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.
OCR's question on this play is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the play elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the play, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts as the play shows it, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
