Short Story and visualization of some parts of "The Merchant of Venice"

04November2008

"The end of the world", this is the name of the short story presented in this class by Andreia.

This short story was about a man who was dying and wanted his soon William to visite him.

The story will go around the relationship between a father and a soon.

The second part of the class was used to see some parts of "The Merchant of Venice" that showed the differences between the Christians and the Jews.

In the two parts, we saw that Shylock was afraid of the Christians and that he was invited to dinner just because he has money. Showed us that Shylock led a very serious live, very different from the live that the Cristians led. He didn´t felt as being part of Venice society.

We also saw in the scene court that the law had double standard, because in the end it was used a law against Shylock that was not written in the contract. he was accused for attempting against the live of a Venice citizen, he was concidered as a foreigner not a citizen of Venice like Antonio just because he was a Jew. Even when the judge calls for Shylock he didn´t called for his name but said "Call the Jew". Shylock said something that tell us what he thing about the Christians. He said that he prefered to see her daughter with Barrabás rather than with a Christian.

"The Merchant of Venice" and Short Story

03November2008

Today we began to talk about "The Merchant of Venice" and the first thing we focus was the Globe Theatre. We also talked about Shakespeare who was borned in the 16/17 century, during the time of Queen Elizabeth I. The plays in Shakespeare are based in the English History context. After this introduction we point out the name of the characters of the play and we give our idea about the main plot and sub-plots and we also descrived the relations between the characters Antonio/Bassanio - Shylock/Jessica - Jessica/Lorenzo - Graciano/Nerissa - Bassanio/Portia.

In the second hour it was the time for Carlos Barroso to present his short story, this was called "What do you do in San Francisco". This story is about a family that left San Francisco and went to a small village. In this village they staid in a house in whish they didn´t change anything. The women was a painter and the man did´t work. The way of live this family was taking was very strange for the people of the village and because they didn´t knew anything about the family rumours started to happen.