Context — The Merchant of Venice — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
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 great trading city,
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 case of Rodrigo Lopez, the Queen's physician and a converted Jew, condemned to death for plotting against her shortly before the play was written.
Venice as a rich trading city: a port where merchants ventured their fortunes at sea, the Rialto where its merchants and moneylenders did business, and the ghetto where its Jews had been made to live apart since 1516.
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 Shakespeare's comedies as early as 1598 and ending in marriages, yet with Shylock played by many actors 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.
OCR credits context only as the play shows it: the social, historical and cultural ideas at work in the play that bear on the question. General facts about Shakespeare's life, theatre or times earn nothing on their own.
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.
