Act III

Marry, you may partly hope that your father got you not, that you are not the Jew’s daughter.

That were a kind of bastard hope, indeed: so the sins of my mother should be visited upon me.

Truly then I fear you are damned both by father and mother: thus when I shun Scylla, your father, I fall into Charybdis, your mother: well, you are gone both ways.

I shall be saved by my husband; he hath made me a Christian.

Truly, the more to blame he: we were Christians enow before; e’en as many as could well live, one by another. This making Christians will raise the price of hogs: if we grow all to be pork-eaters, we shall not shortly have a rasher on the coals for money.

I’ll tell my husband, Launcelot, what you say: here he comes.

I shall grow jealous of you shortly, Launcelot, if you thus get my wife into corners.

Nay, you need not fear us, Lorenzo: Launcelot and I are out. He tells me flatly, there is no mercy for me in heaven, because I am a Jew’s daughter: and he says, you are no good member of the commonwealth, for in converting Jews to Christians, you raise the price of pork.