A-Level English Literature: Shakespearean tragedy on the stage

A-Level questions on Shakespeare reward candidates who remember that these are scripts. The examiner's phrase for it is dramatic method, and it means the things that only happen in a theatre: who enters, who is left alone, what an audience knows that a character does not, how long a silence lasts. This set is built entirely on that, and deliberately does not repeat the soliloquy-and-aside ground already covered elsewhere in this category.

Some of the twelve turn on structure. Macbeth opens with three witches and a couplet — "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" — before the protagonist has appeared at all, and the question is what that establishes. The stabbing of Caesar in the Capitol is the hinge, not because it is the biggest event but because it changes the question the play is asking: before it, whether; after it, what follows. Hamlet ends with a stage full of bodies and a Norwegian prince walking in, and order is restored from outside precisely because everyone inside the court is dead.

Others turn on what a performance does to an audience. Iago warns Othello against "the green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on" while the audience watches him lay the trap, which is dramatic irony working as a kind of helplessness. Lear's Fool tells the king exactly what Kent was banished for saying, and survives, because a joke is a licence. Desdemona is killed with hands rather than a blade, on stage rather than off, which takes long enough for her to plead — that length is the point. And in the tomb, Shakespeare gives no direction for how long Romeo looks at Juliet before he drinks, which hands a director the one thing that decides how near the audience is brought to a rescue that never comes.

Every quotation is Shakespeare's own, cited by act and scene, and out of copyright — as with the other materials here, nothing is taken from any exam board's specification, mark scheme or past paper, and no modern set text appears. The wrong answers are readings a thoughtful student might defend before going back to the text, which is what makes them worth ruling out.

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• Say where a named scene sits in the shape of a tragedy, and why it carries the weight it does
• Explain what dramatic irony does to an audience watching a character be deceived
• Account for a switch between verse and prose, and what it signals about a speaker
• Say what a staging achieves that the same words on a page would not
• Explain the function of a licensed truth-teller such as Lear's Fool
• Distinguish a character's stated motive from the motive the play shows
• Describe how order is restored at the end of a tragedy, and what it costs
• Identify what an absent stage direction leaves to a director, and how that choice changes the scene

All quotations are Shakespeare's, out of copyright, cited by act and scene. From the bank, Romeo in the Capulet tomb (5.3): "Ah, dear Juliet, / Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe / That unsubstantial Death is amorous, / And that the lean abhorred monster keeps / Thee here in dark to be his paramour?" He is looking straight at the evidence that she is alive, and the question asks what a director does with the time the script does not fix.