Power and kingship — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Power and kingship
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores good and bad kingship, the divine right of kings and the natural order 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: 'Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord's anointed temple', 'Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown', 'To be thus is nothing; / But to be safely thus', 'Bleed, bleed, poor country!', 'the king-becoming graces', 'Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief', 'this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen'.
Context: the divine right of kings, the Great Chain of Being, Edward the Confessor and the king's evil, and James I's descent from Banquo.
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.
