Prejudice and antisemitism — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Prejudice and antisemitism
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores religious and racial prejudice: how Venice's Christians treat Shylock, how he answers, and whether the play exposes or shares the antisemitism of its time 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 buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you', 'Even there where merchants most do congregate', 'Cursed be my tribe, / If I forgive him!', 'the Jew is the very devil', 'As the dog Jew did utter in the streets', 'lest the devil cross my prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew', 'This making Christians will raise the price of hogs', 'Would any of the stock of Barrabas / Had been her husband rather than a Christian!', 'Now, infidel, I have you on the hip', 'Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?'.
Context: the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290, Venice's ghetto, where Jews were made to live apart from 1516, and readings of the play as antisemitic or as exposing antisemitism.
How to write about the play's prejudice: as something Shakespeare shows and audiences judge, quoting the characters' insults as theirs, not ours.
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.
