Context — Romeo and Juliet — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The Elizabethan context of Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare's source, Arthur Brooke's poem, and the tragedy of 'star-cross'd lovers',
marriage, fathers and daughters in Elizabethan England, honour, duelling and the feud, Petrarch and the sonnet, and fate and the stars.
How to use this context in an answer about the play rather than as background.
Tragedy and the tragic hero, and how the Prologue tells the audience the ending before the play begins.
Shakespeare's source, Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), and how Shakespeare compresses its story of several months into a few days.
Petrarch and the sonnet: Romeo's love for Rosaline as a fashionable pose, and the lovers' shared sonnet.
Fathers, daughters and marriage in Elizabethan England, and Juliet's age.
Honour, the duel and the feud, the Prince's law, and Elizabethan belief in fate and the stars.
OCR credits context only as the play shows it: the social, historical and cultural ideas at work in the play that bear on the question. General facts about Shakespeare's life, theatre or times earn nothing on their own.
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.
