Choose a scene from William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice that is particularly dramatic and explain how the drama was created.

The student submitting this question has chosen William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice as the play from which to extract and discuss a particularly dramatic passage. The Merchant of Venice is both a drama and comedy, the comedic aspect embodied in Portia's contrivance with respect to her late-father's scheme for selecting for her a suitable husband. While Shakespeare was obviously a gifted playwright, adept at both drama and comedy, it is the dramatic aspect of this play that is most memorable and that lends itself well to the particular assignment at hand.

It is up to the individual reader or student to select a scene from a chosen play and to explain how the playwright structured that scene and built the drama. One possible selection from The Merchant of Venice occurs in Act III, Scene I--the pivotal scene in which the trial takes place that will determine whether the Jewish moneylender, Shylock, will succeed in extracting a pound of flesh from the body of Antonio. Antonio, desperate to borrow money to help his friend Bassanio win over Portia's hand-in-marriage, agrees to an arrangement with Shylock in which the latter will provide the money in exchange for a pound of Antonio's flesh should the latter fail to repay the loan.

What makes the play, and this particular scene, so dramatic is the history between these two men. Antonio may be a good friend to Bassanio and to others, and is sincere in his desire to help his friend woo Portia, but he is also, common to that time and place, virulently anti-Semitic, insulting the Jewish businessman at every opportunity. Shylock is bitter and resentful, and is determined to exact his revenge for this history of slights. During the trial, however, his struggle for justice is undermined by Portia, and his frustration at the manner in which this perverted legal process is playing out boils over, with the result being one of the greatest and most touching monologues in the history of the English language. In the following quote, Shylock is exhausted from the injustices and indignities to which he has been subjected, and makes a heart-felt plea for treatment commensurate with his basic humanity:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? 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 a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

The character of Shylock is infamous in the annals of theater for its crude portrait of the stereotypical Jew. Shakespeare, however, gave this character a full airing, with his comments throughout the play filled with anger and contempt for those who look down on him and have relegated him and the city's other Jews to the margins of society. In so doing, Shylock is presented in a negative light unless one takes the time to seriously assess the nature of his being. It is this speech in Act III that offers the penultimate demand for equal treatment.