Act 3 — Twelfth Night — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Act 3
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Feste and Viola, Olivia's declaration to Cesario, Sir Andrew's challenge, Antonio lending Sebastian his purse,
Malvolio cross-gartered before Olivia and shut away as mad, the mock duel, and Antonio's arrest.
Key quotations: 'Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines every where', 'This fellow is wise enough to play the fool', 'I am not what I am', 'Love sought is good, but given unsought better', 'I have one heart, one bosom and one truth', 'he does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies', 'I could not stay behind you', 'Why, this is very midsummer madness', 'Nothing that can be can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes', 'If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction', 'we'll have him in a dark room and bound', 'A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man', 'In nature there's no blemish but the mind; / None can be call'd deform'd but the unkind', 'Prove true, imagination, O, prove true'.
Structure: the gulling plot and the duel plot meet in the long fourth scene, while Antonio's arrest prepares the mistaken identities to come.
Dramatic irony: the audience knows Malvolio is obeying a forged letter and that Cesario is Viola, so Olivia's and Antonio's confusion is comic and painful at once.
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.
