A-Level English Literature: Shakespearean comedy and the problem plays - Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew

Shakespeare's comedies are set at A level as often as his tragedies: 'Twelfth Night', 'Measure for Measure' and 'The Taming of the Shrew' appear in drama and comedy components, for example AQA's 'Aspects of comedy' option and the Shakespeare choices of other boards. This material works through the three plays with the lines printed in full, so that you practise close reading as well as knowledge of plot.

'Twelfth Night' is studied as a festive comedy. You look at Orsino's self-indulgent opening, Viola's disguise and the dramatic irony of her wooing speech and of her riddle about her father's daughters, Sir Toby's defence of 'cakes and ale' against the killjoy Malvolio, and the way the ending is unsettled by Malvolio's revenge and Feste's song of the rain that 'raineth every day'.

'Measure for Measure' is studied as a problem play: a comedy in form that treats death, hypocrisy and sexual coercion seriously. You read Isabella's attack on 'man, proud man, / Dressed in a little brief authority', Angelo's 'Who will believe thee, Isabel?', Claudio's terror of death, and the ending in which Isabella gives no answer to the Duke's proposal.

'The Taming of the Shrew' raises the most debated question in the group: how to read Katherine's final speech, which compares a wife's duty to a subject's duty to a prince. You consider sincere, ironic and performed readings, and the Induction that frames the whole plot as a play staged for the drunken Christopher Sly.

Throughout, the questions connect language to genre: the pattern of disorder resolved in marriage, the idea of festive comedy (C. L. Barber) and the label 'problem play' (F. S. Boas), and the decisions a director must make where the text leaves silence.

The material offers a quiz of twelve questions with one defensible answer each and an explanation after every answer, twelve flashcards on structure, terms and key lines, and a printable written work of eight open questions - close analysis of printed speeches, Malvolio, disguise and gender, the problem-play label, comic endings and festive comedy - each with a model answer and the key points a strong response should include.

  • Explain the structure of Shakespearean romantic comedy and how endings complicate it
  • Analyse disguise, dramatic irony and gender in 'Twelfth Night'
  • Read Malvolio as comic butt and as victim
  • Explain why 'Measure for Measure' is called a problem play, including Isabella's silence
  • Weigh sincere, ironic and performed readings of Katherine's final speech
  • Use the critical ideas of festive comedy and the problem play as arguments to test

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the DfE A level English Literature subject content (drama, including a Shakespeare play). Quotations from public-domain texts on Project Gutenberg: 'Twelfth Night' (#1526), 'Measure for Measure' (#1530), 'The Taming of the Shrew' (#1508).

Sample question

'Twelfth Night' opens with Duke Orsino: If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die. That strain again, it had a dying fall; O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour. Enough; no more; ’Tis not so sweet now as it was before. What does this opening suggest about Orsino?

See the answer

He is in love with love itself: he indulges his feelings, asks for excess, then tires of the music at once

Orsino asks for 'excess' so that his appetite for love may 'sicken and so die', savours a strain with 'a dying fall', and then abruptly says 'Enough; no more'. The lines present a self-indulgent, changeable lover more absorbed in his own emotion than in Olivia, which the comedy will test.

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