Love and marriage — Much Ado About Nothing — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Love and marriage
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores love, courtship and marriage through two contrasting couples 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: 'Lady, as you are mine, I am yours', 'O Lord, my lord, if they were but a week married, they would talk themselves mad', 'Speak, count, 'tis your cue', 'Love me! why, it must be requited', 'I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest', 'Why, no; no more than reason', 'by this light, I take thee for pity', 'How dost thou, Benedick, the married man?'.
Two couples: Claudio and Hero's quick match arranged through the Prince against Beatrice and Benedick's slow, witty courtship, and marriage as the comedy's ending.
Context: marriage as a family arrangement of wealth and status, and comedy's happy ending in marriage.
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.
