Choose your favorite character from the story, “The Merchant of Venice”. In a two minute video, tell the story in your own words, from your point of view. Be sure to introduce yourself as your character, so that I know who you are portraying.
Answers
Explanation:
Antonio is the title character in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. An influential, powerful, and wealthy nobleman of Venice, he is a middle-aged man and a merchant by trade who has his financial interests tied up in overseas shipments when the play begins. He is kind, generous, honest, and confident, and is loved and revered by all the Christians who know him, but not by the Jew Shylock.
When we first see him commiserating with his friends Salanio and Salarino he is pondering the unknown source of his depressive state:
In sooth I know not why I am so sad.
It wearies me, you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff ‘tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me
That I have much ado to know myself.
His friends try to guess the origin and nature of his condition by questioning him. First they inquire as to whether or not he is worried about his investments. When he insists that is not the reason they ask if he is in love which he is also quick to dismiss. It is then speculated that perhaps he has a strange temperament as some people do. This pair quickly exits to make way for Bassanio who is accompanied by his friends Lorenzo and Gratiano. Lorenzo cannot get in a word for the boisterous Gratiano who makes sport of Antonio's melancholy telling him that he is too serious and that he himself would rather go through life acting foolish.