Friendship and loyalty — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Friendship and loyalty
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores friendship and loyalty between friends, husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, and to faith 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: 'To you, Antonio, / I owe the most, in money and in love', 'My purse, my person, my extremest means, / Lie all unlock'd to your occasions', 'I think he only loves the world for him', 'Slubber not business for my sake, Bassanio', 'all debts are cleared between you and I, if I might but see you at my death', 'Commend me to your honourable wife: / Tell her the process of Antonio's end', 'I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all / Here to this devil, to deliver you', 'Let his deservings and my love withal / Be valued 'gainst your wife's commandment'.
Loyalty to friends, to husbands and wives, to fathers and to faith, and how the ring plot sets Bassanio's loyalty to Antonio against his loyalty to Portia.
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.
