How Shakespeare presents Bassanio, and how the character develops across the text: a suitor in debt who chooses the right casket, torn between his loyalty to Antonio and to Portia.
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 chief care / Is to come fairly off from the great debts', 'Her name is Portia, nothing undervalued / To Cato's daughter', 'her sunny locks / Hang on her temples like a golden fleece', 'You shall not seal to such a bond for me: / I'll rather dwell in my necessity', 'Thou gaudy gold, / Hard food for Midas, I will none of thee', 'Madam, you have bereft me of all words', 'when this ring / Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence', 'all the wealth I had / Ran in my veins, I was a gentleman', 'But life itself, my wife, and all the world, / Are not with me esteem'd above thy life', 'Pardon this fault, and by my soul I swear / I never more will break an oath with thee'.
His debts and his wooing of a rich heiress: a fortune-hunter or a true lover, and how his choice of the lead casket answers that.
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.
