Context — The Merchant of Venice — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The contexts of The Merchant of Venice: Jews in Elizabethan England after their expulsion in 1290, Venice as a trading republic,
usury and Christian teaching, the play as a comedy with a tragic figure at its centre, and how audiences and productions have read Shylock.
How to use this context in an answer about the play rather than as background.
Jews in Shakespeare's England: expelled in 1290 and not readmitted until 1656, the stage stereotype of the greedy Jewish villain, as in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and the execution of Roderigo Lopes in 1594.
Venice as a rich trading republic: the Rialto at the heart of its commerce, merchants trading across the Mediterranean, and the laws and ghetto that set its Jews apart.
Usury: why Christian teaching condemned lending money at interest, and why moneylending was one of the few trades left open to Jews.
The play as a comedy: listed among the comedies in the First Folio and ending in marriages, yet with Shylock seen by some critics as a tragic figure.
Shylock on stage: from a comic villain to Macklin's return to Shakespeare's text, Kean's and Irving's sympathetic Shylocks, the play's use in Nazi Germany, and modern productions that show the abuse he suffers.
How to write about the play's antisemitism: as a prejudice of its time that the play shows and audiences have judged in different ways, never as fact.
On Edexcel's paper, context earns marks only in part (b) of the Shakespeare question, 5 of its 20: use it to support an argument about the play, woven into the point rather than added as a separate paragraph.
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.
