HSC English. The smart way to prepare for your HSC.

This one-day HSC English preparation course focuses on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice for the English Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences. Students will refine their skills in articulating a clear and detailed analysis of the play’s key scenes through writing and whole group discussion. Links will be made to our own world as the course covers the dramatic representation of prejudice, mercy, justice, love, and revenge as intensely emotional aspects of human experience.

While these experiences are embedded in a specific cultural context, they are played out through the familiar lens of family relationships in dynamic tension with romantic love.

Close attention to speeches, imagery, motifs, and extended metaphors will generate robust classroom discussion of changing cultural and historical perspectives on the power and conscience of an individual in a ‘just’ society.

The nexus between power, justice and mercy dramatised in the world of the play remains open to critique in our own troubled times. Evidence-based discussion will ignite new ideas and empower students to reflect personally on the complexity of human experience in Shakespeare’s play and as it appears to us on the current world stage.

Students will be encouraged to explore