Gratiano and Nerissa — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
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.
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.
