How Shakespeare presents Shylock, and how the character develops across the text: a Jewish moneylender scorned by Venice's Christians, whose demand for a pound of flesh ends in defeat and forced conversion: villain, victim, or both.
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: 'Hath a dog money?', 'Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe', 'Signior Antonio, many a time and oft / In the Rialto you have rated me', 'Jessica, my girl, / Look to my house', 'I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear!', 'Thou call'dst me dog before thou hadst a cause; / But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs', 'If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge', 'You have among you many a purchased slave', 'These be the Christian husbands', 'I stand here for law', 'Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that', 'I am content'.
Context: Jews in England after the expulsion of 1290, the stage stereotype of the Jewish moneylender, and how actors from Kean to modern productions have played him as villain or victim.
His prose and verse, his repetition of 'bond', and how his isolation grows as he loses his daughter, his case and his faith.
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.
