IB Paper Two - Comparative Essay - Practice Questions
Paper Two will be based on:
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
King Lear by William Shakespeare
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde
1. Symbols and images often play a significant part in stage plays. Explore the use of such
devices in plays you have studied.
2. Examine the ways in which novelists or playwrights whose work you have studied present
stories of failure or suffering. What do you gather about the effect they are trying to
produce in their readers?
3.
‘Among the most powerful tools at a storyteller’s disposal are suspense and surprise.’
Explain the difference between those two features of plays, illustrating your answer from
literature of quality you have studied.
4. Discuss the ways in which writers you have studied prepare their readers or audiences for
the conclusion of the stories they are telling.
5. ‘In the end is my beginning.’
This has been said by an author to explain how he organises his writing. Examine one or
more plays to see whether their structure reflects a similar mode of planning.
6. ‘In our world of ordinary men and women – living ordinary lives, frittering away their time on
petty activities, it raises our spirits to read of individuals of intensity. They awaken our sense
of the potential of humans.’
To what extent do the major characters in a novel or play you have studied ‘awaken our
sense of human potential'? Does the experience raise our spirits?
7. Disputes and arguments can heighten interest for, and even provoke, a theatre audience.
Illustrate that effect from a play or plays you have studied.
8. Explore the attention playwrights have paid to the gap either between dreams and reality or
between appearance and reality.
9. “Plays should never seek to teach, but only to entertain.” To what extent and by what means
is this view supported by your study of at least two plays?
10. In what ways are at least two of the works you have studied interested in the portrayal of
psychological, physical or some other kind of violence?
11. Compare the dramatic uses that the playwrights you have studied have made of the endings
of their plays.
12. “In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.” Assess the
validity of this statement in at least two of the works studied.
13. Compare and contrast the use of symbolism in at least two of the works you have studied.
14. Plays deal with human behavior at its extremes. Examine the extremes of human behavior in
two plays you have studied and show how the distance between them gives rise to dramatic
tension.
15. How do the playwrights you have studied make use of the exposition of their plays?
16. “Without contraries there is no progression.” Consider the role and opposition and/or
contradiction in at least two plays you have studied.
17. With reference to at least two plays you have studied, discuss the significance of dialogue in
the playwright’s presentation and construction of gender.
18. “The key to the dramatic life of any play is the fact that action takes place in particular,
limited spaces." How important is the sense of spatial confinement to the drama of at least
two of the plays you have studied?
19. “Visual action can be as important on the stage as speech.” How far do you agree with this
claim? Refer to at least two of the plays you have studied.
20. Compare and contrast the dramatic effectiveness of the relationship between setting and
plot in two or three plays you have studied.
21. “Fact versus fantasy; this is a clash that can have comic or tragic results.” Bearing this
statement in mind explore the results of using realism and fantasy in two or three works you
have studied.
22. “Works of literature are often layered, and may require close attention to discover their
depth and complexity.” With respect to two plays you have studied, discuss whether the
author has created a coherent, imagined “world”.
23. Use two or three plays you have studied to discuss how and to what effect writers have used
exaggeration as a literary device.