In the second act, the story is set in Venice. I found out that in Shakespeare’s time Venice was a wealthy city, but it was also accosted with greed. Belmont, on the other hand is ‘a place of romance’. Also woman seem more in power, and can control what happens to them.
There are many differences between Portia and Nerissa’s friendship and Antonio and Bassanio’s is that the girls seem to rely on each other and respect each other more than how Bassanio is always asking Antonio for money and never paying him back.
Portia’s mood is simialr to Antonio’s because they both have a lot of money so that reflects on their personalities. They both where also sad, but both for diffrent reasons. Antonio was sad about Bassanio, and Portia was sad about her whole ‘husband picking’ ideal.
Portia does not like her deceased fathers method of selecting a husband. So far most of her potential husbands gave up at the chance of marrying her because of the penalty for guessing wrong in her fathers ‘pick the right box and you get to marry Portia’ game. (The penalty being guess wrong and never marry.) So now, at the point where I am in the story there are two possible husbands for Portia left: Bassanio and the Prince of Morocco.
Portia sees fault’s in all of her possible husbands, she doesn’t like the Neapolitan prince because he is ‘too found of his horse’, the Palatine count is ‘too serious’, the english man lacks any knowledge about any language Portia speaks, and the german man is drunk. The thing that is different with her criticism involving the Prince of Morocco is that she is more concered with his appearance than who he is as a person, she doesn’t seem to have any interest in marrying him.
When Portia is talking to Nerissa about Bassanio she says she met Bassanio back when her father was alive, he seemed to have a fair social standing and a good amount of money.
Jillian Richardson 