Love in the comedies: desire, disguise, marriage

Shakespeare's comic love plots are machines for testing the conventions of romantic love, not for endorsing them.

• Love at first sight — presented with real power and, simultaneously, with scepticism: the speed of infatuation is very often mocked by the play's own structure, especially when a lover transfers his devotion overnight.
• Disguise and cross-dressing — the heroine in male dress can speak, argue, travel and be heard. Notice the implication: her wit was always there; what she lacked was permission. The disguise reveals that gender is partly a costume, and the play knows it.
• Obstruction — fathers, laws, rank, feuds, mistaken identity. Comic love is defined by what stands in its way, and the obstacle is usually social.
• The marriage ending — reconciliation and multiple weddings. Test the ending, always. Do all the couples want each other? Is anyone forgiven too fast? Does anyone leave the stage unpaired, unpersuaded or unheard?
• The counter-voice — the cynic, the fool, the melancholic who declines the dance. Shakespeare almost always leaves someone on stage to withhold consent from the happy ending.

Exemplar, not syllabus: AQA revises its Shakespeare list, so the plays named here are only illustrations of the method. Work from the play your class studies — the exam rewards how you read Shakespearean love, not which play you have.

Reading the comic ending

Love in the tragedies: desire, jealousy, possession

In the tragedies, love is bound up with ownership, reputation and proof — and it is fatal.

• Love as possession — the language of property and title runs through Shakespearean jealousy. A husband who believes he has been robbed is speaking of a wife.
• Jealousy and the demand for proof — the tragic lover wants ocular certainty about an interior fact, and that demand is unsatisfiable. The manipulator's work is easy because the demand is already there.
• Reputation and the double standard — a woman's honour is her chastity and it is destroyed by rumour, not by act. Male honour is public and repairable; female honour is not.
• Love against the world — desire that defies family, state, race or age, and is crushed between them. The lovers are not merely unlucky; they are illegible to their society.
• Language collapsing — track how a lover's verse degrades. In Shakespeare, the disintegration of the metre is the disintegration of the man, and it is one of the most reliable AO2 observations you can make.

The question that opens a top-band essay: is the tragedy caused by the villain, or does the villain merely supply the words for something the lover already believed about women, about honour, or about what love entitles him to?

Tragic love

Sort the Shakespearean method

Tap a feature, then tap what kind of dramatic method it is.

Shakespeare's dramatic methods

AO2 in Section A means Shakespeare's methods as a dramatist. Not just imagery — the whole apparatus:

• Soliloquy and aside — privileged access to a mind, and the audience made a confidant. Ask who is given soliloquies and who is not: in most Shakespearean love plots, interiority is distributed unequally, and the distribution is the meaning.
• Blank verse vs prose — verse for the elevated, the passionate and the noble; prose for the comic, the low, the mad and the plain-speaking. When a character crosses between them, something has happened.
• Dramatic irony — the audience's knowledge exceeding the character's. In comedy this produces delight; in tragedy, dread. The same device, opposite genres.
• Staging and space — the balcony, the bedchamber, the wood, the court. Where a scene is set is an argument about what kind of love is possible there.
• Imagery clusters — track a chain of images across acts (light and dark, hunting, disease, the sea, coinage). One image in one line is nothing; a pattern across a play is a reading.
• Shared lines and stichomythia — two speakers completing one line of verse: intimacy or antagonism made metrical. It is worth counting.

Verse and prose

Match the dramatic method to its effect

Tap a method on the left, then the effect it produces.

What love meant in Shakespeare's England

Context here must be specific and must change the reading.

• Marriage as an alliance — among the propertied, marriage transferred land and money and was arranged by fathers. A daughter's refusal is not a lifestyle choice; it is a challenge to paternal authority and property law.
• Patriarchy and coverture — a wife's legal personhood was largely absorbed into her husband's. When Shakespearean husbands speak of wives in the language of ownership, they are not being metaphorical.
• Chastity as capital — female honour was the family's asset and could be destroyed by slander alone. This is why rumour is lethal in these plays.
• Boy actors — women's parts were played by boys. A heroine disguised as a boy was a boy playing a woman playing a boy, and Elizabethan audiences knew it. Desire on that stage was already unstable, which is why queer readings of the comedies are not an imposition but a recovery.
• Reception — the plays have been rewritten, censored, given happy endings, staged as arguments about race, class and gender. That history is evidence, and you may use it.

Deletion test: cut your context sentence. If the analysis survives untouched, it was decoration. AO3 must do work.

Context with teeth

Reading Shakespearean love through theory

• Feminist — who speaks, who is spoken about, who is granted a soliloquy? Count the lines. Notice how often a heroine's wit is at its sharpest in disguise and disappears when she is returned to a dress and a husband at the end.
• Queer — the ungendered sonnet addressee, the intense same-sex friendships that the marriage plot must subordinate, the boy actor. The comedies are structurally unstable about desire, and modern criticism has not invented that instability so much as stopped ignoring it.
• Marxist — follow the dowry, the inheritance, the rank, the debt. Shakespearean love plots are property transactions with a poetry problem.
• Psychoanalytic — jealousy as projection; the beloved as a screen for the lover's fantasy; desire intensified by prohibition.
• Performance criticism — a production is an interpretation with evidence. A director who has the heroine walk away in the final tableau has made an argument, and you may analyse it as one.

The rule: one lens, one textual claim. A feminist critic would object earns nothing. The play gives the husband a soliloquy in which to work out that he must kill her, and gives her not one private line in which to know that she is going to die earns a great deal.

AO5, properly grounded

The passage plus linked essay: method

Section A gives you an extract and asks how Shakespeare presents an aspect of love here, and then in the play as a whole. Both halves are marked.

1. Place the extract (one sentence): where in the play does this fall, and what has just become possible or impossible?
2. Thesis: one arguable claim about how this passage presents love. The passage presents love as a form of accountancy: the speaker cannot say what he feels without also saying what she is worth.
3. Three or four close paragraphs on the extract — verse and prose, imagery, syntax, staging, who is silent. Method → effect → what it says about love.
4. Then widen, deliberately and with signposted care: two or three paragraphs showing how this presentation of love is developed, contradicted or paid for elsewhere in the play.
5. Weave AO3 and AO5 where they bite. Do not quarantine them.

The most common way to lose marks in Section A: writing a beautiful close reading of the extract and never leaving it. The question asks about the play. Budget the time before you start writing.

Passage and play

Using quotation honestly and well

Section A of Paper 1 is a closed-book environment for the play in most centres' experience of this paper — but whatever the conditions, the principle is the same:

• Quote the extract exactly — it is printed in front of you. There is no excuse for misquoting it.
• For the wider play, quote short or not at all. A precise reference to what happens, and to how Shakespeare stages it, is worth more than a mangled half-line.
• Never invent a quotation. An examiner who spots a fabricated line stops trusting the rest of the answer. If you are not certain of the words, describe the moment: in the scene where he demands the handkerchief be produced...
• Embed, do not park. Quotations belong inside your sentence, doing grammatical work.
• Analyse the words you quote. A quotation followed by this shows that he is angry has wasted itself.

Learn a small number of quotations extremely well — six or eight per play, chosen because they are analysable, not because they are famous. Depth of analysis on a short phrase beats a long quotation left inert on the page.

Quotation discipline

The big ideas to take into the exam

Shakespeare does not celebrate the conventions of love. He gives them to people, and shows what they cost. Press Finish to see your score.