Context — Much Ado About Nothing — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The Elizabethan context of Much Ado About Nothing: comedy as a genre, courtship and marriage, honour and female chastity,
social status in Messina from the Prince of Aragon to Dogberry's watch, and Shakespeare's sources and the date of the play.
How to use this context in an answer about the play rather than as background.
Comedy as a genre: a light-hearted play that ends in marriages, and how the church scene takes Much Ado close to tragedy before its happy ending.
Courtship and marriage in Shakespeare's England: matches made by families for wealth and status, dowries and heirs, and a bride's vow to obey.
Honour and female chastity: a bride's virginity as her own and her family's honour, the jokes about cuckolds' horns, and why the men believe the slander so quickly.
Social status: a prince, a count and a lord as guests of the governor of Messina, Hero as her father's heir, Don John as a bastard who cannot inherit, and Dogberry's bumbling watch.
Shakespeare's sources and date: tales by Bandello and Ariosto of a lover tricked into believing his bride unfaithful, the wooing of Beatrice and Benedick as Shakespeare's own, and a play written in 1598 or 1599 and printed in 1600, with Dogberry first played by the comic actor Will Kemp.
The title's pun on nothing and noting: gossip, overhearing and misreading what is seen.
OCR credits context only as the play shows it: the social, historical and cultural ideas at work in the play that bear on the question. General facts about Shakespeare's life, theatre or times earn nothing on their own.
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.
