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.