Don Pedro and Don John — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Don Pedro and Don John
Characters
What you need to know
How Shakespeare presents Don Pedro and Don John, and how the character develops across the text: the prince who makes matches and his bastard brother who sets out to break them.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I will teach you how to humour your cousin', 'Will you have me, lady?', 'the sport will be, when they hold one an opinion of another's dotage', 'Thou wilt be like a lover presently / And tire the hearer with a book of words', 'I am not of many words, but I thank you', 'I cannot hide what I am', 'I am trusted with a muzzle and enfranchised with a clog', 'If I had my mouth, I would bite', 'I make all use of it, for I use it only', 'the word is too good to paint out her wickedness', 'the practise of it lives in John the bastard'.
Structure: the brothers as foils, one deceiving to make love and one to destroy it, and Don John's few, flat words against the Prince's sociable wit.
Context: Don Pedro's rank as Prince of Aragon, and Don John's illegitimacy in a society where a bastard could not inherit.
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.
