How Shakespeare presents Feste, and how the character develops across the text: the wise fool who moves between households, sees through everyone and closes the play with a song.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage', 'Better a witty fool than a foolish wit', 'Cucullus non facit monachum: that's as much to say as I wear not motley in my brain', 'The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven', 'O mistress mine, where are you roaming?', 'Present mirth hath present laughter', 'I am indeed not her fool, but her corrupter of words', 'Nay, I am for all waters', 'And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges', 'When that I was and a little tiny boy'.
His wordplay, songs and riddles, his movement between Olivia's and Orsino's households, and his part as Sir Topas in the gulling of Malvolio.
Context: the licensed fool who can tell the truth to his betters, Robert Armin who first played him, and the closing song sung to the audience.
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.
