How Shakespeare presents Orsino, and how the character develops across the text: the lovesick Duke of Illyria whose self-indulgent passion for Olivia gives way to love for Viola once her disguise falls.
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: 'So full of shapes is fancy / That it alone is high fantastical', 'Away before me to sweet beds of flowers: / Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers', 'Thou know'st no less but all; I have unclasp'd / To thee the book even of my secret soul', 'Be clamorous and leap all civil bounds', 'For such as I am all true lovers are, / Unstaid and skittish in all motions else', 'Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, / More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn, / Than women's are', 'There is no woman's sides / Can bide the beating of so strong a passion', 'mine is all as hungry as the sea', 'thy mind is a very opal', 'You uncivil lady, / To whose ingrate and unauspicious altars / My soul the faithfull'st offerings hath breathed out', 'you shall from this time be / Your master's mistress'.
His verse and its images of music, appetite, the sea and hunting, his claims about how men and women love, and his sudden threat against Cesario.
Context: the fashionable melancholy of the lovesick lover, a duke's power over his household, and readings of his closeness to Cesario before he knows who she is.
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.
