Act 3 — Macbeth — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Act 3
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Macbeth as king, Banquo's murder and Fleance's escape, the banquet and Banquo's ghost.
Key quotations: 'To be thus is nothing; / But to be safely thus', 'Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown', 'O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!', 'Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck', 'Come, seeling night', 'Fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly!', 'never shake / Thy gory locks at me', 'Are you a man?', 'I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far', 'Nought's had, all's spent'.
How the balance between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth shifts, and the banquet as a public collapse.
OCR's question on this play is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the play elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the play, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts as the play shows it, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
