Merchant of Venice - Discursive Speech - PowerPoint

This PowerPoint contains lecture style notes and activities for Gareth Hind’s graphic novel, ‘The Merchant of Venice’. The resource is designed to support students’ study of Shakespeare and develop a discursive speech, at an early Stage 5 level. It also contains biblical references to support students’ understanding of different perspectives on a topic.

The first few slides introduce ‘theme’ and the structure of a discursive response.

The rest of the presentation unpacks these themes in 4 central quotes from ‘Merchant of Venice’:

• “All that glisters is not gold.”
• “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.”
• “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as Christians is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?”
• “The quality of mercy is not strained,
• It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
• Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
• It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

This is a support resource which can be used alongside a Shakespeare film study, as it is aligned with the NSW Syllabus for Stage 5.