Power and control — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Power and control
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores power and control: masters and servants, punishment and reward, and freedom and imprisonment 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: 'Thou liest, malignant thing!', 'I'll rack thee with old cramps', 'Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself', 'Remember I have done thee worthy service', 'I will be correspondent to command / And do my spiriting gently', 'this wooden slavery', 'I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer', 'What would my potent master? here I am', 'Let them be hunted soundly', 'Thou shalt have the air at freedom', 'Let your indulgence set me free'.
Prospero as master of Ariel, Caliban and Ferdinand compared: promises, threats and punishments, and how far he is a good master.
Freedom and imprisonment, from Ariel's cloven pine to the Epilogue, where Prospero asks the audience to release him.
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.
