Love and marriage — Othello — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Love and marriage
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores love and marriage: Othello and Desdemona's love and how quickly it is broken, and the soured marriage of Iago and Emilia 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: 'It gives me wonder great as my content / To see you here before me', 'And this, and this, the greatest discords be / That e'er our hearts shall make', 'Come, my dear love, / The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue', 'Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul, / But I do love thee! and when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again', 'A good wench; give it me', 'O, the world hath not a sweeter creature', 'My love doth so approve him, / That even his stubbornness, his checks, his frowns', 'Yet I'll not shed her blood', 'Had she been true, / If heaven would make me such another world / Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, / I'd not have sold her for it'.
Othello and Desdemona's love across differences of age, race and background, how quickly Iago turns it, and Iago and Emilia's marriage as its bitter opposite.
Context that helps a reading: marriage as an agreement between families, and an elopement that defies a father's choice.
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.
