The Merchant of Venice Act One Scenes 1 & 2.

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The Merchant of Venice

Act One

Scenes 1 & 2

  1. The phrase ‘a want-wit’ means ‘he who wants knowledge’. This would come back to the earlier phrase said by Antonio – ‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad’. He then says that what makes him sad he ‘is to learn’ and in that says that sadness makes him ‘he who wants knowledge’.

  1. When answering the question above, I made sure that I found out what the original meaning of ‘wit’ was, as I happened to read this question, giving me a good suspicion that ‘wit’ did have a different meaning in the time of Shakepeare.
  2. In the light of point (b), I looked through the meanings of ‘wit’ in an old dictionary, which lists the meanings of words in the order of the time that they had that particular meaning (oldest first). I would rather have done that than let myself succumb to guesswork and get the answer wrong.
  3. The quotation starts in elipses (…) because they mean that text precedes the text shown if looked at in its original source.
  4. ‘That’ starts a new line because the preceding line has run out of its ten-syllable limit. Because the text is written in verse, each line is restricted to ten syllables, (as the play could then be rendered truly false in the eyes of the church), and because the bit of text before contains ten syllables, ‘that’ must appear on a new line.
  5. ‘That’ receives a capital ‘T’, even though it is not the start of a new sentence, because the start of a new line when it is in verse means that the first word receives a capital first letter as it is seen as a different segment of text.
  6. You have put the quotation in the middle of the page and surrounded it with a blank line above and below because it saves loosing the important quote in the midst of the text. Consequently, it also makes the reader want to read it and absorb it more because they can see it better.
  7. The ‘meaning of the stuff in the brackets at the end of the quotation’ is that the quotation is lines 6 through to 7 in act one, scene one (although it doesn’t directly state the act and the scene as it is aforementioned at the top of the page).
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  1. I believe that Shakespeare has begun the play with the lament of Antonio because it gives the audience a way to know about the fact that Antonio has argosies bound for various destinations, which becomes important later in the play. It puts the audience in a direct position with the characters as the conversation starts in the middle, but it is also a good way to get the audience initially intrigued. It keeps the audience watching, a bit like those crazy Midsommer Murders sub-plots.

3)

…Or, as it were, the pageants of the sea,

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