A-Level English Literature: Drama and Prose

The examiner's question is always the same underneath: not what happens, but how the writing makes it happen. So these ten questions each hand you a short extract and ask what the method is doing with it.

On the drama side: what a soliloquy lets an audience know that nobody on stage does, what Iago's aside establishes the moment he speaks it, why the Porter's drunken joke about being the gatekeeper of hell arrives at exactly that point in Macbeth, and how Wilde's paradoxes and Nora's "doll-wife" do their work. The Porter question is worth singling out, because the commonest answer — comic relief — is not wrong and still earns almost nothing. The scene is comic; the question is what the comedy is for, and the answer is in where the Porter is standing while he pretends to keep the gate of hell.

On the prose side: the two Pips present at once in a retrospective first-person narrative, the difference between that and free indirect style, and what Dickens is doing when he opens Bleak House with a page of fog that turns out to be thickest around the Court of Chancery. The last question sets a feminist and a postcolonial reading of Bertha Mason side by side and asks which fact about her each one treats as decisive.

Every quotation is from a work published before 1930, out of copyright, attributed by author and title, and kept short; the single invented passage says in the question that it is invented. That constraint is deliberate — boards set different texts, most set texts are in copyright, and the reading method is the part that transfers.

Nothing is taken from any exam board specification, past paper, mark scheme or published critical work.

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with any exam board and it is not an exam centre.

• Say what a soliloquy or an aside gives the audience that the other characters do not have
• Explain what a comic scene is doing in a tragedy, beyond relieving the tension
• Identify a retrospective first-person narrator and distinguish it from free indirect style and from unreliability
• Read a described setting as an argument rather than as scenery
• Recognise the markers of Gothic writing in a passage
• Set a feminist and a postcolonial reading of the same character side by side and say which evidence separates them

Charles Dickens's 'Bleak House' opens: 'Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping.' Dickens keeps going in the same manner for another page, and the fog is at its very densest around the Court of Chancery. What is the setting doing? — one of ten questions written for this set.