Appearance and reality — Macbeth — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Appearance and reality
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores deception, equivocation and the gap between appearance and reality 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: 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair', 'There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face', 'look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't', 'False face must hide what the false heart doth know', 'There's daggers in men's smiles', 'make our faces vizards to our hearts', 'an equivocator'.
Context: Father Henry Garnet, equivocation and the Gunpowder Plot; clothing imagery.
Eduqas's Shakespeare questions don't mark context: the extract question (15 marks) and the whole-play essay (20 marks, plus 5 for spelling, punctuation, vocabulary and sentence structures) both mark response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2). Use context only in a phrase that supports an interpretation, and say which question each worked paragraph practises.
