How Shakespeare presents Hero, and how the character develops across the text: the quiet, obedient daughter who is slandered, shamed and thought dead before her innocence is proved.
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: 'My cousin means Signior Benedick of Padua', 'Why, then, your visor should be thatched', 'I will do any modest office, my lord, to help my cousin to a good husband', 'Speak, cousin; or, if you cannot, stop his mouth with a kiss', 'No, truly, Ursula, she is too disdainful', 'Is little Cupid's crafty arrow made, / That only wounds by hearsay', 'Is my lord well, that he doth speak so wide?', 'O, God defend me! how am I beset!', 'If I know more of any man alive / Than that which maiden modesty doth warrant, / Let all my sins lack mercy!', 'And when I lived, I was your other wife: / And when you loved, you were my other husband'.
Her few words in public against her lively talk with the women in Act 3, and her silence as a dramatic choice.
Context: a daughter's obedience to her father, a bride's chastity as her family's honour, and feminist readings of how Hero is treated.
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.
