Masculinity and gender — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Masculinity and gender
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores ideas of manhood and gender in the play 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: 'unsex me here', 'Come to my woman's breasts, / And take my milk for gall', 'When you durst do it, then you were a man', 'I dare do all that may become a man', 'Bring forth men-children only', 'Are you a man?', 'But I must also feel it as a man', 'you should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so'.
Context: Jacobean expectations of men and women, and boy actors playing the women's parts.
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.
