Writer's methods — Macbeth — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Writer's methods
Writer's methods
What you need to know
How Shakespeare's form, structure and language create meaning: tragedy and the tragic hero, soliloquies and asides,
dramatic irony, verse and prose, and imagery such as blood, darkness, sleep and clothing.
Form: tragedy and the tragic hero; soliloquies and asides; blank verse, prose (the Porter, the sleepwalking scene) and the witches' rhyme; shared and broken-off lines.
Structure and imagery: dramatic irony, the play's speed, and the motifs of blood, sleep, darkness and clothes ('like a giant's robe').
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.
