Fate and free will — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Fate and free will
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores fate, the stars and chance against the characters' own choices 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: 'A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life', 'Some consequence yet hanging in the stars', 'O, I am fortune's fool!', 'I have an ill-divining soul', 'Then I defy you, stars!', 'A greater power than we can contradict'.
Chance, haste and choice: the plague that stops the Friar's letter, and the characters' own decisions.
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.
