How Shakespeare presents Antonio, and how the character develops across the text: the melancholy merchant who risks his life for Bassanio while treating Shylock with contempt.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'My ventures are not in one bottom trusted', 'Try what my credit can in Venice do', 'I am as like to call thee so again, / To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too', 'for when did friendship take / A breed for barren metal of his friend?', 'The Hebrew will turn Christian: he grows kind', 'I oft deliver'd from his forfeitures / Many that have at times made moan to me; / Therefore he hates me', 'Pray God, Bassanio come / To see me pay his debt, and then I care not!', 'I am arm'd / To suffer, with a quietness of spirit', 'Grieve not that I am fallen to this for you', 'I'll pay it instantly with all my heart', 'I once did lend my body for his wealth'.
Context: Christian teaching against lending at interest, and the debate over whether Antonio's devotion to Bassanio is friendship or unspoken love.
His sadness and passivity, and his place outside the marriages at the end of the play.
Edexcel's Shakespeare question has two parts: part (a) on the printed extract marks only language, form and structure (AO2), so context earns nothing there; part (b) on the play elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1, 15 marks) and context (AO3, 5 marks), not language analysis. Say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
