Masculinity and gender — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Masculinity and gender
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores ideas of manhood and gender in the play 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: 'unsex me here', 'Come to my woman's breasts, / And take my milk for gall', 'When you durst do it, then you were a man', 'I dare do all that may become a man', 'Bring forth men-children only', 'Are you a man?', 'But I must also feel it as a man', 'you should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so'.
Context: Jacobean expectations of men and women, and boy actors playing the women's parts.
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.
