Deception and appearances — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Deception and appearances
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores deception, disguise and overhearing, used both to make love and to destroy it, and the gap between seeming and being 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: 'the infernal Ate in good apparel', 'Note this before my notes; / There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting', 'Is't possible? Sits the wind in that corner?', 'the fashion of a doublet, or a hat, or a cloak, is nothing to a man', 'Would you not swear, / All you that see her, that she were a maid, / By these exterior shows?', 'What men daily do, not knowing what they do!', 'O, what men dare do! what men may do!', 'let her awhile be secretly kept in', 'I have deceived even your very eyes'.
Deception for good and for harm: Don Pedro's tricks against Don John's, masks and overhearing, the pun on nothing and noting, and the Friar's deception that heals.
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.
