Love and marriage — Twelfth Night — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Love and marriage
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores love in its many forms, self-indulgent, patient, sudden, self-loving and loyal, and the marriages that end the comedy 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: 'O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou', 'Then let thy love be younger than thyself', 'Let still the woman take / An elder than herself: so wears she to him, / So sways she level in her husband's heart', 'Journeys end in lovers meeting', 'In delay there lies no plenty; / Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty', 'Alas, their love may be call'd appetite', 'A contract of eternal bond of love', 'A solemn combination shall be made / Of our dear souls', 'In recompense whereof he hath married her', 'You are betroth'd both to a maid and man'.
Kinds of love compared: Orsino's self-indulgent passion, Viola's patience, Olivia's sudden desire, Malvolio's self-love and Antonio's loyalty, and marriages at the end that are made in haste.
Context: Elizabethan marriage as a joining of families' wealth and rank, and romantic comedy's ending in weddings.
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.
