Gratiano and Nerissa — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Gratiano and Nerissa
Characters
What you need to know
How Shakespeare presents Gratiano and Nerissa, and how the character develops across the text: the loud, mocking friend and the witty companion whose marriage echoes Portia's and Bassanio's.
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: 'Let me play the fool', 'Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing', 'Thou art too wild, too rude and bold of voice', 'We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece', 'My eyes, my lord, can look as swift as yours', 'O, be thou damn'd, inexecrable dog!', 'A halter gratis; nothing else, for God's sake', 'Had I been judge, thou shouldst have had ten more, / To bring thee to the gallows, not the font', 'they are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing', 'Your father was ever virtuous', 'You swore to me, when I did give it you, / That you would wear it till your hour of death', 'So sore as keeping safe Nerissa's ring'.
Gratiano's jokes and his cruelty to Shylock at the trial, Nerissa as Portia's witty confidante, and their marriage as a comic echo of the main couple's.
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.
