How Shakespeare presents Portia, and how the character develops across the text: from a daughter bound by her father's will to the disguised lawyer who saves Antonio and tests her husband with a ring.
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: 'I may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I dislike', 'if he have the condition of a saint and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me than wive me', 'I would be trebled twenty times myself', 'Her gentle spirit / Commits itself to yours to be directed, / As from her lord, her governor, her king', 'One half of me is yours, the other half yours', 'Since you are dear bought, I will love you dear', 'I never did repent for doing good, / Nor shall not now', 'I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two', 'Then must the Jew be merciful', 'I pray you, know me when we meet again', 'Let me give light, but let me not be light'.
Context: a daughter's obedience and a wife's duty, and a woman who must disguise herself as a man to act in the court.
Her wit in prose, her authority in verse, and her prejudice towards Morocco as well as her cleverness at the trial.
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.
