The Merchant of Venice

Main Characters

Portia - wealthy heiress of Belmont

Bassanio - Portia's would be husband

Shylock - Jewish moneylender

Plot

Bassanio must choose correctly from 3 caskets to win Portia's hand at marriage. If he picks wrong then he can never get married to anyone and will have no heirs.

Reading Shakespeare's Language

Learning Spanish, Latin, German, French helps

Others must untangle poetic lines, unusual sentence structure, word omissions and different vocabulary to feel the play

Shakespeare's Words

Unfamiliar words

"sooth (i.e, truth), piring (i.e., peering), an (i.e., if) and doit (i.e, jot)." (The Merchant of Venice xvi).

Words with different meanings

"We find the word still where we would use 'always', the word disabled where we would say 'depleted'," (The Merchant of Venice xvi).

Words used to build different worlds

The mercantile world of Venice

The Romantic world of Portia's estate

"In the first and third scenes of the play, he builds-through references to 'argosies,' to 'signiors,' to 'ventures,' to 'shallows,' to 'the Rialto,' - a Venetian location inhabited by merchants," (The Merchant of Venice xvii)

Shakespeare's Sentences

Words in an unusual order to fit with poetic rythming

He does not go vs. He goes not

Placing object or the predicative adjective before the subject and verb

The dog bit the boy vs. The boy bit the dog

I hit him vs. Him I hit

Inversions

I no question make

Omissions of words

Old wrinkles vs wrinkles of old age

Shakespearean Wordplay

Puns

Malaprobisms

gentle/gentile

Similies

Metaphors

Incarnation used for Incarnate

"Her sunny locks/ Hang on her temples like a golden fleece,/ " (1.1.176-77).

Comparing Portia's hair to fleece

Implied Stage Action

What we are reading is a performance script and we must imagine the actors acting out the lines.