Colonisation — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Colonisation
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores colonisation: who owns the island, how its people are treated, and ideas of the civilised and the savage 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: 'the still-vex'd Bermoothes', 'This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother', 'You taught me language; and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse', 'Had I plantation of this isle, my lord', 'Yet he would be king on't', 'they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian', 'I'll kiss thy foot; I'll swear myself thy subject', 'Freedom, high-day! high-day, freedom!', 'This will prove a brave kingdom to me', 'O brave new world, / That has such people in't!', 'this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine'.
Context: the Virginia Company and the Sea Venture, Montaigne's essay on the Americas, and readings since about 1950 that see Prospero as a coloniser and Caliban and Ariel as the colonised.
The limits of that reading: an island between Tunis and Naples that Prospero reaches by accident, not by choice.
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.
