How Shakespeare presents Beatrice, and how the character develops across the text: from the scornful wit of the merry war to a woman who admits her love and demands justice for Hero.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I pray you, is Signior Mountanto returned from the wars or no?', 'he is a very valiant trencher-man', 'You always end with a jade's trick', 'He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man', 'lead his apes into hell', 'he lent it me awhile; and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one', 'there was a star danced, and under that was I born', 'O, on my soul, my cousin is belied!', 'manhood is melted into courtesies', 'I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving', 'a goodly count, Count Comfect', 'I yield upon great persuasion'.
Form: her prose wit and wordplay, her one soliloquy in rhymed verse, and the kiss that ends her last speech.
Context: a woman's duty to marry and obey, and readings of Beatrice's resistance to marriage as a reasonable answer to the men's distrust of women, or of her love as a self-taming.
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.
