What the exam asks
In Paper 2 (25 marks, closed book), you compare two literary works in response to one of four general questions. To reach the top markband in Criterion A (knowledge, understanding and interpretation, 5 marks) and Criterion B1 (analysis and evaluation of textual features and/or authorial choices, 5 marks), you must move beyond plot summary to explain how Shakespeare’s dramatic and linguistic choices shape the audience’s shifting sympathy. In the individual oral, the prose speech in Act 3 Scene 1 is a rich 40-line extract for global issues concerning prejudice, justice or the cycle of retaliation.
Core ideas
Dramatic sequencing and shifting sympathy
In Act 2, the audience does not see Shylock react directly to Jessica’s elopement; instead, Solanio reports his grief to Salarino in Act 2 Scene 8 as a comic caricature of a miser crying for his ducats and his daughter. By delaying Shylock’s stage entrance until Act 3 Scene 1—and placing it immediately after Solanio and Salarino mock him with crude “flesh and blood” jokes—Shakespeare forces the audience to hear Shylock’s pain in his own voice. However, Shakespeare does not leave Shylock in a posture of sympathetic victimhood: by Act 3 Scene 3, Shylock has hardened into a figure who refuses all dialogue, preparing the audience for the legal rigidity of the Act 4 trial.
The choice of prose in Act 3 Scene 1
Shakespeare writes the whole of Act 3 Scene 1 in prose rather than iambic pentameter verse. In Shakespearean drama, prose is often used for commercial transactions, comic banter or stripped-back, unvarnished confrontation. Giving “Hath not a Jew eyes?” prose rather than lyrical verse strips away romantic ornament: Shylock’s argument sounds raw, public and logically relentless. When Shylock returns in Act 3 Scene 3, Shakespeare shifts him back into blank verse, giving his obsession with his legal bond a rigid, rhythmic finality.
Holding two readings in tension
Top-band responses under Criterion A recognise that “Hath not a Jew eyes?” supports two simultaneous interpretations:
| Reading | How the text supports it | Effect on the audience |
|---|---|---|
| 1. A plea for shared humanity | Shylock catalogues physical and emotional universals (“eyes”, “hands”, “passions”, “diseases”) to expose the hypocrisy of Christian Venice. | Elicits sharp sympathy and indicts Salarino and Solanio’s casual cruelty. |
| 2. A cold rationalisation of revenge | Shared humanity is used as the starting point of a syllogism (an argument that draws a conclusion from two linked statements) whose conclusion is murder: because Jews and Christians are alike in body, they must be alike in vengeance. | Chills sympathy at the turn, showing how persecution breeds a mirror-image cruelty. |
The structural see-saw and the ring motif
In the second half of Act 3 Scene 1, Tubal’s news alternates between Jessica’s extravagant spending in Genoa and Antonio’s shipwrecks. This structural see-saw swings Shylock between rage at his daughter and glee at his enemy’s ruin, until the mention of the turquoise ring his wife Leah gave him (she never appears and is presumably dead) pierces the comic stereotyping. That ring connects directly to the play’s wider ring plot: while Bassanio and Gratiano later give away their wives’ rings under pressure in Act 4, Jessica trades her mother’s ring for a monkey, deepening the personal wound behind Shylock’s legal vengeance.