‫بسم هللا الرحمن الرحيم‬
Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts
Department of English
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Examination Sheet
PART 1 :
A : Information
Student's Name:
Student's No. :
Semester: First
Academic year : 2009/2010
Instructor's Name: Dr Abdullatif al-Khaiat
Time: 9 - 11
Course Title: SHAKESPEARE Course No: 120355
Date: 24 / 1 / 2010
Day: Sunday
Examination:
Final
B -Guidelines
-The exam consists of four categories and the total mark is ( 50 ).
- Each question has its own mark.
-The answer must be written clearly.
C. Exam Questions, Grades and Time Allocated for Each Question:
Question
Minutes
Total points
1.
15
5
2, 3, 4 (2 Q. out of 3)
45
9 X2
5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (3 Q. out of 5)
60
9X3
120
50
Total
D- Student Comments on the Questions ( If any )
E- Tutor's Remarks:
Points Earned
PART II : Questions
FIRST Category :Knowledge and Understanding
The aim of these questions is to asses the basic knowledge and skills the student acquired.
ANSWER QUESTION ONE:
Q. (1) ANALYSE AND COMMENT ON THE FOLLOWING EXCERPT:
Therefore the poet
Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods,
Since naught so stockfish, hard, and full of rage,
But music for the time doth change his nature.
5 points
[Lorenzo, V, 1, 79-82]
ANSWER TWO OF THE FOLLOWING THREE QUESTIONS:
9 points each
Q. (2) Are there any serious issues raised in The Merchant of Venice, or is it just for pure
humour? Give some details.
Q. (3) What abilities does Portia prove to have during the long trial scene? Give some
details.
Q. (4) Is Nerissa important in the play? Give your reasons.
Second Category : (Cognitive and Analytical)
The aim of these questions is to asses the students ability to recognize and analyze information.
CHOOSE THREE OF THE FOLLOWING FIVE QUESTIONS:
9 points each
Q. (5) Why do you think Shakespeare includes in The Merchant of Venice the love story
of Jessica and Lorenzo?
Q. (6) Discuss religion in the play of The Merchant of Venice.
Q. (7) Does one feel from reading the play that he/she can imagine how life was in Venice
at that time? Or is that of no particular interest to Shakespeare? Give some details.
Q. (8) What types of humour do we have in The Merchant of Venice? Give some
examples.
Q. (9) Is it important for appreciating The Merchant of Venice to have some knowledge of
The Bible and mythology? How?
‫بسم هللا الرحمن الرحيم‬
Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts
Department of English
‫ـــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Model Answers and Marks Distribution
Semester: First
Academic year : 2009/2010
Instructor's Name : Dr. Al-Khaiat
Course Title: Shakespeare
Examination :
Course No.: 120355
Final
Model Answers :
Questionَ
Model Answer Components
Lorenzo is saying: It is for the above reasons that Ovid the poet
claimed that Orpheus caused by his music even the trees, stones and
floods to follow him; that is because there is nothing in existence so
insensitive or heartless but music will change its nature, even if for a
short while.
1.
This mythical story of Orpheus is an effective hyperbole to show
the extreme effect of music. Using 'his' instead of 'its' is a
personification to signify how those inanimate things will be moved
like humans.
This play does raise important issues. Although Shakespeare is
careful to please and gratify his Christian audience, he does
challenge their stereotyped image of the Jew. Shylock dos make a
strong case for remembering that the Jews, like anybody else, suffer
2. pain, and have the same needs like others; and that they will revenge
for the insults leveled at them. The Prince of Morocco and others
draw attention to the merits of people outside Europe, and that may
broaden the minds of the audience.
It is not just rhetoric that Portia uses, although she has a lot of it. She
shows that her knowledge of the law, and even of legal terminology,
is extensive. She also has a plan, when she starts by urging Shylock
to show mercy, and she speaks most effectively in this strain. When
3. he proves immune to any sympathy or pity, she first wins his
confidence by showing great impartiality. But then she gives him
several quick blows that leave him no option but to surrender.
Mark
5 points
9 points x2
(2 Q. out
of 3)
Of course she is not as important as Portia or Shylock, but she is very
useful and has several functions. She is Portia's personal maid, and to
her Portia can speak like a friend; and she herself can make bold
4. suggestions, as when she arouses her mistress's interest in Bassanio.
She does not need Portia's approval before she accepts Gratiano's
proposal of marriage, or to quarrel with him about the ring. She is
very useful as a legal assistant in court.
They are not indispensable for the main plot of the play, but their
story is a sub-plot that adds to the attraction of the play; their
adventure is quite exciting, and we know more about the Jew from
5. his daughter, as she can no longer endure to live with him. Lorenzo
himself is a very effective speaker about love, and he has some of the
most excellent lines about the moon, about music, etc.
Religious worship is almost never mentioned, although Portia claims
(falsely) that she will be spending a long time with her maid in a
monastery. People pray to God, and swear by God, but are not
6. particularly devoted. Religion is in this play mostly a refuge or a
factor in uniting Christians against the Jews or the Jews against
Christians.
Shakespeare gives only the essentials of Venetian life for his
practical purpose of people's responding to the play. We have some
Italian words, like magnifico, and we know about the Rialto; we
know that people used a gondola to cross the channels of Venice. We
7. also are told on several occasions, especially during the trial, of the
laws of Venice, and why everybody needs to respect them. But on
the whole, Shakespeare does not provide more than the most
necessary information about that town.
8.
Launcelot uses several types of humour: he uses puns, confuses
words, muddles phrases; uses meaningless English or Latin phrases,
and even shouts with incomprehensible sounds. All this may be
counted as rather low humour. Portia uses much higher humour, and
that is what is expected from a person like her, and of course Nerissa
tries to vie with her mistress in this. Gratiano has some rough
humour, and that accords with his character. We have other things,
like the silly situation Shylock is exposed to while Tubal is playing
with him with quick alternative news.
One can of course get along without knowing the many mythical
allusions, and allusions to the Bible, but one misses a lot in that case.
The story of Laban and Jacob is very interesting, and the allusion to
9. Daniel is important. Lorenzo and Jessica show great familiarity with
mythical legends and myths. It is obvious that Shakespeare expected
his audience to appreciate all that, because such allusions are quite
numerous; and one misses much without such knowledge.
Day & Date: Sunday 24/1/2010
Course Instructor: Dr. Abdullatif al-Khaiat
Signature:
9 points X
3 (3 Q. out
of 5)