Close analysis of an extract

The passage question rewards density: you must mine a short extract for how its language and form make meaning.

• Place the extract in one sentence: where in the play’s arc does it fall, and what has just become possible or impossible?
• Track shifts within the passage — a change of register, a switch from verse to prose, a turn of address.
• Read the imagery cluster present in these particular lines, not imported from elsewhere.
• Notice the metre and its disruptions — a broken pentameter can enact a broken mind.

Move across the whole extract, including its end. Weak answers exhaust the clock on the first few lines.

Close analysis

Building a sustained argument

The discursive essay ranges across the entire play and must argue a line, not survey the plot.

• Answer the question’s concept — power, guilt, deception — with a thesis from the first sentence.
• Trace a motif or idea across the play, choosing moments that develop your argument.
• Weigh the ending against the opening — what has changed, and does the play endorse or question it?
• Structure as a claim, not as a walk through the acts.

Selectivity is a skill: in a closed-text exam you cannot cover everything, so choose the three or four moments that best prove your case.

Whole-play argument

Vocabulary to read the play

Match your vocabulary to the play’s genre:

• Tragedy — hamartia, hubris, peripeteia, anagnorisis, catharsis, nemesis (from Aristotle’s Poetics), used as analytical tools.
• Comedy — the blocking figure, disguise and mistaken identity, the green world and the reconciling marriage (Northrop Frye), festive carnival (Bakhtin).
• History — kingship, legitimacy, the providential or the Machiavellian view of power.

Name to analyse, not to decorate: the term must lead to a point about method or meaning.

Diagnose the term

Criticism and performance

OCR rewards awareness that a play sustains multiple readings (AO5), including in performance:

• A.C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904) — character-centred reading built on the hero and the flaw.
• Jan Kott (Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1964) — a political, absurdist reading for the modern age.
• Performance criticism — meaning made in staging: a cut line, a doubled role, a director’s reading of an ending.

Discipline: a critical idea must produce a textual claim. Not “Kott is political”, but “the flat closing couplet lends weight to Kott’s sense that the state, not the soul, is the play’s real subject.”

Using interpretation

Sort the analytical move

Tap a move, then tap whether it belongs to close passage analysis, whole-play argument, or performance and interpretation.

Production and reception

AO3 has two halves for Shakespeare:

• Production — the ordered Elizabethan and Jacobean cosmos, kingship and succession, gender and marriage, damnation, the open-air playhouse and boy actors.
• Reception — how the play’s meaning shifts for later audiences with different beliefs.

Weld it: if deleting the context leaves the reading unchanged, it was decoration. Context is a lens, not an appendix.

Which half of AO3?

Working from memory, accurately

Because the exam is closed-text, quotation must be accurate or replaced by precise reference.

• Learn a small bank of exact, useful quotations rather than many half-remembered ones.
• Where memory fails, describe the moment precisely instead of risking a misquotation.
• Time discipline: the passage and the essay are worth comparable marks — do not lavish everything on one.

Honesty rule: a described effect with no quotation beats an invented line. Examiners mark what the text does.

Closed-text honesty

Match the critic or concept

Tap a description on the left, then the critic or concept it names.

The big ideas to take into the exam

You now have both the close-analysis and whole-play argument skills for any Shakespeare play. Press Finish to see your score.