Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Maria — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Maria
Characters
What you need to know
How Shakespeare presents Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Maria, and how the character develops across the text: Olivia's drunken uncle, the foolish knight he cheats and the waiting-gentlewoman whose forged letter wins her a husband.
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: 'I'll drink to her as long as there is a passage in my throat and drink in Illyria', 'he's as tall a man as any's in Illyria', 'he has three thousand ducats a year', 'Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian or an ordinary man has', 'I was adored once too', 'you must confine yourself within the modest limits of order', 'if I do not gull him into a nayword, and make him a common recreation, do not think I have wit enough to lie straight in my bed', 'I can write very like my lady your niece', 'She's a beagle, true-bred, and one that adores me', 'I have been dear to him, lad, some two thousand strong, or so', 'bloody as the hunter', 'souls and bodies hath he divorced three', 'an ass-head and a coxcomb and a knave, a thin-faced knave, a gull!'.
Their prose, songs and drinking, Sir Andrew's foolish echoes of Sir Toby, Maria's skill with the forged letter, and Sir Toby's manipulation of Viola and Sir Andrew in the duel plot.
Context: the spirit of festive misrule, a knight living on his niece and on Sir Andrew's money, and a gentlewoman who marries above her station.
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.
