Eduqas GCE English Language and Literature Component 2

Eduqas GCE English Language and Literature Component 2

Component 2 Drama: SECTION A: SHAKESPEARE (closed book) 1 hr 15 m 24+48=72 • Extract analysis: 30 minutes AO 1: 12 marks AO 2: 12 marks (24) • Essay question (whole play). Choice of 2 questions 45 minutes AO 1: 12 marks AO 2: 12 marks AO 3: 24 marks (48) SECTION B: MODERN DRAMA (closed book) 45 mins 48 marks • Essay question (whole play). Choice of 2 questions. AO 1: 16 marks AO 2: 16 marks AO 3: 16 marks

Component 2 Shakespeare: set texts Modern Drama: set texts Antony and Cleopatra Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – Edward Albee King Lear The History Boys – Alan Bennett Much Ado About Nothing Translations – Brian Friel Othello Kindertransport – Diane Samuels The Tempest Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Tennessee Williams

Key messages from this year’s report SECTION A: Shakespeare extract question 1. Answers are starting to focus more on dramatic (as well as linguistic) effects. There were some good examples of this. 2. Aim for detailed analysis of the significant aspects of the language – those that bring out the most important meanings of the work - using an appropriate, wide range of approaches.

Key messages from this year’s report SECTION A: Shakespeare essay question 1. Learn quotations precisely. 2. Discussion of context is generally improving, although more could still be done, particularly with literary context.

Key messages from this year’s report Section B: Modern Drama 1. As last year, context work was strong, often with detailed knowledge and generally relevant application. 2. As elsewhere in the component, heavy dependence on word class analysis (often lacking purpose) is widespread. 3. Some improvement in discussion of dramatic effects, but lots more could still be done.

Component 2 Shakespeare’s language • Candidates currently tend to focus on word classes or mood, or (sometimes very appropriately) conversation analysis and pragmatics, as if the speeches are ‘just’ ordinary utterances. • But both AO 1 and AO 2 marks can be enhanced considerably in either an extract or essay question by analysing any verse as poetry, as one would a poem.

Component 2 Shakespeare’s grand style: heightened language • Often, when climactic or profound moments arise in a play, Shakespeare uses what is known as the ‘grand style’ or ‘high style’ (after Cicero, the Roman orator ), to move the hearts of both the auditor(s) on stage and the audience in theatre. • It involves the use of the full range of poetic and linguistic effects in order to create intense emotions of any kind. • See Reading Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language: A Guide (Sylvia Adamson et al, 2001), especially Chapters 3 and 4.

Component 2 Shakespeare’s grand style: heightened language • Intensified lexis: typical examples are compounds, such as thought-executing, sight-outrunning, knee-crooking, hair-breadth, thrice-driven, vaunt-couriers etc. , but also latinate lexis such as disposition, accommodation, exhibition, sulphurous, speculative, rotundity. . . • Metaphors and similes • Phonological repetition: alliteration, assonance, consonance, reverse rhyme, pararhyme, rhyme • Epithets: the tranquil mind, the plumed troop, the big wars • Metrical features, such as: disruption (where the iambic pentameter is changed), as in spondees (for emphasis), trochaic line starts; but also caesuras, enjambments, chiasmus, personification, short or long lines. . . • Periodic sentences (where a long sentence delays the main finite verb until the end, for climax) • Rhetorical features: for example antithesis, apostrophe, metonymy etc. • Classical references: usually to the Greek and Roman gods or myths

Component 2 TASK: Analysing and interpreting the grand style (1) • Read the extract from this year’s exam Section A, from King Lear Act 3 Scene 2 (in Resources). • Make notes (in the table given) of relevant linguistic effects.

Component 2 Extract from candidate response: Lear is very angry because he is now realising that his daughters have betrayed him. His anger is clear in the imperative verbs he uses: “Rage, blow” and “spout”. He is unable to do anything about his anger, so is powerless and has to shout at the storm instead of his daughters. He is going mad, as he talks to the elements as if they were his daughters, using personification with “I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children”. He then becomes calmer and uses a list of adjectives showing a more realistic view of his situation, with “A poor, infirm, weak and despis’d old man”. • What are the strengths of this extract? • What could the candidate do to improve? (Use table in Resources)

Component 2 TASK: Now improve the response to include analysis of grand style language features and their dramatic significance. (Use table in Resources)

Component 2 My suggestion: Shakespeare’s use of the grand style here suggests Lear’s heightened emotional intensity, and the climactic stage that the plot has reached, with the king left out in the storm to die. It also creates irony, as Lear is using the powerful language of a monarch, yet his impotence is only too clear. He cannot direct the elements – he is indeed “weak” and “infirm”. There is a powerful sense of Lear’s anger and vehemence with alternating listed imperatives and vocatives, such as “Blow”, “crack”, “rage”, “blow” followed by “You cataracts and hurricanoes”, again with “You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires” followed by “Singe”, and then “thou, all-shaking thunder” followed by “Strike flat”. All these (ironically) sound forceful and commanding, with the angry authority intensified further by the frequent spondees, such as “Blow winds” and “rage, blow”. The pararhymed verbs “drench’d” and “drown’d” combine with the compound modifiers “thought-executing” and “oak-cleaving” to evoke Lear’s truly apocalyptic vision here, as he suffers the appalling humiliation of rejection and powerlessness. Shakespeare then contrasts Lear’s grand style with the humble prose and mundane lexis of his Fool, (“cod-piece”, “beggars”, “toe” and “corn”), who Lear ignores completely, evoking a poignant sense of the ignorant arrogance and solipsism that Lear has not yet transcended.

Component 2 TASK: Analysing and interpreting the grand style (2) • Read the extract from this year’s exam Section A, from The Tempest Act 3 Scene 3 (in Resources). • Make notes (in the table given) of relevant linguistic effects.

Component 2 Extract from candidate response This is really where Prospero gets his revenge on Antonio and Alonso. He gets it through deception and trickery, as the harpy is really Ariel, which the audience know, and Ariel is speaking what Prospero has told him to. We learn this at the end of the speech, when Prospero congratulates Ariel on his performance. Ariel uses language to make three men feel powerless and worthless, like the dynamic verb “belch you up”, and frightens them with “worse than any death”. He makes them the adjective “mad”, and the men try to attack the harpy, but the harpy overpowers them, saying that he is “invulnerable”. • What are the strengths of this extract? • What could the candidate do to improve? (Use table in Resources)

Component 2 My suggestion: Ariel’s speech as the harpy uses a wide range of linguistic features from the grand style in order to terrify and humiliate the guilty courtiers, and convince them that the harpy and his fellows are indeed “ministers of fate”. Compound modifiers such as “never-surfeited”, “bemocked-at” and “still-closing” are intense and powerful because they condense a whole clause into one word. The anthropomorphism of “the never-surfeited sea” and “belch you up”, and later of the onomatopoeic, sibilant “Incensed the seas and shores”, suggests that all the elements are alive and working against the sinners. In addition to the visual impact of the harpy looking down on the angry, ineffectual men, Ariel intensifies his scorn for their attempts at resistance with the alliteration and consonance of “Wound the loud winds”, and makes it even more powerful with the trochaic line start, and the spondee of “loud winds”. He repeats the effect in the next line with “Kill the still-closing waters”, where again a trochaic line start emphasises the futility of their protests, made more forceful with the internal rhyme of “Kill. . . still”, and then their gestures are dismissed completely with the bathos of the spondaic phrase “One dowl”, again intensified by the alliteration with “diminish” in the previous line.

Component 2 Sharing good practice: Note down two ideas for teaching features of the grand style, and discuss.

Component 2 My suggestion: • Use Quizlet (website or phone app) or Tiny Cards (phone app) for self-testing on terms. If not, old-fashioned cardboard cue cards work well. • Ask students in pairs or groups to identify a grand style passage in their play (giving support where necessary). • Feedback to whole class, checking these are correct. • They prepare presentations (each group taking a different passage) identifying features and saying how and why they are used.

Component 2 Word class analysis Word classes are by far the commonest language feature identified in exam responses across the Language and Literature specification, but very often, even if correct, the term is irrelevant. In order to gain credit at Band 3 or above, the application of the term or concept must be purposeful. It can’t just be feature spotting.

Component 2 Word class analysis 1 What many candidates find themselves resorting to is this kind of thing (on The History Boys): i) “At the beginning of Act 2, Irwin uses the proper nouns of famous leaders in “If you want to learn about Stalin study Henry VIII. If you want to learn about Mrs. Thatcher study Henry VIII. ” Or, ii) “Bennett uses the taboo noun “shit” in “God is dead. Shit lives”. • What are the strengths of these points? • What could the candidates do to improve? Write up these points in the Resources table and make suggestions on how you might improve them.

Component 2 Word class analysis 1: Strengths Weaknesses i) Their word class is not the main point. It’s the surprising effect of the juxtaposition (placing next to each other) of these names that needs comment, along with the parallelism of the subordinate clauses. The proper nouns are correctly identified. ii) Again, the noun is correctly identified. The identification does not help to analyse the significance of the line. One of the main effects created is bathos, the anti-climactic contrast in lexis between the lofty noun “God” and the taboo noun “Shit”.

Component 2 Word class analysis 2 Consider the following speech by Big Daddy, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: “and I’m going to pick me a good one to spend ‘em on! I’m going to pick me a choice one, I don’t care how much she costs, I’ll smother in – minks! Ha ha! I’ll strip her naked and smother in minks and choke her with diamonds! Ha Ha! I’ll strip her naked and choke her with diamonds and smother with minks and hump her from hell to breakfast. ” • Using the Resources table, make notes on the word class comments that could purposefully be offered about this passage.

Component 2 Word class analysis 2: my suggestions Example Word class Effect created “to pick. . . pick”; “smother. . . strip. . . smother. . . choke. . . strip. . . choke. . . smother. . . hump” A list of Infinitive verbs Brutish, objectifying, violent attitude to women “a good one” “a choice one” Parallel adjectives Again, objectifying, dehumanising “a good one” “ a choice one” A list of pronouns and then 7 occurrences of “her” Suggest that the woman’s identity is obscure, irrelevant

Component 2 Consider other grammatical tools. . . • Teaching a text from a literary linguistic perspective is challenging, particularly since there is a great deal of technical material to be learned. • Word classes are the foundation of grammatical analysis but extending the study of grammar to noun phrases and clause analysis can make a big difference.

Component 2 Consider other grammatical tools. . . Noun phrases are particularly fruitful. Heavily modified noun phrases are not often used in spoken language, so when they occur in drama they can be powerful: “a switch clicking off in my head, turning the hot light off and the cool night on. . . ” (Brick, Act 2, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)

Component 2 Some important noun phrases (from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and one from The History Boys): • • • “a man that can’t stand you” “a problem that I will have to work out” “a couple of rutten peek-hole spies. . . ” “all the goddam lies and liars that I have had to put up with” “all the goddam hypocrisy that I lived with all these forty years that we been livin together. . . ” • “a patient and amused sufferance of the predilections and preoccupations of men” (Mrs. Lintott)

Component 2 Recommended reference: Sara Thorne: Mastering Advanced English Language (Palgrave) Noun phrases: pp. 26 -28 Clause analysis: pp. 32 -36