Honour and reputation — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Honour and reputation
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores honour, female chastity and reputation, and the harm slander does 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: 'mine, and mine I loved and mine I praised / And mine that I was proud on', 'Death is the fairest cover for her shame / That may be wish'd for', 'Change slander to remorse', 'Shall be lamented, pitied and excused / Of every hearer', 'Is he not approved in the height a villain, that hath slandered, scorned, dishonoured my kinswoman?', 'Sweet Hero! She is wronged, she is slandered, she is undone', 'I'll prove it on his body, if he dare', 'In a false quarrel there is no true valour', 'She died, my lord, but whiles her slander lived'.
Context: a woman's chastity as the honour of her father and husband, men's honour defended by the challenge, and how slander kills Hero's good name.
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.
