Gender and identity — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Gender and identity
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores gender and identity: Viola's disguise as Cesario, what it reveals about men and women, and the twins whose likeness drives the confusion 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 shalt present me as an eunuch to him', 'Diana's lip / Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe / Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound, / And all is semblative a woman's part', ''Tis with him in standing water, between boy and man', 'Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness, / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much', 'For such as we are made of, such we be', 'Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we!', 'My father had a daughter loved a man, / As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman, / I should your lordship', 'We men may say more, swear more: but indeed / Our shows are more than will', 'Thou never shouldst love woman like to me', 'let me see thee in thy woman's weeds', 'So comes it, lady, you have been mistook: / But nature to her bias drew in that'.
Viola's disguise as a way to live safely and speak freely, the argument between Orsino and Cesario about men's and women's love, and the twins as two halves of one identity.
Context: boy actors in women's parts, and the festival custom of men dressing as women.
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.
