How Shakespeare presents Hero, and how the character develops across the text: the quiet, obedient daughter who is slandered, shamed and thought dead before her innocence is proved.
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: 'My cousin means Signior Benedick of Padua', 'Why, then, your visor should be thatched', 'I will do any modest office, my lord, to help my cousin to a good husband', 'Speak, cousin; or, if you cannot, stop his mouth with a kiss', 'No, truly, Ursula, she is too disdainful', 'Is little Cupid's crafty arrow made, / That only wounds by hearsay', 'Is my lord well, that he doth speak so wide?', 'O, God defend me! how am I beset!', 'If I know more of any man alive / Than that which maiden modesty doth warrant, / Let all my sins lack mercy!', 'And when I lived, I was your other wife: / And when you loved, you were my other husband'.
Her few words in public against her lively talk with the women in Act 3, and her silence as a dramatic choice.
Context: a daughter's obedience to her father, a bride's chastity as her family's honour, and feminist readings of how Hero is treated.
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.
