Love and marriage — The Merchant of Venice — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Love and marriage
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores love, courtship and marriage: the caskets, the rings and the three couples 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 die as chaste as Diana, unless I be obtained by the manner of my father's will', 'Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath', 'Beshrew me but I love her heartily', 'Promise me life, and I'll confess the truth', 'This house, these servants and this same myself / Are yours, my lord', 'I give them with this ring; / Which when you part from, lose, or give away, / Let it presage the ruin of your love', 'You loved, I loved; for intermission', 'I will ne'er come in your bed / Until I see the ring', 'My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord / Will never more break faith advisedly'.
Context: fathers' authority over daughters' marriages and a wife's duty to her husband, and how far Portia and Jessica accept or bend them.
The three couples compared, and the rings as a test of whether love or friendship comes first.
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.
