Prejudice and antisemitism — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Prejudice and antisemitism
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores religious and racial prejudice: how Venice's Christians treat Shylock, how he answers, and whether the play exposes or shares the antisemitism of its time 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: 'I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you', 'Even there where merchants most do congregate', 'Cursed be my tribe, / If I forgive him!', 'the Jew is the very devil', 'As the dog Jew did utter in the streets', 'lest the devil cross my prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew', 'This making Christians will raise the price of hogs', 'Would any of the stock of Barrabas / Had been her husband rather than a Christian!', 'Now, infidel, I have you on the hip', 'Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?'.
Context: the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290, Venice's ghetto and the signs Jews there were made to wear, and readings of the play as antisemitic or as exposing antisemitism.
How to write about the play's prejudice: as something Shakespeare shows and audiences judge, quoting the characters' insults as theirs, not ours.
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.
