ABSTRACT
Jessica’s epiphany offers a distinctive and significant spiritual possibility in a play that is normally read in reductively materialist terms. This chapter first focuses on Jessica’s courage and rebellion and how they fashion her developing epiphany in Act 5. I then track Jessica’s epiphanic drive within the dramatic narrative to further examine her transformation. Jessica’s behaviors partly result from the treatment of women in traditional Jewish texts as well as in the early modern culture in which she lives. She can also be understood through a close look at Holocaust children, as the Spanish Expulsion is about as temporally proximate to sixteenth-century Venice as the Holocaust is to today’s world. Jessica potentially has her epiphany or the inception of it when she begins to see that the greater her hearing of the supernal, the greater her loving synthesis with Lorenzo. When Lorenzo claims after his speech on the harmony of the orbs, that “we cannot hear it [the harmony]” (5.1.65), Jessica is disappointed. She fears that Lorenzo’s “muddy vesture of decay” (5.1.64) might prevent Lorenzo from honoring his divine love as poeticized. Jessica wants to embrace the ultimate heavenly sound that Lorenzo describes, not the music he runs to when he is sadly near deaf. She has faith that Lorenzo might one day find delight in her “sweet soul” (5.1.49) and merge with her in a place of sublime beauty. First, though, she must, in silence, process what we can see as a preliminary call to the transcendent.
