How Shakespeare presents Viola, and how the character develops across the text: a shipwrecked young woman who disguises herself as Cesario, woos Olivia for the man she loves and trusts time to untangle the disguise.
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: 'And what should I do in Illyria?', 'Perchance he is not drown'd: what think you, sailors?', 'I'll do my best / To woo your lady', 'I am not that I play', ''Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white / Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on', 'Halloo your name to the reverberate hills', 'I am the man: if it be so, as 'tis, / Poor lady, she were better love a dream', 'I am no fighter', 'And I, most jocund, apt and willingly, / To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die', 'After him I love / More than I love these eyes, more than my life'.
Her verse in the love scenes and her quick prose wit with Feste and Olivia, the asides and soliloquies that share the disguise with the audience, and her own name kept back until the last scene.
Context: a woman alone without a brother's or father's protection, a boy actor playing a woman playing a man, and readings of Viola as patient or as resourceful.
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.
