Character Analysis: Merchant of Venice

My senior year of high school, my Lit. teacher had us choose a literary character and pretend we were them. We were supposed to choose something that we thought they'd want to eat, or a food that represented them. I chose Wickham, from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. For anyone familiar with the book, you would know that Wickham is this horrible person that was given the opportunity to improve his status in society but chose to misuse the opportunity and turned out very wild.

To anyone who didn't already know him, he was seen as this incredibly charming young man. So, for the food object I chose to represent him, I made some chocolate chip cookies-yummy, appealing, enticing- but with a ton of salt. My point was that although the cookies looked delicious from the outside, they were in all actuality rotten on the inside, just like Wickham.
Anyways, I thought I would try to do the same thing for Shakespeare's characters!

So... Portia. I thought of her as a soufflé. Refined and complicated, in order to reach a good finished product there are a series of set rules that must be followed. In order for Portia to marry, her father developed a series of rules for her pursuers to follow. At the same time, Portia lived in a sense by setting her own boundaries. This is exemplified by her intelligence and decision to pretend to be a man at Antonio's court trial. Soufflés are very delicate in nature in that they can easily deflate. A lot of variables come into play when preparing a finished product.

Shylock. I thought of him as a chocolate bar. As far as I can remember, chocolate has always gotten a bad rap health-wise. It supposedly can lead to an increase in acne and undesired weight gain. In the Merchant of Venice, Shylock was always made fun of and belittled because of his religious beliefs, and often was used as a scapegoat. Shylock though, is just as human as everyone else, as he so mentions in III.i. Shylock, like chocolate, can be just as good, or as bad, as any other person, or food item. With Shylock, I believe a lot of why he acted the way he did throughout the play was due to how he was treated by Christians.

And finally, Antonio. My first thought honestly was Horchata. Apparently it's this incredible drink and everyone that I have talked to loves it. I don't like it all. With Antonio, everyone appears to think he is this wonderful person, but in reality he is a bully. Perhaps this relates only to me.