Technical Features

Abstract

In real life we get to know people largely by the way they speak and everything that goes to make a stage play, physical activity, gestures, pauses, silences, grows out of or helps the language. This action is the language and both major and minor personages in The Merchant may be identified by the lines Shakespeare has given them. Shakespeare denotes character through carefully chosen words and repeated images, though he occasionally surprises us, as when Lorenzo, who has hitherto been unimpressive as a speaker, suddenly bursts into magic poetry in Act V.