would want to confirm to himself. The play does not, finally, allow the question to settle. Lorenzo's "wise, fair, and true" speech is genuinely beautiful; it is also delivered in the moment of receiving a casket of stolen ducats from a young woman in boy's disguise leaning out of her father's window. The two registers — lyric romance and material acquisition — coexist in the same speech, and the play's structural decision is to let them coexist without resolution.
The Moonlight Scene
Act 5, Scene 1 opens with one of the most-celebrated lyric exchanges in Shakespeare, and Lorenzo's contributions are among the most-quoted single passages in the play. He and Jessica are alone at Belmont in the moonlight, waiting for Portia to return from Venice.
Original
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Let's sit here and we'll let the sounds of music
Waft in our ears: oh what a lovely night
To hear the harmonies of gentle music.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the sky in heaven
Is thickly dotted with its golden stars:
There's not a star within the sky so small
Whose motion doesn't match angelic singing,
Like cherubs singing in falsetto tones.
That sound comes from our immortality;
But whilst we're here within decaying bodies
That keep us trapped within, we cannot hear it.
The speech is one of the most-celebrated single passages in Shakespeare's mature comedy, and Hazlitt's 1817 chapter calls the surrounding scene "a collection of classical elegancies." The structural achievement is the welding of pastoral pictorial writing ("the floor of heaven thick inlaid with patines of bright gold") to Renaissance neo-Platonic cosmology (the music of the spheres — the doctrine that the planets, in their motion, produce a celestial music inaudible to human ears because of "this muddy vesture of decay"). The "patines" image is exact — a paten is the small gold plate used in Christian Eucharist, and Lorenzo is describing the night sky as if it were the ceiling of a vast cathedral. The musical philosophy that follows — that human bodies prevent the soul from hearing the celestial harmony — is one of the cleanest articulations in Shakespeare of the Renaissance Platonist position. The speech is also the play's most direct evidence of Lorenzo's character. He is a young man capable of speaking, in twelve lines, the kind of language that Renaissance educators considered the highest achievement of cultivated discourse — Greek philosophy translated through Christian theology into vernacular English verse. The complication, as Hazlitt's reading captures, is that the same young man has, two acts earlier, organised a theft. The "classical elegancies" are real. They are also being delivered by the man who described Shylock as a "faithless Jew" whose only chance at heaven would be the saintly intercession of the daughter who stole from him.
"The Man That Hath No Music"
The "music of the spheres" passage extends into one of Shakespeare's most-quoted single sentences about the moral significance of musicality. Lorenzo, hearing the musicians arrive at Belmont, articulates the philosophical position that music's reception is the marker of moral health.
Original
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The person who hates music and is tone deaf,
And lacks appreciation for sweet tunes,
Is good for nothing but for plots to cheat you;
His soulless actions are as dull as night;
He thinks like Erebus, the god of darkness.
Don't trust a man like that.
The speech is one of Lorenzo's most direct philosophical statements and one of Shakespeare's most-quoted positions on music. Within the Renaissance tradition Lorenzo is drawing on, music was understood as the most direct human access to divine order — the audible echo of the music of the spheres — and the capacity to be "moved with concord of sweet sounds" was understood as the marker of a soul properly aligned with that order. The man without music, on this reading, is a man whose soul has lost its proper attunement, and such a man — Lorenzo argues — is "fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils." The connection between musicality and morality is exact. Music, in Lorenzo's philosophy, is not a pleasure or a recreation; it is a moral diagnostic. The speech has been quoted across four centuries as one of the most affecting Renaissance defences of music's spiritual significance. It is also, structurally, an unobtrusive piece of the play's anti-Jewish substrate. The principal figure in the play to whom Lorenzo's diagnostic applies is Shylock, whose 2.5 line — "Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum / And the vile squealing of the wry-necked fife, / Clamb not you up to the casements then" — has presented him as the man who actively forbids music in his household. Lorenzo's "let no such man be trusted" is, in this reading, the comedy's quiet philosophical justification for the treatment Shylock has received: the man who hates music is, by his own action, fit for the treatment the play has given him.
"The dialogue between this newly married couple by moonlight, beginning 'On such a night,' &c., is a collection of classical elegancies."
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, 1817
Key Quotes by Lorenzo
Quote 1
She hath directedHow I shall take her from her father's house,
What gold and jewels she is furnished with,
What page's suit she hath in readiness.
(Act 2, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
She's told me
How I shall take her from her father's house,
What gold and jewels she is carrying,
And what her pageboy clothes she has prepared.
Quote Analysis: Lorenzo's most operational single piece of writing, and the play's clearest evidence of how the elopement is materially organised. Jessica has "directed" — the verb carries the executive force of a household planner — and Lorenzo is the recipient of the plan rather than its architect. The three-part inventory ("gold and jewels," "page's suit") makes the material economy explicit. The speech is also one of the play's quietest indictments of Lorenzo's moral position: he is recounting, to Gratiano, that his future wife has organised the theft of her father's property, and he is doing so without registering, in any visible way, that the theft is morally significant.
If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven,
It will be for his gentle daughter's sake.
(Act 2, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And if her Jewish father gets to heaven,
It will be only for his daughter's sake.
Quote Analysis: Lorenzo's most explicit articulation of the play's Christian-supremacist framework, and one of its most carefully written pieces of theological positioning. The line uses the medieval Christian figure of the saintly intercessor — Mary or a female saint pleading for a sinner's soul — and applies it to Jessica. The implication is structurally complete: Shylock is a "faithless Jew" whose soul cannot, on its own merits, enter heaven; only Jessica's intercession could possibly save him; and even that intercession will operate only because she has been Christianised. The "gentle/Gentile" pun is at work — Gratiano will deploy the same pun about Jessica twenty lines later — and Lorenzo's theology has, in advance of her conversion, already Christianised her by adjective.
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Look how the sky in heaven
Is thickly dotted with its golden stars:
There's not a star within the sky so small
Whose motion doesn't match angelic singing.
Quote Analysis: Lorenzo's most-quoted single piece of pastoral writing, and one of the most-celebrated single passages in Shakespeare's mature comedy. The "patines" image is the speech's structural device — a paten is the small gold plate used in Christian Eucharist, and Lorenzo is describing the night sky as if it were the ceiling of a vast cathedral. The image fuses pastoral pictorial writing with Renaissance neo-Platonic cosmology (the music of the spheres), and the writing's beauty is real. Hazlitt's "classical elegancies" reading captures both the praise and the qualification: the writing is among the play's most beautiful, and the man producing it is the same man who, two acts earlier, organised Jessica's flight with the casket of Shylock's ducats.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The person who hates music and is tone deaf,
And lacks appreciation for sweet tunes,
Is good for nothing but for plots to cheat you.
Quote Analysis: Lorenzo's most-quoted single position on music, and one of Shakespeare's most affecting Renaissance defences of music's spiritual significance. The argument operates within the period's neo-Platonic tradition — music as the audible echo of divine harmony, and the capacity to be moved by it as the marker of a soul properly aligned with that order. The line has been quoted across four centuries as one of the great defences of music's moral weight. Within the play's own structure, it also operates, more quietly, as the comedy's philosophical justification for the treatment Shylock has received — the man whose 2.5 line forbade music in his household is, by Lorenzo's diagnostic, "fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils."
Key Takeaways
- The Operational Lover: Lorenzo's 2.4 speech reveals the elopement's material organisation — Jessica has directed the theft, the disguise, and the timing, and Lorenzo is the recipient of the plan rather than its architect.
- The Christian Framework: "If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven, / It will be for his gentle daughter's sake" articulates the play's Christian-supremacist theological position in its sharpest form.
- The Moonlight Lyric: The "look how the floor of heaven" speech of 5.1 is one of the most-celebrated single passages in Shakespeare's mature comedy, and Hazlitt's "classical elegancies" judgement captures both the praise and the moral qualification.
- The Music Philosophy: "The man that hath no music in himself... is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils" is the comedy's quiet philosophical justification for the treatment Shylock has received — and, on Hazlitt's reading, one of the play's most carefully constructed pieces of Christian self-justification.
Study Questions and Analysis
Does Lorenzo genuinely love Jessica?
The play's evidence is mixed, and the question has been one of the most-discussed in modern criticism. The case for genuine love rests on the lyric register of 5.1 — the moonlight exchange, the "look how the floor of heaven" speech, the music philosophy. Lorenzo is, at Belmont, presenting Jessica with some of the most carefully written pastoral verse in Shakespeare's mature work, and the writing's beauty is real. He has also organised an elopement that, on his own admission to Gratiano in 2.4, involved substantial personal risk — being caught with Jessica would have led to legal and social consequences for both of them. The case against rests on the play's quieter arithmetic. Lorenzo's 2.4 "she hath directed" speech presents the elopement principally as a material operation — gold, jewels, page's suit — and his theological positioning of Jessica as the "gentle daughter" who might one day intercede for her "faithless" father presents her as a religious-symbolic figure rather than a person. The 2.6 "wise, fair, and true" speech praises Jessica with the formal Renaissance romantic vocabulary while qualifying each claim ("if I can judge of her," "if that mine eyes be true," "as she hath proved herself"). Hazlitt's reading is the most direct: "we should like... Lorenzo, if he had not married a Jewess, though he thinks he has a right to wrong a Jew." The Hazlitt position is that Lorenzo's love operates within a moral economy that has been organised to make the wronging of Shylock permissible, and that the love and the wronging are not, finally, separable. Modern productions have varied. Some play Lorenzo as straightforwardly in love; others play him as an opportunist whose lyric register at Belmont is the closing aestheticisation of a transaction; most settle somewhere between. The play, as is its habit, supports all readings.
Why does Lorenzo's poetry at Belmont feel so beautiful if his actions are morally complicated?
The question captures one of the play's most carefully constructed tensions, and the answer is structural rather than evaluative. The "look how the floor of heaven" speech is, by every available aesthetic measure, among the most beautiful single passages in Shakespeare's mature comedy. The fusion of pastoral pictorial writing ("patines of bright gold") with Renaissance neo-Platonic cosmology (the music of the spheres) is one of the period's most achieved poetic constructions, and the writing's verbal music is exact. The complication is that the same character delivering this speech is the man whose 2.4 explanation to Gratiano recounted, without apparent moral registration, the operational details of Jessica's theft from her father. The two registers — Belmont pastoral and Venetian transactional — coexist in the same character, and the play does not collapse them. The structural decision is one of Shakespeare's most pointed. The aestheticisation of the resolution at Belmont is what allows the comedy to function as a comedy; if the play had insisted on holding Lorenzo's moral arithmetic in front of the audience during the 5.1 lyric exchange, the comic resolution would have collapsed. Instead, the play permits the lyric register to dominate the final scene, and trusts the audience to remember what they have seen earlier without insisting on the reminder. Hazlitt's reading captures this exactly: he calls the moonlight scene "a collection of classical elegancies" — preserving the praise of the writing — while remaining clear in the surrounding chapter that he disapproves of Lorenzo's conduct. The two judgements are not, on Hazlitt's reading, incompatible. The poetry is beautiful; the moral economy producing it is contested; both can be true.
What is the music of the spheres reference in 5.1?
The "music of the spheres" — the central image of Lorenzo's 5.1 philosophy — is one of the most influential ideas of Renaissance cosmology, drawn from the Pythagorean and Platonist traditions and transmitted through medieval Christian theology. The doctrine held that the planets and stars, in their orbital motions, produced a continuous celestial music — an audible expression of the divine mathematical order that organised the universe. The music was inaudible to ordinary human hearing because, as Lorenzo names it, "this muddy vesture of decay / Doth grossly close it in" — the body, as the soul's earthly housing, dulls the spiritual perception that would otherwise register the celestial harmony. The doctrine had broad cultural currency in the period. Plato had developed it in the Republic and the Timaeus; Cicero had transmitted it through Somnium Scipionis; Boethius had given it its medieval Christian form in De Institutione Musica; Renaissance neo-Platonists like Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola had revived it in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Shakespeare's familiarity with the doctrine was substantial — versions of it appear in Twelfth Night, The Tempest, and several of the sonnets — and the Merchant passage is the most fully developed example. Lorenzo's argument is that the immortal soul retains the capacity for the celestial music even while the body cannot hear it, and that the response to earthly music is therefore the soul's recognition of its own true register. The argument provides the philosophical foundation for the "man that hath no music" diagnostic that follows: the soul that cannot be moved by earthly music has, on this reading, become so detached from its own celestial register that it has lost the capacity for moral order. The position is one of Shakespeare's most carefully constructed Renaissance philosophical statements, and Lorenzo is the figure he gives it to.
How does Lorenzo function in the comedy's structure?
Lorenzo operates as the comedy's third male principal — alongside Bassanio and Gratiano — and his structural function is specific. Bassanio is the play's romantic protagonist who wins Portia at the caskets; Gratiano is the comic-romantic parallel who marries Nerissa; Lorenzo is the third pairing, marrying Jessica outside the casket-test framework entirely. The structural distinction matters. Bassanio and Gratiano earn their wives within the legitimate marriage-resolution structure that Portia's father's will has established; Lorenzo earns Jessica by extracting her from her own father's household against the father's will. The comedy absorbs both routes into its closing resolution at Belmont, but the routes are structurally different. Lorenzo's pairing with Jessica is also structurally important for the play's broader religious-economic arithmetic. The Christian victory in 4.1 — Portia's defeat of Shylock — has the practical effect that half of Shylock's estate is given to Lorenzo and Jessica as a deed of gift. The closing transfer of wealth is what completes the comedy's redistribution: Shylock's daughter and her Christian husband inherit half of what was Shylock's, and the household economy that Shylock built has, by the play's end, been absorbed into the Christian Belmont household. Lorenzo's function is therefore both romantic and economic. He is the figure who marries Shylock's daughter and the figure through whom Shylock's wealth crosses into Christian hands. The lyric register of 5.1 is what allows this economic absorption to feel like a romantic resolution rather than what it also is.
What does "manna in the way of starved people" reveal about Lorenzo's view of the inheritance?
The line is delivered by Lorenzo in 5.1 on receiving the news that Shylock's deed of gift will transfer half of his estate to him and Jessica at Shylock's death. The full line — "Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starved people" — is one of the play's most carefully exposing pieces of writing for Lorenzo. The biblical reference is to Exodus 16, where God provides manna to the starving Israelites in the wilderness. Lorenzo's deployment of the image positions himself and Jessica as the "starved people" and Portia and Nerissa as the divine providers of the manna. The image is structurally extraordinary on several counts. First, Lorenzo and Jessica are not "starved" — they have been living in Belmont as the privileged guests of Portia, presiding over the household in her absence, and the deed of gift will make them substantially wealthy in their own right. Second, the manna they are receiving is, in its actual provenance, the confiscated wealth of Jessica's father, taken from him in 4.1 as the price of his life. The biblical analogy converts what is structurally an act of legal expropriation into an act of divine provision, and the conversion is one of the play's quietest pieces of Christian self-justification. Third, the use of an Old Testament image (manna in the wilderness) to celebrate the redistribution of Jewish wealth to a Christianised Jewish daughter and her Christian husband is one of the play's most pointed pieces of religious irony — though the play does not, finally, comment on it. Lorenzo's line is the play's most direct demonstration of the structural relationship between the comedy's lyric beauty and its economic-religious arithmetic. The same young man who can speak the "patines of bright gold" speech can also receive the news of his future inheritance with a biblical metaphor that converts expropriation into providence, and the play does not, anywhere, ask him to reconcile the two registers.
How does Lorenzo compare to Bassanio?
The comparison is structurally illuminating. Both are young Christian Venetians, both are friends of Antonio, both marry into wealth at Belmont. The differences are exact. Bassanio wins Portia by passing the casket-test her father designed — a legitimate marriage-resolution mechanism that the play presents as morally and theologically sound; Lorenzo wins Jessica by organising her flight from her father's household, a route the play does not, anywhere, present as straightforwardly legitimate. Bassanio's 3.2 casket-speech (the "outward shows" / "lead casket" reasoning) is the play's most direct articulation of Christian-Platonist value theory; Lorenzo's 2.4 explanation to Gratiano is the play's most direct articulation of how an elopement-and-theft can be operationally organised. Bassanio's lyric capacity is competent but undistinguished — he speaks the play's serviceable middle register; Lorenzo's lyric capacity in 5.1 exceeds Bassanio's by a substantial margin. The combination is interesting. The man with the more legitimate route to marriage has the less distinctive lyric capacity; the man with the more contested route to marriage has the more remarkable poetry. The structural decision may be Shakespeare's quiet acknowledgement that lyric beauty and moral integrity are not, in his work, the same thing. Bassanio is a more conventionally upright figure; Lorenzo is the figure to whom the play gives its most exposed poetry; both are, by the comedy's resolution, equally rewarded with wives and estates. The play does not adjudicate. What it does is record the asymmetry and trust the audience to register what the asymmetry implies.
Does the play justify Lorenzo's actions?
The play does not, finally, justify or condemn — it absorbs. By the closing scene of 5.1, Lorenzo is integrated into the Belmont household, married to Jessica, the joint recipient of half of Shylock's estate, and the speaker of some of the play's most beautiful verse. The structural absorption is the comedy's quiet position: whatever the moral economy of Lorenzo's earlier conduct, the marriage-resolution mechanism has accepted him, and the play moves on. What the play does not do is provide a scene in which Lorenzo registers the cost of his actions, apologises for the elopement, or acknowledges the loss to Shylock. The absence is structurally significant. Comedies of marriage-resolution typically require the figures to be either reconciled to the family they came from (as in the marriages of A Midsummer Night's Dream, where the fathers are eventually present at the weddings) or to have separated cleanly enough that the new family supersedes the old (as in Twelfth Night, where Viola's brother is restored to her before her marriage to Orsino). Jessica's marriage to Lorenzo does neither. Shylock is not present at any of the marriages; he has been formally excluded from the comic resolution by his absence from the closing scene; and the household into which Jessica marries makes no provision for him. Hazlitt's reading captures the structural decision exactly: "we should like... Lorenzo, if he had not married a Jewess, though he thinks he has a right to wrong a Jew." The "thinks he has a right" is the operative phrase. The play allows Lorenzo's confidence in his own justification to stand; it does not, finally, endorse it. The audience is left to assess the moral economy on its own terms, and the lyric register of 5.1 is what makes the assessment difficult.
