Power and kingship — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Power and kingship
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores good and bad kingship, the divine right of kings and the natural order 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: 'Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord's anointed temple', 'Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown', 'To be thus is nothing; / But to be safely thus', 'Bleed, bleed, poor country!', 'the king-becoming graces', 'Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief', 'this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen'.
Context: the divine right of kings, the Great Chain of Being, Edward the Confessor and the king's evil, and James I's descent from Banquo.
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.
