Act 2 — Much Ado About Nothing — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Act 2
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
The masked dance, Don John's first trick on Claudio, the engagement of Claudio and Hero, Don Pedro's plan to make Beatrice and Benedick fall in love,
Borachio's plan to make Hero seem unfaithful, and the gulling of Benedick in the orchard.
Key quotations: 'Lord, I could not endure a husband with a beard on his face', 'Not till God make men of some other metal than earth', 'wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque pace', 'he is the prince's jester: a very dull fool', 'Friendship is constant in all other things / Save in the office and affairs of love', 'Let every eye negotiate for itself / And trust no agent', 'She speaks poniards, and every word stabs', 'Silence is the perfectest herald of joy', 'we are the only love-gods', 'Any bar, any cross, any impediment will be medicinable to me', 'Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, / Men were deceivers ever', 'This can be no trick', 'When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married'.
Form: masks and overhearing at the dance, Benedick's prose soliloquies either side of his gulling, and Balthasar's song.
Structure: Don John's two plots, one failing at the dance and one prepared with Borachio, set against Don Pedro's plot to make a match.
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.
