A-Level English Literature: context and criticism

Two of the assessment strands at A-Level are the ones candidates handle worst: the significance of contexts, and the use of other readers' interpretations. Both go wrong in the same way — as decoration. A paragraph of biography at the top of an essay, a critic's name dropped in to settle an argument. This set is built to make the difference between decoration and work visible, and every question is anchored in a real case rather than in a definition.

Start with the clearest. Two sentences are offered as context for Jane Eyre: that Charlotte Brontë's mother died when she was five, and that a married woman in 1847 could not hold property in her own name. Both are true. Only one of them changes a line of the novel — because if a wife's money became her husband's, then Jane's inheritance from her uncle is not a convenience of the plot but the thing that makes her return to Rochester a choice between equals.

Then criticism as argument. Samuel Johnson, editing Shakespeare in 1765, admitted he had never been able to bear rereading the end of King Lear. That is not an authority that settles whether the ending is a fault; it is evidence about the play's effect, and evidence can be tested. In 1681 Nahum Tate had already acted on the same discomfort, rewriting the play so that Cordelia lives and marries Edgar — and that version held the English stage for about a century and a half. It is the best case in the language for the difference between the context a work was produced in and the context it is received in: the popularity of the happy ending tells us about Tate's audiences and nothing whatever about 1606.

The rest works the same way. Two readings of Hamlet's delay, and the line where he names his doubt of the Ghost and then contrives a test, which is what that doubt would require. Caliban's "This island's mine", and the standard by which a reading from the position of the colonised should be judged — including the parts of the play it must not skip. Polonius telling his son to be true to himself, two acts before he sends a servant to spread lies about him. Two opposite refusals to read The Merchant of Venice, one modern and one historical, both of which have to skip the trial scene. And Portia's "naughty world", which in 1600 meant a wicked one.

Everything quoted is out of copyright, no critic later than 1930 is quoted, and nothing comes from any exam board's specification, mark scheme or past paper.

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• Tell a contextual point that changes a reading from biography attached to an essay
• Use a period fact — a law, a legal status — to explain what is at stake in a scene
• Separate the context a work was produced in from the context it has been received in
• Treat a critic's remark as an argument to be tested against the text rather than an authority
• Say what evidence would settle a disagreement between two readings
• Judge a reading made through a particular lens by how much of the text it accounts for
• Avoid mistaking a character's speech for the author's opinion
• Recognize semantic shift, and tell an arguable claim from a fact that can only be recited

Quotations are from out-of-copyright texts and critics. From the bank, Samuel Johnson in his 1765 edition of Shakespeare, on the end of King Lear: "I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor." The question asks what a candidate should do with a remark like that — which is to test it, not to cite it.