Musings of the Obsessive Kind

With Jessica (speaking as someone having the ubiquitous name - my mom always says, "No one knew the name would be that popular when I gave it to you!" sigh. Although her second choice was Arielle. Three years pre-dating The Little Mermaid's Ariel, I'm still glad I didn't have to deal with people making "Part of Your World" references to me my whole life, but I digress) - a lot of people think Jessica is okay as a medieval name because of Shakespeare's use of it in The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare's Jessica is the oldest usage (at least ever written down) of the name, and it's generally agreed that he took it from the Hebrew Iskah (or its variants Yiskah, Yivka, etc), being that Shylock and Jessica are Jewish in the play. The Merchant of Venice was written in the late 1590s as far as I recall, and is set in an earlier period of Venetian history, so somehow people extrapolate from this that it was a name in common circulation at the time. It wasn't, which made her character unique in Shakespeare's day, but who needs accuracy? :P /nerd