Gender — Much Ado About Nothing — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Gender
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores men and women, the male world of soldiers and fathers, and Beatrice's challenge to it 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: 'Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust?', 'In faith, she's too curst', 'thou wilt never get thee a husband, if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue', 'she would infect to the north star', 'it is my cousin's duty to make curtsy', 'I would to God some scholar would conjure her', 'O God, that I were a man!', 'What a pretty thing man is when he goes in his doublet and hose and leaves off his wit!', 'Boys, apes, braggarts, Jacks, milksops!'.
Context: a patriarchal society of soldiers and fathers, women's duty to obey, the sharp-tongued woman thought too curst to win a husband, and readings of the ending as leaving the men's suspicion of women in place.
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.
