Love — Romeo and Juliet — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Love
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores romantic love, Petrarchan love, sexual love and love's link with death 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: 'O brawling love! O loving hate!', 'Did my heart love till now?', 'My bounty is as boundless as the sea', 'These violent delights have violent ends', 'Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds', 'Thus with a kiss I die'.
Petrarchan love for Rosaline against Romeo's love for Juliet, the Nurse's and Mercutio's bawdy view of love, and love joined with death.
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.
