Appearance and reality — Macbeth — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Appearance and reality
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores deception, equivocation and the gap between appearance and reality across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair', 'There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face', 'look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't', 'False face must hide what the false heart doth know', 'There's daggers in men's smiles', 'make our faces vizards to our hearts', 'an equivocator'.
Context: Father Henry Garnet, equivocation and the Gunpowder Plot; clothing imagery.
Edexcel's Shakespeare question has two parts: part (a) on the printed extract marks only language, form and structure (AO2), so context earns nothing there; part (b) on the play elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1, 15 marks) and context (AO3, 5 marks), not language analysis. Say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
