Context — Romeo and Juliet — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The Elizabethan context of Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare's source, Arthur Brooke's poem, and the tragedy of 'star-cross'd lovers',
marriage, fathers and daughters in Elizabethan England, honour, duelling and the feud, Petrarch and the sonnet, and fate and the stars.
How to use this context in an answer about the play rather than as background.
Tragedy and the tragic hero, and how the Prologue tells the audience the ending before the play begins.
Shakespeare's source, Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), and how Shakespeare compresses its nine months into a few days.
Petrarch and the sonnet: Romeo's love for Rosaline as a fashionable pose, and the lovers' shared sonnet.
Fathers, daughters and marriage in Elizabethan England, and Juliet's age.
Honour, the duel and the feud, the Prince's law, and Elizabethan belief in fate and the stars.
On Edexcel's paper, context earns marks only in part (b) of the Shakespeare question, 5 of its 20: use it to support an argument about the play, woven into the point rather than added as a separate paragraph.
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.
