Appearance and reality — Macbeth — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
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.
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.
