Gender — Much Ado About Nothing — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Gender
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores men and women, the male world of soldiers and fathers, and Beatrice's challenge to it 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: 'Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust?', 'In faith, she's too curst', 'thou wilt never get thee a husband, if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue', 'she would infect to the north star', 'it is my cousin's duty to make curtsy', 'I would to God some scholar would conjure her', 'O God, that I were a man!', 'What a pretty thing man is when he goes in his doublet and hose and leaves off his wit!', 'Boys, apes, braggarts, Jacks, milksops!'.
Context: a patriarchal society of soldiers and fathers, women's duty to obey, the sharp-tongued woman as a type, and readings of the ending as Beatrice's silencing.
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.
