Festivity and melancholy — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Festivity and melancholy
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores festivity and melancholy: the revelry of Twelfth Night set against mourning, lovesickness and Feste's songs about time and endings 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: 'to season / A brother's dead love', 'care's an enemy to life', 'Shall we rouse the night-owl in a catch', 'Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?', 'What's to come is still unsure', 'That old and antique song we heard last night', 'Come away, come away, death, / And in sad cypress let me be laid', 'Now, the melancholy god protect thee', 'A great while ago the world begun', 'But that's all one, our play is done'.
Context: the Twelfth Night festival and the Lord of Misrule, Puritan opposition to revelry, and the fashion for melancholy in Shakespeare's England.
The play's mixed mood: grief and lovesickness at the start, revelry that turns cruel, and Feste's songs about youth, time and the rain.
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.
