Appearance and reality — The Merchant of Venice — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Appearance and reality
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores appearance and reality: the caskets, disguise, and the gap between outward show and inner worth across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose', 'A goodly apple rotten at the heart: / O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!', 'I like not fair terms and a villain's mind', 'All that glisters is not gold', 'A golden mind stoops not to shows of dross', 'There is no vice so simple but assumes / Some mark of virtue on his outward parts', 'Thus ornament is but the guiled shore / To a most dangerous sea', 'Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves'.
The caskets as a test of judging by appearances, Portia's and Nerissa's disguises, and the gap between the Christians' professed mercy and their treatment of Shylock.
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.
