Friendship and loyalty — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Friendship and loyalty
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores friendship and loyalty between friends, husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, and to faith 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: 'To you, Antonio, / I owe the most, in money and in love', 'My purse, my person, my extremest means, / Lie all unlock'd to your occasions', 'I think he only loves the world for him', 'Slubber not business for my sake, Bassanio', 'all debts are cleared between you and I, if I might but see you at my death', 'Commend me to your honourable wife: / Tell her the process of Antonio's end', 'I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all / Here to this devil, to deliver you', 'Let his deservings and my love withal / Be valued 'gainst your wife's commandment'.
Loyalty to friends, to husbands and wives, to fathers and to faith, and how the ring plot sets Bassanio's loyalty to Antonio against his loyalty to Portia.
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.
