This Literature quiz is called 'The Merchant of Venice - Dialogue' and it has been written by teachers to help you if you are studying the subject at senior high school. Playing educational quizzes is one of the most efficienct ways to learn if you are in the 11th or 12th grade - aged 16 to 18.
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This senior high school English Literature quiz challenges you on dialog in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Almost without exception, any work of drama consists primarily of dialog. In some ways this can make it more difficult to read and understand a play because you are missing the other elements essential to the text and only possible to convey through performance. That is, it can be much easier to understand a play when it is being performed on stage. Of course, reading a play gives you the chance to go slowly, to re-read and to think carefully about the dialog.
Dialog conveys meaning not only through its content, but also through specific details such as language choice, use of dialect and even interruptions and pauses.
Ask yourself the following questions as you read The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare or any work of fiction: How do different characters speak? How does vocabulary vary between different characters? Does the way in which a character speaks change over time, or in different situations? Does it matter to whom the character is speaking? Since this is Shakespeare, you might even like to compare dialog that is written in poetry with dialog that is written in prose. What are the differences between the characters who speak in one but not the other?
Dialog conveys much more than the individual beliefs and preferences of any character. Dialog also gives you practical information, such as which events lead to the point at which the play began or how characters are related and have engaged with one another in the past. In The Merchant of Venice it is valuable to pay close attention to how each character discusses money and love or friendship. What can this tell us about the relationship between two key themes of the play?
Memorizing Shakespearean dialog is not only a good way to impress your teacher, but also a useful method of preparing to write about the play. Create a list of the most significant examples of dialog for each character, especially noting those that illustrate their characteristics or occur at a turning point in the text.