Act 4 — Twelfth Night — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Act 4
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Sebastian mistaken for Cesario by Sir Andrew and Olivia, Feste as Sir Topas visiting Malvolio in the dark, and Sebastian's marriage to Olivia.
Key quotations: 'Nothing that is so is so', 'Are all the people mad?', 'Or I am mad, or else this is a dream', 'If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!', 'Sir Topas, never was man thus wronged', 'they have laid me here in hideous darkness', 'there is no darkness but ignorance', 'I am no more mad than you are', 'I would we were well rid of this knavery', 'This is the air; that is the glorious sun', 'yet 'tis not madness', 'Now go with me and with this holy man / Into the chantry by'.
Form: Feste's double act as himself and as Sir Topas, Malvolio's prose pleas from the dark, and Sebastian's soliloquy of wonder in verse.
Context: darkness and confinement as the treatment for madness, and Sebastian's sudden marriage to a rich countess.
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.
