Paul Morris
English 398
Dr. Strickland
August 6, 2002
Literary Theory, Shakespeare and A Levels 1911-2001
If there is ever an area where Shakespeare can be said to hold cultural capital it is in the
form of the A Level question. A Levels arguably represent the status of literature and
literary theory in their most “naturalized” form—an epistemological “given” which
thousands of students and their teachers work towards every year. This nexus, where
literary theory meets the chalkface, is where most students and parents gain their deepest
impression of what English Literature means as a discipline. This paper explores a
century of evolution in literary theories in the academy and attempts to ascertain their
impact at a crucial site on the educational map—how literature, and particularly, though
not exclusively, Shakespeare is constructed in the form of the A Level essay question.
For Catherine Belsey, examination questions mark “the ultimate location of
institutional power,” since they “identify the boundaries of the discipline, and define what
it is permissible to ‘discuss’” (437). A Levels are particularly important. They represent
the “gold standard” of British secondary education experience, but one that is equally a
measure of the university system. They are designed as external exams by teams of
universities to act as “gatekeepers” of the tertiary institutions—a very public articulation
of what learning, knowledge and education mean at any given time.
Literary theory has evolved continuously over the last century, with the spilling of
much critical blood. While battles over competing epistemologies have been lost and
won, Shakespeare has been a constant fixture, outlasting the most turbulent of ideological
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skirmishes. He represents an apparently seamless, universal and timeless take on
literature throughout the ages. To what extent, though, have changes in the academy
seeped into this most hallowed of temples, the Shakespearean experience of the A Level
exam as well as other “lesser” parts? And, in what ways does the relatively rarefied and
cloistered musings of the academy distil into society at large, shaping the cultural
currency and educational experience of thousands of school leavers? By examining the
changing face of the A Level Literature Paper I hope to shine a light on these questions,
registering any changes in the “boundaries of the discipline” at this most important of
arenas in the educational institution.
This study focuses on the AQA examination board—The Assessment and
Qualifications Alliance. For most of the century it was known as the Joint Matriculation
Board of the Universities of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham
and went under the mantle of the “Higher Paper” or “Higher School Certificate” until the
1940’s. The first paper available dates from 1911 and the last 2001; other boards go back
to about the 1870’s, thus predicating the possibility of some findings not available to my
research. I have limited my focus to one year from every decade. The intention is to
identify meaningful trends and draw general conclusions.
Although the study focuses on trends within university English departments, it
would be foolish to rule out other contingencies—such as pedagogical and social changes
beyond the remit of this paper—but it is worth noting that many movements within
English are likely to correspond with broader intellectual, pedagogical and social trends;
for example, the importance of scientism in the middle of the century, and a concern for
“multiculturalism,” “diversity” and “globalism” in the 1990’s, reflecting a broader
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movement from modernity to postmodernity. There is also the democratizing force of an
expanding university population; Alan Sinfield states that the number of students entered
for A level English rose from 13,000 in 1951 to 66, 000 in 1976 (144). These figures
would have grown exponentially over the ensuing decades, forging their own
contributions to the rubric and format of the examination system.
Finally, one must be on one’s guard not to over-simplify the correlation between
events at the university and the rubric of the A Level. First, it takes time for change to
filter down to the school curriculum, so one should expect something of a temporal
dislocation, a time-lag, if you like. Second, some of my source material is derived from
the American academy, and although there is a strong Anglo-American correlation, there
are subtle differences too; for example, according to Michael Payne, British universities
swung less dramatically between theoretical polarities than their American
counterparts—it would be “strange to British readers” (369) to note that historicism was
once more-or-less jettisoned in the USA. That said, I reiterate that it is major trends I
wish to identity, trends that were shared on both sides of the pond.
If I were to summarize the major movements of the last century, it would be in
terms of the extrinsic and the intrinsic. The former represents critical approaches that
focus on the social or historical—including the author, source material and literary
period—and the latter attempts to isolate the text from such contingencies, raising it into
its own realm of existence. It is between these two main camps that critical theory has
swung in the last century, but it has also been complicated by the broader epistemological
rupture between modernism and postmodernism.
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At the turn of the last century, university English departments in both the UK and
USA were still emerging from the chrysalises of classical rhetoric, elocution and
philology. As the native culture began to replace the study of the classics, the focus
moved to the rhetorical technique, and the study of historical and linguistic roots of
European cultures, particularly English literature. There was, however, another emergent
philosophy that shared this emphasis on native culture but with a humanist twist, heavily
influenced by a post-Romantic and quasi-religious notion of literature, one with a capital
L. According to Gerald Graff, there were thus two broad camps in the US, scholarly
researchers, on the one hand, and the humanists, on the other.
The philologists and historical scholars primarily saw themselves as linguists
concerned with etymology, phonetics and the history of the language. Historical and
linguistic research combined a particular regard to the author’s life and times with the
study of influences, source material, textual verification, chronologies, literary relations,
parallels and genres. However, philology could also include broader sociohistorical
contingencies, such as political history, customs, and mythology, (as evinced in the
Brothers Grimm). Scholarly research ultimately offered more than a purely historical and
formal study of phraseology and structure, becoming what T.H. Hunt of Princeton in
1883 called “philosophic and critical methods” of the “the study of literature and style”
and with the “historical, linguistic, legendary, poetic and rhetorical” all coming together
(qtd. in Graff 77-8). According to Graff, from the late 1870’s onwards, the fieldcoverage model of study was also set in motion in US universities. Study was divided
along the lines of literary periods, genres and a “scattering of themes and special topics”
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(7). A course set up at Harvard in 1872 gives us clues to the kind of authors studied and
a sense of the emergent canon—Shakespeare, Chaucer, Bacon, Milton and Dryden (66).
Reacting against the perceived positivism of the historical and linguistic scholars,
the humanist camp was heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold. It saw literature as the
transmission of “broad general culture” as opposed to the specialized fields of the
scholarly study and its “atomized empiricism of research and explication” (Graff 3). The
“generalists” called for a liberal arts pedagogy in the tradition of Arnold to let the “great
masterpieces of literature teach themselves” (86). According to Terry Eagleton, Arnold’s
liberal humanism had an equally powerful effect in the UK where the transmission of
culture, frequently in the form of memorization of texts, was seen as the necessary social
glue to replace the fading religious observances of the working class.
Also on the side of the humanists, enters Shakespearean scholar A.C. Bradley
with his seminal work Shakespearean Tragedy, first published in 1904. Writing very
much in the spirit of Arnold, Shakespearean tragedies are expounded for their universal
themes, quasi-religious in nature. Although stagecraft is certainly scrutinized, it is not in
the context of sociohistorical contingency, but rather as an idealized and Romantic notion
of a theatre of the mind—a universalized, generalized and timeless “dramatic
appreciation” (Bradley xxxv).
However, arguably Bradley’s most important contribution to literary theory is the
emphasis he places on character study, the internal motivations and psychological
development of heroic and universal moral exemplars. According to John Russell Brown
in his 1992 Introduction Bradley “sought the reasons why tragic heroes acted as they did
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and not otherwise” (xiii), even if this agency was confusingly pitted against a sense of
fate or poetic justice that often seemed to outweigh human action. According to Brown:
Such an emphasis on inner workings of mind and on pressures of which the
conscious mind is ignorant was very much in tune with a new “scientific” interest
in psychology (xviii).
Although Bradley himself never alluded to Sigmund Freud, it is interesting to note how
such an ambivalent relation to scientific positivism was set to recur in the New Critics;
Bradley seemed to be representing a rearguard action against the empirical forces of
positivism by advancing what was ultimately another variant of high modernism.
Bradley also foreshadowed the New Critics with his concern for “the effect of a
play as a whole” (Brown xxi). He basically ignored the extrinsic social and historical
issues and complexities of “authority, power, family interests, age, wealth, poverty”
(xxii) but was concerned for the “decisive moment” in play’s action and the controlling
principle of “mystery,” “awe” or “human suffering.” According to Brown, this humanist
search for telos—“the assumption that art seeks necessarily for unity and for a resolution
of differences”—is what distances contemporary criticism most from Bradley:
In looking for clues to the nature of Shakespearean tragedy, he took for granted
that this would depend on a profound and single vision developing form play to
play and governing the plan of each (xxvi).
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It is also what unites him most cogently with the encroaching New Criticism.
The 1911 and 1921 papers bear all the hallmarks of an academy in flux, pitched
between Bradley’s humanism, and the established historicism and broad philology.
In the 1911 paper, there is one section with mandatory questions on Shakespeare
and Spenser followed by a choice of authors, similar to Harvard canon of 1872. The fact
that Shakespeare is elevated alongside Spenser to a separate section is of course
indicative of his importance—a stature that will only grow in the ensuing century. The
plays will lend themselves effectively to the New Critical approach; The Fairie Queene
not. Interestingly, Chaucer is conspicuously absent from the 1911 paper (another poet
who will later gain favor with the New Critics) and the range of authors is very limited,
barely more than half a dozen, suggestive that the canon was still in flux and less
dominated by “personalities.” A whole section is dedicated to the essayist, Addison, as
well as Southey’s “popular biography” The Life of Nelson, but, evidently, the novel had
yet to make the big time (George Eliot the sole representative). There are sections based
on an anthology “Golden Treasury” and on a “General Question”; this tendency towards
“generality” is suggestive of a liberal arts education; it also suggests that the text had yet
to be elevated above the period, the genre or the author. Such an epistemology is
reflected in the Shakespeare and Spenser section where candidates are asked to relate the
writers to their historical period. The milieu of the author is privileged over the aesthetic,
and genre over close analysis:
Write an essay on one of the following subjects:
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A comparison of Shakespeare and Spenser as characteristic products of the
Elizabethan age
The Elizabethan age as mirrored in the work of Shakespeare and Spenser.
The realism of Shakespeare.
Spenser as a romanticist.
A comparison of the treatment of nature in the poetry of the Elizabethans and
Wordsworth.
A consideration of the relative advantages and disadvantages of the drama and
novel for the delineation of character.
There is one other example of a predominantly source-based historical question on the
paper:
What are the characteristics of Plutarch’s Lives which, in your opinion, proved
most attractive to Shakespeare?
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It is evident that this curriculum required knowledge of a period and milieu as a major
component of study. Although there are questions that require close analysis of
individual texts, these tend to foreground the technical skill of the artist (“Addison as a
satirist”) over “felt experience”—the artist as a craftsman rather than a genius. The
scholarly and empirical approach is also present in the positivist language of the rubric
which tends to demand exposition rather than interpretation, as in “explanation,”
“illustration,” “expounding,” “consideration” and “comparison.” A question on the use
of soliloquy, for instance, implies little in the way of, say, thematic interpretation, but
much in the way of the formal skill of the dramatic artist—the soliloquy as technique:
Discuss, with special reference to Hamlet, the use of soliloquy.
However, some hints of A.C. Bradley seem present in the section on Henry 1 IV
and its focus on telling points of character analysis (even here, though, the first is more
about dramatic techne):
Illustrate the manner in which Shakespeare brings out the contrast between the
characters of Prince Hal and Hotspur.
How far can Falstaff be defended from the charge of being (a) a liar (b) a coward?
There exists some evidence for the nascent humanist and interpretive model of literary
study—but, over-all it is very much subjugated to scholarly exposition and rhetorical
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analysis. The formative notion of literature as the transcendent voice of genius is present,
but much mitigated by the more “prosaic” blend of biography, essays and source
material, as well as an emphasis on formal skill and rhetorical technique.
The 1921 exam continues the rhetorical approach to literature, but reifies the
historicism in a major way, reflecting the “field coverage” model that Graff sees
emanating from the scholarly research of the 19th century. The questions are divided into
five periods—1579-1616, 1616-1660, 1660-1780, 1780-1835, 1835-1885. Each
candidate has to cover one period and is expected to have a solid grasp of the
sociohistorical sweep as well as the texts. Many of the authors include men of letters
who might now be regarded as critics, social historians, and biographers rather than
“literary” authors—Bacon, Walpole, Burke, Calvin, Knox, Montaigne, Carlyle, Ruskin.
This again tells us something of the status of “literature” at this time—more of a
scholarly and historical medium than an aesthetic or transcendent vision. Examples:
1579-1616: How far is Jonson successful in “shewing an image of the times” in
Every Man in his Humour?
1579-1616: What light is thrown by Bacon’s Essays upon the personality of the
author?
1579-1616: How far does the literature of this period reflect the social, political,
and intellectual activities of the age?
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1579-1616: Trace in summary fashion the development of either tragedy or
comedy during Shakespeare’s lifetime.
1579-1616: Point out the distinguishing qualities of Elizabethan prose style as
shown by Sidney’s Apology and the Authorised Version of the Bible.
1616-1660: What is the significance of Bacon’s ideal commonwealth for the
understanding of Bacon as a statesman and philosopher?
1616-1660: What new fields of literature were cultivated in this period and what
indications are there of new developments yet to come?
1660-1780: Trace the development of English prose style (not of English prose
works) during this period from your knowledge of the essay-writers of the time.
1660-1780: Write a brief essay on Johnson and his circle.
1660-1780: Show how Paradise Lost and the Essay on Man are characteristic of
their authors and their times in their different methods of “justifying (or
vindicating) the ways of God to men.”
1780-1835: What were Lamb’s favourite authors? Show how they have affected
both the thought and style of his essays.
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1780-1835: Contrast and account for the attitude of the earlier and later writers of
this period towards the French Revolution.
1835-1885: Illustrate the various ways in which the religious and scientific
movements of this period find their reflection in its literature.
The 1921 paper exudes institutional confidence in the scholarly approach. While
the 1911 paper possessed a rather paltry and desultory range of authors, the choice on
offer in 1921 has quadrupled to more than forty. There is still a separate mandatory
section for Shakespeare, this time alongside Chaucer. Although there will be some finetuning over the years, the two-paper model will remain intact until the 1980’s. There will
be a paper on Shakespeare and one other author (frequently Milton or Chaucer) and there
will be a paper offering questions from a larger selection.
Significantly perhaps, it is in this section on Shakespeare where one is most likely
to encounter questions of a more intrinsic nature and humanist tendency, reminiscent of
A.C. Bradley’s disquisitions on character and dramatic appreciation:
How does the dramatic structure of Henry IV Part II compare with that of Part I?
What special effects are introduced into Henry IV Part II by the scenes placed in
Gloucestershire?
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To what extent may the character of Hotspur be said to throw into relief the
character of Prince Hal?
Write a short appreciation with illustrative quotations of Falstaff’s character.
“Falstaff engages the attention of the audience beyond what is required (almost
beyond what is permitted) by the general trend of the story.” Discuss this
statement.
Mention any two passages of notable poetic value in the plays and discuss their
appropriateness in their dramatic setting.
However, although all these questions privilege the intrinsic value of the text, they are
still a fair way from the epistemology of New Criticism. They are set in an exam whose
main emphasis tends to the historical. Furthermore, like most of the textual questions on
the paper, the text is viewed very much as an examplar of either a mode of writing, a
genre, or a particular use of style; in other words, the emphasis is still very much on
rhetorical, structural and dramatic effects (the Falstaff questions seem to be the exception
here). This may be a subtle nuance, but in the context of the historical evolution of
literary theory, I think it is an important one.
Significantly, the Shakespeare section also sees the introduction of “context
questions,” a feature that will remain intact until the present and will undoubtedly
become a key vehicle for the New Critical method, particularly as a mainstay for
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negotiating texts longer than a poem. Students are asked to comment on “any difficulties
or points of interest” in selected passages, thus again focusing on the “intrinsic” rather
than the extrinsic. For the time being, they are a clear indication that the 1921 paper was
attempting to balance the scholarly approach with something of an evaluative touch,
particularly as regards Shakespeare.
There are other scattered examples of a movement towards more humanistic
concerns: T. S. Eliot would have approved of the question concerned with the “enduring
fame” of Dryden; ditto for the “conversational note” of Chaucer’s poetry, given his
penchant for “native rhythms”; A.C. Bradley would applaud the “permanent types of
humanity” and “consistency” of character asked for in an essay on Chaucer. A new
lexicon, too, is beginning to seep into the rubric—one that intimates a more evaluative
(“discuss”), critical (“comment”) and aesthetic (“appreciation,” used at least four times)
response alongside the more empirical “illustrate” and “give an account.” The emphasis
on technical skill and style is tempered with references to “poetic value” and “poetic
qualities.” Occasional questions point to literary unity and transcendence. Yet, over-all,
the paper of 1921 represents the zenith of an historical approach to literary studies. No
paper afterwards limits students to any one period nor expects them to comprehend its
sociocultural trends in such detail. No other paper divides literature into such explicit
fields of coverage. The Old Historicism soon fades into a palimpsest where texts will
still be arranged chronological, but the real emphasis is on the texts—and the text alone.
If A.C. Bradley had privileged the study of character as an antidote to scholastic
empiricism, then the 1930’s saw the confluence of movements that elevated the text in
and of itself as worthy of study. The British humanists and American generalists evolved
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into the Scrutiny movement and the New Critics, respectively. In fact, this “movement”
was already underway in the England in the 1920’s when I.A. Richard’s published three
books, Science and Poetry, Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism and,
as noted, is arguably already trickling down to the 1921 paper. But it is from the 1930’s
that the new epistemology really takes off, to have an unparalleled effect on literary
studies for the rest of the century.
In 1932 I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis published the first “Scrutiny” Journal, the
focal point of the new movement, partly based on Richard’s “hard-nosed ‘scientific’
psychology” (Eagleton 45). Richard’s performed protocol experiments on Cambridge
University students that were the driving force behind the Practical Criticism exercises
familiar to all British students—responding analytically and “appreciatively” to an
unseen passage or poem using only the piece itself to justify the analysis. Possibly, such
experiments too lay behind the introduction of “context” questions on Shakespeare
witnessed in the 1921 paper, questions that become more elaborate as the century
proceeds.
The New Critical and Practical Criticism movements were predicated on rigorous
critical analysis and attention to words on the page, underpinned by the principle that the
rhythm of language contained its own reality—a concrete “felt experience,” evocative of
a lost organic, premodern (almost prelapsarian) society. For Leavis and such luminaries
at T.S. Eliot and E.M. Tillyard, the turning point was sometime in seventeenth century
England. Until this point, before a “dissociation of sensibility” set in, poets excelled in a
“sensuous apprehension of thought.” For Eliot, good poetry contained an “objective
correlative,” symbolic in nature but containing its own meaning, a physical and
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unconscious relation to human existence, its psyche, archetypes and collective
unconscious. As Catherine Belsey puts it, they “constructed between them a lost
Elizabethan utopia where thought and feeling were one, where the native rhythms of
speech expressed in poetry the intuitive consciousness of an organic community” (437).
What was said was not as important as how it was said, the qualities of language and
feeling that the successful reader experienced.
Like A. C. Bradley, the New Critics thus responded to the crassness of modernity
with a pseudo-religious enterprise, one based upon the awe-inspiring hero, the other on
the numinousness of texts. The historical scholar was replaced by the textual
interpreter—Cleanth Brook’s “ideal reader” (“Credo” 48) and W.K. Wimsatt’s “objective
critic” (89). Literature was conceived as transcendent of social contingency, “released
from history by the apparatus criticus” into a “perpetual present” (Belsey 437). Brooks
had little problem cutting the text “loose from its author and from his life as a man” and
“severing it from those who actually read it” (46). He is disparaging of the historical
scholars: “the formalist critic is concerned primarily with the work itself. . . . Speculation
on the mental processes of the author takes the critic away from the work into biography
and psychology” (47).
A maxim for the New Critics might have been Aristotle’s “beauty is based on
unity in variety.” Since the New Critics, dehistoricized art, seeking organic harmony and
transcendent universals, their preoccupation was establishing unity and coherence in the
intrinsic text. In a successful work “form and content cannot be separated” and, indeed,
“form is meaning” declares Brooks (45), but, we might add, text can be separated from
context. Like Eliot, Brooks and the New Critics privileged the metaphorical and
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symbolic, with poetic detail pointing outwards to more transcendent concerns—“the
general and the universal are not seized upon by abstraction, but got at through the
concrete and the particular” (Brooks 45). For Mark Schorer (writing in 1968) this is part
of a work’s “technique” which is much more than a sum of its parts; never-the-less he is
able to oblige the reader with a catalogue of details—the tools of the trade—that were the
hallmarks of Practical Criticism: “themes and meanings,” “arrangement of events,”
“suspense,” “climax,” “character motivation, relationship and development,” “point of
view,” and “manipulation” of language to create a certain “texture and tone.” Detail
dominates the particular of intrinsic descriptions but also the mode of the critic’s
response, tying every literary nuance and verbal incident to a unified thread.
There are a number of ironies. In attempting to escape the brutalizing
mechanisms of modernity, New Criticism too easily became reduced to a regimented
series of mechanical processes. There is a thin line between an eye for detail and an
obsession with discovering unity at any cost. The sense of the felt experience gets lost in
this dissection of texts. Further, like Old Historicism, New Criticism relied on a
Cartesian split between the reader and text and, ultimately, the kind of modernist
paradigm it ostensibly resisted. According to Eagleton, “Its battering of critical
instruments was a way of competing with the hard sciences on their own terms in a
society where such science was the dominant criterion of knowledge” (49). From I.A.
Richards protocol experiments onwards, the New Critical movement was deeply
implicated in scientism. It should be noted, however, that the British critics never quite
severed the text from its context quite as drastically as the New Critics. William Empson
was something of an intentionalist and, according to Eagleton, while the New Critics
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tended to rematerialize the text and reify it, the aims of I.A.Richard’s were mainly to
“dematerialize” it, effectively “reducing it to a transparent window on to the poet’s
psyche” (49).
And what about Shakespeare? G. Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire is the
seminal Shakespeare text of the era, published in 1930. It is pure New Criticism (or,
certainly the British equivalent) as evinced in the recurring lexicon of: “unity,” “organic
totality,” “the whole of the poet’s vision,” “thickly-scattered correspondences in a single
view of the whole,” “balance,” “whole design,” “duel elements perfectly harmonized.” A
salient feature that hits home immediately is Knight’s “animadversions as to ‘character’”
(v)—his dismissal of current realist and psychological character study, with its causal
relations and concern for motivation: “Bradley certainly on occasion pushed ‘character’
analysis to an unnecessary extreme” (v). He is just as dismissive of modes of criticisms
that seek out the “artist’s intentions” or research involving sources. Likewise,
concentrating on the contingencies of the Elizabethan stage and theatrical technique is a
waste of the critic’s time since Knight posits Shakespeare as a “philosophic poet rather
than a man of a stage” (vi). This is in keeping with the New Critical tendency to
privilege poetry (and particularly poetic vision) over other genres.
Knight is concerned with “poetic interpretation” and “the penetration of its deeper
meanings” (vi). For this he appeals to scientific objectivity, citing recent events in
physics and positing literature as another “natural” phenomena, where characters are
mere “particles” or details of an overriding “form,” “pattern” and “symmetry.” The key
to unlocking the secret nature of the play is to view it as a “visionary whole, close knit in
personification, atmospheric suggestion, and direct poetic-symbolism” (11) where the
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play is an “extended metaphor” and its characters become a cast of symbols. Such a
symbolic reading allows any apparent faults, contradictions or problems to be seen in a
new light: “It will then usually appear that many difficult actions and events become
coherent and, within the scope of their universe, natural” (15). “Faults” are said to
“automatically vanish” when the play is “understood in its totality” (2). Each play is a
“visionary unit bound to obey none but its own self-imposed laws” (14). But the vision
also covers the sweep of the whole of Shakespeare’s genius, (unwittingly but ironically
privileging the status of the author), “the single tempest-music opposition binding and
interpenetrating the whole succession of plays” that progresses to the “mystic insight”
(16) of the last play, The Tempest. Knight’s desire to air-brush apparent textual faults
represents the ultimate in the New Critical drive towards self-contained coherence and is
echoed in a form of essay question that comes to dominate A Levels from 1941 onwards
(peaking in 1961): a problematizing comment (never contextualized) is the invitation for
the student to solve any apparent disjuncture and bring the apparent fault into the fold.
As if to reinforce Knight’s veracity, T.S. Eliot’s 1930’s introduction spells it out
in capital letters, declaring it an important step to see Shakespeare’s “work as a whole,”
interweaving patterns “organically” into a “whole design” or “poetic unit.” The point of
interpretation is to “understand its subject in the light of its own nature,” the
“reconstruction of vision” that “receives the whole of the poet’s vision,” in its
“transcendent order” (3).
The 1931 A Level paper marks a definitive shift from the extrinsic towards
valorizing the intrinsic. In 1931, only one question can be regarded as purely historical
(“Give some account of Johnson’s relations with any two of the following people . . .”)
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although there are at about half a dozen questions that still make some connection
between text and context. None, however, require anything like the scale of historical
understanding required in 1921 and the sociohistorical relevance can be gleaned entirely
from a knowledge of the text:
What light is thrown by Emma on the manners and customs of the early
nineteenth century?
What light is thrown by the Essays of Elia on either Lamb’s personality or his
life?
Paper 2 is no longer divided into historical or literary periods but sections of “Prescribed
Books.” Although still organized in a vaguely chronological way, the exam is stripped of
dates and historical significance. This remains the trend for the rest of the century.
Perhaps one question from 1931 requires a fairly distinct understanding of the
sociocultural context of the poet:
Say a) what is “for an age” and b) what is “for all time” in any one of the
following: Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Tennyson, Swinburne.
Even here, though, contextual knowledge mainly amounts to identifying anachronisms,
and the emphasis on “for all time” has all the hallmarks of the New Critics. Such a trend
to identify the transcendent and universal is apparent elsewhere:
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“It is by their successful blending of the individual with the universal that
Chaucer’s portraits are so effective.” Illustrate this statement form the portraits of
the Prioress and the Wife of Bath.
“The poet must transform or transcend the facts which have set his powers to
work.” Illustrate Milton’s imaginative treatment of his themes in the “Ode on the
Nativity” and “Lycidas.”
“Much of Bacon’s thought is of universal and profound ethical interest.” Discuss
with examples.
“One of the great fascinations of Dryden’s satire is its perfect ease of application
to our own time.” How far would you agree?
Works are now being posited as unique and timeless repositories of human experience.
This paper marks the candidates as interpreters and evaluators of texts for the first time.
They are asked to “discuss,” or “how far would you agree?” or repeatedly to “give your
opinion.” None of the Shakespeare questions require any extrinsic knowledge but require
analyzing the play on its own terms, often relating a part to the whole:
Set down the evidence provided by the play regarding the extent of Hamlet’s love
for Ophelia and discuss the bearing of this on the whole tragedy of Hamlet.
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The prologue to Romeo and Juliet tells of a “pair of star-crossed lovers” (extract).
How far is this a correct description of the story and a just comment on the fate of
Romeo and Juliet?
What incidents and qualities of The Winter’s Tale justify our calling it a
“romantic tragicomedy” and how far is such a description applicable to the play
as a whole?
Character analysis remains very prominent, both in dramatic and psychological terms a la
A.C. Bradley:
What light is thrown on Hamlet’s character by his dealings with either Horatio or
the players?
What qualities in Falstaff make him (a) a comic character and (b) an appropriate
figure in a history play?
Comment on the character of Henry IV as a man and on his virtues as a king.
Set out a length those traits in Shylock’s character (a) which arouse our
admiration and (b) which draw forth our resentment.
23
Attempt to justify the methods by which Portia deprives Shylock of victory
against Antonio and say how far her use of these methods modifies your view of
her character.
From 1941 onwards, there will be virtually no traces of the “mechanical kinds of
contextualising” of “the old positivist literary history” (Graff 11). “Clinical” history will
henceforth be abandoned since this implies contingency and relativism rather than
“unified cultural tradition that was felt to be latent in the great literary texts” (Graff 163).
This valorization of the individual text found its apotheosis in I.A. Richards’s Practical
Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929). Sometime between 1931 and the 1941
paper, Practical Criticism became a fixture of the A level in the form of questions based
upon an “unseen” extract. These “unseen” questions remain a permanent, integral feature
of the A level right up to the present day.
The 1941 paper includes a choice of three unseen passages for close reading. The
student is asked to paraphrase the passage and answer questions on structure, “artistic
effects,” the “effectiveness of imagery,” the language and so on. Significantly, the
subject matter of each self-consciously conforms to the zeitgeist of New Criticism—the
relative merits of literature as art and its apparent timelessness. The first, a critical
commentary by De Quincey, valorizes literature as “the supreme of the fine arts” because
of its “durability” and “phoenix immortality.” The subject of time and mortality is also
the theme of a poem, with poetry vanquishing them both: “And yet to times in hope my
verse shall stand.” The final excerpt by Thomas Randolph, is entitled “Tityrus discusses
the career and the fate of the poet with Damon,” the one token attempt at any form of
24
contextualization in the whole section—there are no dates as befits a timeless literary
lineage. Again, the passage asserts the power of art and the artistic “soul of purer fire”
which, unlike more materialistic beings, can “out-live death.” Each extract thus
promulgates New Critical values, with themes of art, timelessness and immortality to the
fore in a way we might expect at the dawn of the 1940’s.
The 1941 exam also contains numerous examples of questions which use critics’
comments as a lead-in. The quotations set up a problem which the reader attempts to
solve, seeking to find some kind of closure in the text. This echoes G. Wilson Knight’s
notion that drama consists of the thrust and counterthrust of dramatic tensions working to
resolution. In other words, a fault is not really a fault if viewed as part of a tensile whole
by the astute reader. More than before, this paper echoes the spirit of the New Criticism,
inviting the reader to find symmetry, harmony and closure within the texts, pointing to a
universal relevance:
“It is as a story of thrilling events that Hamlet appeals to modern playgoers.”
Discuss.
“Poetry, humour and topical interest are all effectively blended in Hamlet.”
Discuss.
What is added to Cymbeline by the mountain scenes?
25
“Many of the characters in The Prologue are in their essential qualities alive in the
world today.” How far would you agree?
Describe Milton’s prose style and say how far it is suitable to his purpose in
“Areopagitica.”
Theatrical technique is seen purely in ahistorical terms as a purely intrinsic feature:
Illustrate Shakespeare’s stagecraft from this treatment in Cymbeline of either (i)
the battle scenes or (ii) the final denouement.
There are a few other points worthy of note in the 1941 paper—ones that again
resonate powerfully of a burgeoning New Critical influence. First, included is a section
on “Modern Poetry, 1922-1934,” reinforcing the defeat of historicism as well as evoking
an unbroken literary lineage, a seamless and timeless canon. Second, the reader is highly
prized as an evaluator and critic; the student is asked, “How far do you approve?” “which
in your opinion?” “which seem to you?” “which do you prefer?” When the candidate is
asked to “give full reasons for your choice” we can bet those reasons belong to a
particular “terministic screen”—that of the New Critics.
The basic model of the 1941 exam remains intact up to, and including, the 1991
paper, setting the standard for all the papers in between, in format and substance. Paper 1
begins with a context question on Shakespeare, followed by an essay on Shakespeare, an
essay on one “major” author (such as Milton, T.S. Eliot or Keats) and an “unseen,”
26
usually a choice of lyric poem or prose. Paper 2 consists of four questions from a range
of texts. Interestingly, the number of authors was by far and away greatest in the 1921
paper (until 2001), where five questions needed to be answered and where the questions
were divided into periods. In 1921 there were more than forty authors deemed worthy of
study, and often in the context of a whole literary/historical period. By 1941 there are
barely fifteen (fourteen in 1971 and 1981), usually represented by individual works, with
some interchangeability year on year between the resident Romanticist, Classicist,
Nineteenth Century Novelist and so on.
Like its predecessor, the 1951 paper appears to be self-consciously New Critical.
By 1961, though, we might argue that the approach had become so “naturalized” as to be
invisible. The absence of overt New Critical dogma testifies to the true force of its
presence. In 1951, New Criticism consciously flexes its muscles, particularly in choices
for the unseens—Matthew Arnold’s lyrical poem, “Dover Beach,” and a critical
commentary which includes the following on “aesthetic criticism”:
“To see the object as in itself it really is” has been justly said to be the aim of all
true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing
one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to
discriminate it, to realize it distinctly. . . . And he who experiences these
impressions strongly and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of
them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in
itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience—metaphysical questions as
unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. . . . The aesthetic critic then
27
regards all the objects . . . as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations . .
. This influence he feels and wishes to explain by analyzing and reducing it to its
elements.
This constitutes enough epistemological red meat to keep any New Critic happy.
The 1951 and 1961 follow a trend in aestheticizing the text and promulgating its
intrinsic unity. They contain four vaguely historical questions between them, but these
mainly require imaginative induction from the text to the wider social or biographical
picture (see 1931 too). The text is the key. 1951 contains one essayist—Burke. In 1961,
for the first time, there exist no figures that might be regarded as essayists or critics rather
than bone fide “authors”—and this will remain the case henceforth. Authors, poets and
playwrights are presented solely as artists, erased of their political or social nebula. The
text has truly been severed from its author, and s/he stripped of ideologies and historical
baggage. As late as 1941 there had been questions on Cowley’s Essays, Shelley’s “A
Defence of Poetry,” Cobbett’s “Rural Rides” and Mill’s “On Liberty.” The 1921 and
1931 papers had included Calvin, Knox, Montaigne, Carlyle, Ruskin and Walpole. But
by 1951 the author as anything but a conduit for their poetic vision had vanished.
Both the 1951 and 1961 have a preponderance of questions related to character, as
well as universal humanist themes, “deep feeling and beauty of expression” (as one
question puts it): war, chance, horror, pathos, romantic rivalry, religious feeling, humor,
childhood, the mystery of human personality, the futility of the human condition.
Timelessness is promulgated in a number of questions where students are asked to
28
discuss “a poem of permanent value on a subject of permanent interest” or the “enduring
popularity” of a play.
Symmetry and harmony are much in evidence too: students are asked to discuss
the “total effect” of a play, the “coherent satiric purpose” of a novel, how “description
and reflection are successfully united” in a poem or how a work “harmonizes many
varied elements into a single poetic experience.”
In both papers there is significant emphasis on stylistic qualities and their effects,
particularly the relationship of subject, language and structure—for example, how style is
suited to material in a particular work. To some extent this type of question had always
been present (with a slight blip, predictably, in 1921). However, there is a telling
difference. The 1951 paper is marked with a strong shift towards the aesthetic with a
particularly pronounced emphasis on imagery—a term first found in the 1941 paper
where it is used only once:
Describe and estimate the effectiveness of Swift’s style with particular reference
to i) vocabulary, ii) sentence-structure, and iii) ornament (ie imagery etc).
Here “imagery” is one feature framed within a larger apparatus, one that points towards
New Critical symmetry but also harks back to a longer tradition of rhetorical analysis;
“ornament” has echoes of classical rhetoric, imagery as an adornment more than an
organic experience, part of the artist’s repertoire. This had been the way in 1911 where a
close stylistic reading reveals Milton’s “skill in construction,” or in 1921 where (not
surprisingly) it reveals something of the poet, his “characteristic qualities,” or in 1931
29
Milton’s “poetic skill” or a poem’s “properties,” or in 1941 Shakespeare’s “stagecraft”
and the suitability of Milton’s “prose style” to his “purpose.”
By 1951, the use of the term “imagery” resonates a distinctly New Critical ethos,
one that embraces the sweep of felt poetic experience as much as functional analysis—
a kind of vaguely, quasi-mystical aesthetic. Students are asked to consider the “pictorial
element” in Spenser’s imagery, the “luxuriant” quality of Comus, the “homeliness of the
imagery” in the Book of Job, the “grandeur” of Shelley’s imagery—qualities less specific
but far loftier than the rendering of a particular mechanical skill. Imagery is vague
enough to cultivate the ideal reader as an interpreter of artistic visions, but specific
enough to draw attention to the value of close textual analysis.
Many of the Shakespeare questions relate to themes such as war and tragedy.
There are a number on character such as this one that configures Falstaff as a timeless
figure:
What features in Falstaff’s character and conduct make him a memorable comic
creation?
There is one question that invites the reader to find a fault that probably isn’t really a
fault:
“A feeling of exhaustion and futility pervades Henry IV Part II.” Discuss giving
reasons and illustrations.
30
There is also one Shakespeare question that echoes the ethos of Bradley and Knight:
Describe the various comic elements in Hamlet and say what they contribute to
the total effect of the play.
The 1961 paper is dominated by that other form of question we have glimpsed
before—the problematizing quotation. These constitute about half the questions, far
more than any paper up to this point. They represent the “invisible” success of New
Criticism, where justifying the text as a heterogeneous yet organic whole is surely the
underlying philosophy, even if it is no longer as overt or “pure” as it is in its original
theoretical form. This is New Criticism distilled into practice (“practical” Practical
Criticism, if you like). The literary tools that the students uses to counter the “attack”
also go unmentioned in any rubric, so entrenched and naturalized have they become.
As if to confirm the New Critical credentials of the 1961 examination, a number
of significant authors either make their entrance or up their status. T.S. Eliot is to be
found in both Paper 1 and 2, as a playwright alongside Shakespeare, and as a poet—an
indication of his literary status in 1961. Furthermore, for the first time, a section is
devoted to the movement that Eliot propelled into the canon—“Metaphysical Poetry,
Donne to Butler.” This marks the first mention of the epithet “Metaphysical Poetry” and
of Donne, Herbert and Vaughn. Their contemporaries, Marvell, Crashaw, Cowley and
Lovelace, had made a fleeting appearance in 1921, and Cowley reappeared in 1941 only
to disappear without trace along with Lovelace. Interestingly, Donne himself seems to
have gone out of favor by the 1980’s.
31
Also making their first appearance are the novelists Dickens, Hardy and Woolf,
indicative that New Criticism was at last coming to terms with the novel as a legitimate
form alongside the poem. It had taken quite some time. Its happy inclusion suggests the
confidence of an all-embracing New Criticism, far removed from the historical
scholasticism at the start of the century, in a paper that has the name T.S. Eliot stamped
all over it—literally as well as metaphorically.
Structuralism, a particular strand of formalism, appeared in the 1960’s, influenced
by Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. It stressed the deep and
shared underlying structures beneath all societies, the pattern of narratives, and the key to
all mythologies, which were inherent in the signifying system of language itself and
ultimately rooted in the biology of the human mind. This brand of positivistic formalism
represents another kind of universality that spans generations, genres and places. 1957
had seen the publication of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. His was basically a
structuralist approach, a synoptic coherence achieved by standing back from details to
reveal an underlying structure or myth that makes sense of the whole; this meant that
Shakespeare’s plays were viewed ensemble and as part of a literary heritage—a direct
challenge to formalism of New Critics, but with much in common too. Similar appeals
were made to contemporary science, evoking both physics and biology, and striving for a
process as “coherent and progressive as the study of science” (11). Reacting against the
excesses of textual dissection, Frye sought an over-arching system which concerned itself
with underlying truths in the form of “myth,” “symbol,” “ritual,” and “archetype” (xiii).
His approach is not a sociological one, but has something in common with C. L. Barber’s
contemporaneous revisioning of Shakespeare in terms of native folklore and festival.
32
However, neither, it seems, had much effect on the A Level rubric. Frye’s approach was
perhaps too idiosyncratic and entailed too broad a knowledge of literary history at a time
when the intrinsic was everything; Barber possibly smacked too much of historicism.
Throughout the 1960’s, New Criticism was coming under critical scrutiny in the
academy. It was beginning to parody itself as over-mechanistic “symbol-mongering” for
“hidden meanings” (Graff 240) so that virtually any text could be forced into a
harmonious whole. Meanwhile, other movements were taking shape. E. D. Hirsch
attempted to salvage the Old Historicism by distinguishing between accreted layers of
interpretation or “significance” from authorial “meaning.” Reader Response theories
took root in the 1960’s along with the major “rupture” from essentialism and
determinacy, precipitated by Deconstruction and Post Structuralist theories.
Reader Response or Reception theory made its mark in the 1970’s, and it
undoubtedly disrupts the modernist Cartesian split and toys with ideas of indeterminacy.
For Rosenblatt, meaning resides not in the author’s intent, not in the text, but primarily in
the reader’s personal response:
What readers make of their interplay with a text depends on what they bring to it,
in linguistic and life experiences, in assumptions about the world, and in personal
preoccupations (Karolides 161).
Rosenblatt emphasizes the interactive, reciprocal relationship of the self with the physical
and human environment where human beings are “the mediators in the perception of the
world” and not just “observers” in a Newtonian sense; they are in constant “mutual
33
interplay” (160) and not separate from nature. For Rosenblatt, although there isn’t a
single correct reading, there is something called a “responsible reading” (for Stanley Fish
read “interpretive communities”) where “we can consider some interpretations better or
poorer than others” (163), including taking into account “background,” such as extrinsic
clues from the author’s life and times. Rosenblatt's approach is arguably most evidenced
in O level exams from the 1970’s to 1990’s—in personal and empathetic responses,
“creative extensions,” and relating literature to current concerns. Students were asked to
imagine they were a character, to write their diary or add an extra chapter to a book. I
have detected no trace of influence in any post 1970’s A Level paper. E.D. Hirsch,
meanwhile, might find some solace in the phraseology of the 2001 exam, which, on the
surface at least, seems to give a lot of attention to Shakespeare’s intended meanings.
Old Historicism, New Criticism and Reader Response theory—each ultimately
asserted some sense of totality, whether it lay in the author, the text or the reader. In the
1970’s, Jacques Derrida’s critique of western philosophy and science played a pivotal
role for a new paradigm in which determinacy of single meaning became highly
problematic. The sense of objectivity and totality that characterized New Criticism and
Old Historicism—and, to a lesser extent, Reader Response—was increasingly put under
the microscope and found to be lacking. Old assumptions were now seen as ideologies;
natural presumptions as constructs. The result was the splintering of literary theory into
different “isms,” more self-conscious of their ideological constraints and historical
situations, but also of difference and plurality. The ideal interpretation of a work became
one reading amongst many, and this reading could well draw upon multiple perspectives
and eclectic sources—historical, psychoanalytic, linguistic, and so on—eliding the
34
binaries between systems of thought. What the new theories share, though, is a concern
to foreground ideologies, value systems or power structures perceived to be latent in the
text. Understanding the text is not necessarily an end in itself but only as it applies to
revealing an aspect of the human condition.
According to Gerald Graff, the deconstructionist Paul de Man would posit that all
texts are “allegories of their own unreadability” (241). The text is a site of unstable
discourse and rhetorical and grammatical conflict. Derrida describes the arbitrary
relation between signs and signifiers, the instability and indeterminacy of absolute
meaning and the problem of binary systems in constructing meaning. But at the same
time that meaning and language are critiqued, they are, in a way, valorized, for, one
might argue, discursive power is all we have—text, in a sense, is everything.
Interestingly, all this is not a million miles from Brooks and his concern for ambiguity
and the ironic within the context of the text; the strains of the text that New Critics pulled
into one were not dissimilar to the ones New Critics sought out for dis-ease and disunity.
In terms of A levels, it may be that a consequence of deconstruction would be a renewed
interest in the power of language, rhetoric and discourse. At a deeper level, students
might be encouraged to read the power relations behind this construction through
disunity, contradictions and aporias—for example between poet and text, what they want
to say and what they do say.
A further indirect consequence of Derrida’s decentering of philosophy could be
the valorization of difference, paving the way for multiple approaches to texts, more
options at A level, a more fragmented, less rigid exam system, the opening-up of the
35
canon to multiple voices and the development of a more global perspective of literature,
sowing the seeds for Post-Colonial Study:
One can in fact assume that ethnology could have been born as a science only at
the moment when a decentering had come about: at the moment when European
culture—and, in consequence, the history of metaphysics and of its concepts—
had been dislocated, driven from its locus, and force to stop considering itself as
the culture of reference (Derrida 350).
For New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, one might expect A level
candidates to demonstrate the sociohistorical context of the text or the ideological values
it is seen to reproduce—art as “an important agent . . . in the transmission of culture”
(Greenblatt 448). We would expect far less attention to “eternal verities” such as
character qualities and themes, or literary achievements related to plot, structure and
aestheticism for its own sake, and more emphasis on the sociocultural issues and
representations these achievements project and how they are constructed, both inside and
outside the text. A similar approach could be hypothesized for A level questions
influenced by feminism, gender and race, where the text is seen in terms of a larger
sociocultural apparatus, rather than a work of individual genius.
However, neither new historicist Stephen Greenblatt nor the Marxist Critic Terry
Eagleton would wish to completely abandon close readings of the text—rather they
would wish to relate them to the “complex whole” (Greenblatt 447) of culture. As
Eagleton writes in “Literature and History” (1976) the sociology of literature works not
36
just on the “means of literary production, distribution and exchange” but also to “explain
the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and
meanings. But it also means grasping those forms, styles and meanings as the products
of a particular history” (429). Eagleton reasserts an emphasis on themes, style, rhythm,
image, quality and form and there is, arguably, something of a bridge here between Old
Historicism and New Criticism. Like its predecessors, Marxist criticism also seeks some
kind of “unity”—one of text, ideology, social relations and productive forces (431)—so
the student can possess a “true knowledge of society as a whole” (434).
Louis Montrose and other cultural critics explore Shakespeare in terms of the
(meta)production of ideological values and link the plays’ theatricality to both their own
time and all periods of history in which they have been reproduced. He expounds on the
movement in literary theory in Anglo-American universities since the 1980’s:
During the course of the 1980’s, literary studies in the American academy came to
be centrally concerned with the historical, social, and political conditions and
consequences of literary production and interpretation. From a multiplicity of . . .
perspectives, the writing and reading of texts, as well as the processes by which
they are circulated and categorized, analyzed and taught, are now being construed
as historically determined and determining modes of cultural work. What have
often been taken to be self-contained aesthetic and academic issues are now being
understood as inextricably . . . linked to other social discourses, practices, and
institutions; and such unstable linkages are construed as constituting the
37
ideological field within which individual subjectivities and collective structures
are mutually shaped (1).
To what extent would any of these movements filter down to the A levels of the
1970’s, 80’s and 90’s? What different would there be from the 1950’s and 60’s? The
answer is “not a lot,” given the evidence of the 1971 paper and others that followed—
until 2000. There is very little difference between the 1971, 1981, 1991 paper and the
1961 sample. The canon remains extraordinarily consistent, except for more
contemporaneous additions—E.M. Forster, L.P. Hartley, Graham Greene, Evelyn
Waugh, and Ted Hughes. All the papers from 1971 to 1991 are wholly intrinsic; there is
not one question where historical context or biographical detail is needed. Close reading
of texts for thematic and linguistic coherence remains the underlying principle. Context
questions steer students towards “diction, imagery and verse” and to discovering
symmetry in content, form and style. Practical Criticism of unseens is given even greater
status in 1981 in the form of its own separate paper, bringing the total of papers to three
for the first time.
Character study and thematic issues are again to the fore—the unified, selfcontained individual privileged over fragmented social subjectivity, and the eternal over
the transient and contingent. Textual unity is given voice in expressions that seek “total
effect” and “dramatic coherence,” though, for the most part, the philosophy of coherence
is more implicit than explicit; again, contentious claims are there to be refuted by the
ideal reading of the text.
38
Not one question strays beyond the realm of the text except in the validation of
“universal” humanist themes—good and evil, deception and trickery, violence and
suffering, feelings and emotions, choice, power, love, war, age, nature. Themes are
eternal, but, in the case of Milton, such transcendence needs to be worked at just a little:
“Although these poems of Milton are written in pastoral and other conventions
and are somewhat remote, they still speak to us today.” Discuss.
In 1991, the problematizing questions are present again in abundance, fishing for
unity. Yet, there is arguably a sense in which justifications for intrinsic coherence seem
less sustainable, the challenges just that bit more provocative, as if the reader cannot but
help acknowledge a certain lack in the old paradigm:
“Joseph Andrews succeeds as a novel despite its having no plot.” Discuss.
“The play really ends with the murder of the Duchess; it gains nothing from its
fifth act.” Do you agree?
“Although ‘The Rape of the Lock’ has lost some of its original impact, it is still
humorous to a modern reader.” Discuss.
“The sustained focus upon Margaret Hale makes North and South an excellent
love story, but limits its value as a contrast of the two regions.” Discuss.
39
Consider the view that Far from the Madding Crowd is marred by its
melodramatic elements.
Of Miguel Street Naipul said that where he had seen “drab haphazardness”
readers and critics has seen “unity.” How unified have you found the collection
of stories to be?
Of course, the main aim of these questions is to encourage the reader to refute the claim,
defend the integrity of the text and locate coherence. The paradigm has not really
changed. But there is too perhaps a tacit sense that something of these criticisms must be
valid, and both the questioner and the questioned need to acknowledge that coherence is,
at the least, a fragile alliance and that canonical texts sometimes fall short of the
aspirations of perfection, unity and universality.
Such a rubric dominates the Shakespeare line of questioning in the 1971, 1981
and 1991 paper: a critical reference as a means to analyze the play. Interestingly, the two
latter papers completely drop character studies—a temporary abeyance for A.C.
Bradley—only to return with a vengeance in 2000. Instead, the papers from 1981 and
1991 are dominated by critical comments related to grand humanist themes—heroism,
evil, love, war, revenge, deception. There is also an increasing tendency to see the plays
as plays, questions that promulgate the kind of ahistorical stagecraft that, ironically,
Bradley himself could have scripted:
40
Discuss the following comment on Antony and Cleopatra: “Splendid poetry and
variety of characters cannot make up for the play’s lack of dramatic coherence.
Indeed, they are largely responsible for it.”
Both Bradley and Knight would have loved tackling that one.
If there exists any significant paradigm shift at all, it is in content more than style.
The 1991 choice of authors and their subjects carry English Literature beyond England to
America, Ireland and the former colonies, with explicit recognition of global and Post
Colonial issues. Samuel Beckett had been the sole multicultural voice in 1971 and 1981.
By 1991 he is joined by another Irish man, Seamus Heaney, and Americans in the form
of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O’Neil. But the multiracial and Post Colonial
movement is really represented by Paul Scott’s Raj Quartets and V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel
Street, Naipual being a British citizen of Trinidadian birth and Indian descent. The
“historical and political context” of Scott’s Staying On is acknowledged as an intrinsic
concern of the story, still within the New Critical tradition but hinting again at a potential
rupture in literary theory:
“Staying On concentrates on two insignificant and lonely lives, but Scott ensures
that we appreciate the importance of the historical and political context.” Discuss.
Or:
What effects does Scott achieve in the following passages from Staying On? (You
should refer to characterization, themes, narrative technique and any other
interesting features.
41
The above choice represents an interesting juxtaposition of paradigms. It is the only
instance in the 1991 exam of sociohistorical import, but foreshadows changes to come.
To some extent the 2000 examination represents a gyroscopic movement in
literary studies—a return to history, but a different kind of history.
Like 1941, the two most recent papers (2000/2001) seem to represent some kind
of transition. Historicism and multiplicity sit alongside New Critical formalism and
universality. The 2000 and 2001 papers extend to a range of well over forty different
authors—more than twice that of previous years and equivalent to the 1921 paper. The
trend is towards diversity and multiculturalism, whilst the canon of yore remains intact—
Shakespeare heads a list of Chaucer, Milton, Marlowe, Webster, Keats, Pope et al, all
ensconced since 1921. But diversity is represented in much more contemporaneous
offerings—Maya Angelou, J.M. Synge, Nick Hornby, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Atwood,
Alan Bennet, Alice Walker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, Sylvia Plath,
U.A. Fanthorpe, Tennessee Williams, Mark Twain, Anthony Burgess, Chinua Achebe,
Ian McEwan, Jane Gardam, Brian Friel and Caryl Churchill. Dead white males represent
a distinct minority in this list of additions. Women, “minorities” and “other” cultures
have a much more prominent role in the A level canon.
With diversification, contingencies such as historical and cultural context play a
more crucial role once again, in part because of the multifarious nature of the texts in
hand. For the first time, the 2000 paper sees the dropping of the “context” question
which was predicated on close reading and intrinsic coherence. Further, the “Unseen
Critical Appreciations,” which do remain from 1941, survive in a state significantly
42
different from the “vacuum” of I.A. Richard’s Practical Criticism. We now witness
serious acknowledgement of contingencies and extrinsic matters. The readings are
carefully contextualized and the questions themselves prompt the student to consider
sociocultural “issues” alongside and as part of formalistic analyses:
I know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first volume of autobiography by Maya
Angelou, the black American writer. She was born in 1928, and the book
recounts her childhood experiences in the Southern states of the 1930’s, when
racism was common. The following extract details her experiences of work as a
maid aged 10, in a white household. Bailey is her 11 year old brother.
Write about the extract, focusing specifically on the following aspects:

The contrast between white and black lives

The uses and purposes of humour

The impact of the writer’s choice of vocabulary and imagery

The ways the narrator seeks to involve her readers.
This is still a close reading but one which has subtly different implications than concerns
with intrinsic form. The novel is implicitly related to the broader contexts of its
“readers,” its pragmatic aims and its contingent social arena. The sense of textual
isolation and universality is beginning to fade. This may not constitute a sea-change, but
it is certainly indicates a change in the theoretical tide.
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In another unseen, part of the rubric explains the significance of the title of the
poem “Epithany” by Ted Hughes:
The word “epithany” can refer to several things: to the Christian festival on
January 6 which celebrates the showing of the baby Jesus to the Wise Men; to the
appearance of a superhuman being to those on earth; more generally to a moment
of revelation.
Such an explanation, occurring as part of a broader conspectus, contrasts with the
isolation of the unseen poems and passages witnessed in 1941 and 1951. It answers
objections to I.A. Richard’s protocol experiments, where students floundered against a
tide of lost semantics—double entendres like “die” or the cultural significance of the
“earth’s imagined corners” in Donne’s poetry (qtd. in Graff 175). This led Marilyn M.
Cooper to state: “the students continually attempted to make sense of the poems by
providing the missing contexts. They guessed at the authorship . . . They guessed at the
literary period . . . They guessed at the author’s pragmatic intentions . . .” (qtd. in Graff
175). By 2001, the tides have shifted; most of these questions are answered for the
student.
The other shift is in the focus of the questions. Issues of race relations, power and
politics have become explicit. The student cannot avoid the topical in reading and
responding to Angelou—race is in the rubric and in the question. The contingencies of
the textual production, its cultural milieu and audience, and its sociopolitical status seep
44
into the essay questions too, along with reference to multicultural voices, gender issues,
“otherness,” and global and Post Colonial issues:
Can Ellison be said to represent a wide range of black American voices and
attitudes in the novel?
Is it too limited a view of the Invisible Man to say that it is simply a novel
exposing the racial prejudice in American society of the nineteen forties?
Discuss the depiction of the boxing match in Chapter 1 in the light of the
treatment of racial prejudice in the novel as a whole.
Discuss the relationship between Maire and Yolland in Friel’s Translations in the
light of what the play shows of the connections between political and personal
issues.
“Although Offred displays some admirable qualities, it is women as a group who
are presented as the heroines of The Handmaid’s Tale.” Discuss.
What does Bennet’s use of social status and regional elements contribute to the
effectiveness of his Talking Heads monologues?
45
What do Nettie’s African experiences contribute to the novel The Color Purple as
a whole?
From 2001:
Using Chapter 16 of Huckleberry Finn as a starting point say what you find I
mportant about the historical context of the novel. You will need to consider:

What is revealed in this chapter of life in the American South in the days before
the Civil War;

How Twain uses language in this chapter;

The importance of freedom and slavery here and at one other point in the novel.
How important is story telling in the novel Falling Apart as a whole? You will
need to consider:

Who tells the stories, to whom and why;

How the stories are told and what they are about;

What the stories reveal of the novel’s cultural background and how different
readers might respond to them.
What do you consider to be important about power and the way it is presented in
Chapter 3 of A Clockwork Orange? How do you respond to the connections
between music and power that are made here and elsewhere in the novel?
46
Some readers consider that the women in Enduring Love are less interesting than
the men. What are your views?
How does Miller in Death of A Salesman use father/son relationships to question
the values of 1940’s American society?
What aspects of feminist achievement does Churchill present in Top Girls? To
what extent is the nature of this achievement criticized?
How is the issue of gender explored in Educating Rita?
As in 1991, many of the questions offer the candidate a clear choice, but, this time, the
choice tends to be between the kind of topicality and sociohistorical issues illustrated
above, or an exploration of more traditional universalities and textual formalism. The
papers, like 1931 and 1941, represent a transition, attempting to strike a balance between
two paradigms.
The 2001 samples in particular seem to represent an explosion in issues related to
power, politics, gender and race, and the status of the canon itself. To some extent this
may be due to a more open admission program to A levels. The changing canon also
reflects both changing demographics as well as a change in underlying theories. It is not
just a case of more women authors and more minorities. Post Modernism has questioned
the inherent value of the received canon, eliding the binaries between high brow and low
brow and opening it up to popular culture. Thus, A Clockwork Orange, Catch 22, One
47
Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest and Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love represent the
commercially popular alongside the stalwarts of the canon. There even exist one
question that gives a nod to Deconstruction and Post Modern concerns of language:
Friel has said that his play is “about language.” How far do you agree?
The nature of multicultural texts means the extrinsic cannot be ignored. Students
are not expected to reproduce an empirical biography or history, nor an Elizabethan
world picture, and certainly no “intentional fallacy.” But there exists an appreciation of
the dynamic sociocultural and pragmatic contingences in which texts exist. Indeed, the
rubric that heads the 2001 exam informs students that they are tested on their ability to
“show understanding of the contexts in which literary texts are written and understood”
as well as more formalistic enterprises. These contingencies apply to the different ways
in which readers and critics respond to texts—the candidate should “articulate
independent opinions and judgments, informed by different interpretations of literary
texts by other readers.” Other “readers” would include other members of the interpretive
community—such as the class—acknowledging Rosenblatt’s desire for a “comparison of
our interpretations” which “can lead to self-criticism and increased reading ability”
(Karolides164).
The latest exams certainly do not abandon formalism and they still include a fair
smattering of questions concerned with unity and universality as opposed to multiplicity.
This is particularly true for the “canonical” authors. Universal themes are still
encountered when dealing with Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser et al—education and
48
learning, spirituality and creativity, horror and violence, power and control, past and
present, loyalty, vanity, “greatness,” and law. Character studies and thematic questions
remain prominent, but the approach is more complex and less hermetically-sealed than in
the past. Universalities are still present, but perhaps under erasure, acknowledging a
world out there, one that is subject to change:
“Ibsens’ achievement in Ghosts is the construction of a universal human tragedy
from the life of a nineteenth century bourgeois woman and her family.” How far
do you agree with this opinion?
Discuss how far Congreve’s satire of the “way” of his world is effective for a
modern audience.
Spenser shows a profound understanding of human nature, despite the archaic
language and imagined world of The Faerie Queene. Discuss how far you have
found this statement true.
The concern for universality in these questions also reveals a tacit acknowledgement that
the world has indeed changed, exposing the situatedness of each text as much as its
commonality. The emphasis perhaps has shifted for transcendent universality to situated
topicality—the texts can still be relevant, but in more complicated and problematized
ways, in different ways at different times.
49
Something of this more contextual approach is seen in Shakespeare too. As was
hinted in 1982, the plays are frequently situated within the broader dynamic of their
dramatic context, rather than as a literary artifact, with a particularly fascination for his
“stagecraft” and audience:
Examine the ways in which audiences are invited to be conspirators in the tragedy
of Othello, the character.
Examine the different methods Shakespeare uses to present the characters in this
extract.
What is the appeal of this quick-changing sequence for an audience in the theatre?
Explore the methods Shakespeare uses to present Richard in this passage. As the
play draws to its conclusion examine the impact of this passage on an audience.
Consider how Shakespeare engages your sympathy for two characters in The
Taming of the Shrew.
Consider the gains and losses Shakespeare presents to the audience as a result of
the change of king in Richard II.
50
These questions represent a curious kind of hybrid. To some extent, Hirsch’s pleas for
authorial meaning have been reasserted (“Shakespeare” is repeated a lot), but I don’t
quite know what the reader is to make of this assertion. The texts are socialized but only
in the vaguest terms, pretty much a return to A.C. Bradley’s idealized theatre of the mind.
Although there is a slight shift from poetic isolation to social contingency, the extrinsic is
defined in terms of a dehistoricized, universal “audience.” The continual evocation of
Shakespeare as the intentional author also steers very close, I think, to Eagleton’s
assessment of I.A. Richard’s dematerializing of texts to act as a “window” on the poet’s
psyche. A.C. Bradley might be the most pleased though: not only has his particular take
on stagecraft been reasserted, there has been a triumphant resurgence of his preference
for character, lacking in the previous papers.
The move to present Shakespeare as a dramatist, rather than the poet philosopher
of Knight, Frye and the New Critics, seems to be a fairly superficial, if not tokenist,
move, particularly in the light of the other sociocultural shifts demonstrated on the 2000
and 2001 papers. I am uncertain what advantage students and teachers really gain by this
move, particularly since most teachers (and students) of English are not theatre students.
It would seem that to delineate Shakespeare in the sociohistorical and political context of
Montrose and others is just too much, at least for the time being. Therefore, any real
exploration of theatricality and its relations to ideological production is smothered in
vagueness.
Finally, these papers raise some intriguing questions about the status of literature
in the 2000’s—in relation to itself and the world. There is a new eclecticism reflected in
the varied range of options, formats and choices for the modules. Most material can be
51
examined in an “Open Book” format or “Traditional.” More significantly, the papers
tend to include an eclectic range of “Selected Texts” with little trace left of field coverage
let alone chronological order. In “Selected Texts Y” the order of questions is as follows:
Ibsen, Milton, Thackeray, Dickens, Congreve, Spenser, Shaw, Ishiguro, Atwood, Bennet,
Walker, Plath. This is no strict chronology nor is it an attempt to represent major fields
or genres let alone historical periods. The effect might be to suggest New Critical
universality of literature, but it seems just as likely to emphasize Post Modern relativism
and a leveling of the old canonical hierarchy. Another innovation is the “Linked Texts”
paper, linking texts from disparate contexts and times—“The Rape of the Lock” and “The
Waste Land,” Catch 22 and Poems of Wilfred Owen, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
and the Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath). For example:
To what extent do you think that in Tess of the d’Urbevilles and Wuthering
Heights the presentation of the male characters is stereotypical?
How far do you consider the view of society which Eliot presents in “The Waste
Land” is more acceptable than that which Pope presents in “The Rape of the
Lock”?
Compare and contrast the ways in which Kesey and Plath present the problems of
those who are seen to be disadvantaged in society: ethnic minority groups, the
mentally sick, women, any other disadvantaged people.
52
Do these teamings privilege New Critical universality? Do they acknowledge
Structuralist archetypes? Do they suggest Post Modern intertextuality and cultural
relativism? Do they imply Cultural Materialist concerns? Are some gender-related or
Feminist? Perhaps they do all these, to varying degrees and in different ways,
representing the nexus or cusp of differing paradigms.
The text is still privileged over the extrinsic in these latest papers, but its position
is far less assured than only a decade before. It is no longer severed from the historical
context nor the reader, though, for the main, candidates are expected to intuit the context
from the text; an “expert” knowledge of history is not required as it was in 1921. That
said, a cultural sensitivity is certainly assumed, one that increasingly posits the text as a
site for exploring larger sociocultural issues such as power, race and gender rather than as
a medium for universal values. Formalism remains but is frequently located within the
rhetorical context of a work—such as a novel’s relation to a reader and a play’s relation
to an audience—again denoting a significant shift.
There can be little doubt that A levels reflect a calcified version of literary
assumptions and theories at given moments in the last century. The formalist tendencies
of New Criticism and Practical Criticism dominated the century. No examination
eschewed such formalism, but the earliest ones were marked with a more rhetorical,
scholarly interest in the writer’s methods along with a historical concerns; literature was
framed more as a scholarly rhetorical discourse about the world rather than a complete
aesthetic experience in its own right. This changed as literature came to be regarded as a
unique discipline—a wholly intrinsic, self-reflexive enterprise, whose sole relation to the
53
outside world rested on humanist universal values and structures, values that were
uniquely literary, aesthetic and true.
It is fair to say that the A levels studied indicate a decade or more time lag in their
reflection of literary movements. It should perhaps not then be too much of a surprise to
see Derrida’s “rupture” of the 1970’s—the growth in status of the reader, intertextuality,
multiplicity, the return of history and the sociopolitics of constructivist theories of the
1980’s and 1990’s— only making headway in the 2000’s.
Shakespeare continues to be valorized above all other writers by having either his
own paper or own section. Most of the trends that have distilled into the A Level have
been evident in Shakespeare too, but with perhaps a particularly bias towards character
study and, secondly, thematic issues. It is probably fair to say that the Shakespeare part
of the exam has changed the least. Even in the most historical of earlier papers (1921)
the majority of Shakespeare questions favored more intrinsic analysis. Indeed, a
contemporary student of Shakespeare would be happy with virtually any question from
any of the exams with little to throw him or her off balance. Of all the critical
commentators who might be pleased with the impact of their work, I think it is A.C.
Bradley who would be the happiest—very much including the latest exam (2001).
Although the latest exams reflect a return to history, it is, of course, a very
different history where literature is read as a repository and agent of sociocultural
concerns. We have noted the gradual erasure of field coverage, historical periods and,
arguably in 2001, the less certain status of canonical figures. This is a very different
return to the extrinsic; less assured, less determinate, more pluralistic and more situated.
It will be interesting to see how the current equilibrium between the more universal
54
readings and the emerging situated readings pans out; one suspects formalism will
continue to play an important role whatever the focus. What seems for certain is that
2000 and 2001 do represent something of a rupture, an opening of the canon to multiple
voices that had been resisted for quite sometime.
55
Works Cited
Assessment and Qualifications Alliance: Higher School Certificates and A Level
English Literature Examination Papers: 1911, 1921, 1941, 1951, 1961, 1971,
1981, 1991, 2000, 2001.
Barber, C. L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its
Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959.
Beardsley, Monroe, C. “Textual Meanings and Authorial Meaning.” Contexts for
Criticism. Ed. Donald Kesey. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1994. 91-98.
Belsey, Catherine. “Literature, History, Politics.” Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald
Kesey. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1994. 436-44.
Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear,
Macbeth. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Brooks, Cleanth. “Irony as a Principle of Structure.” Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald
Kesey. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1994. 74-81.
56
Brooks, Cleanth. “My Credo—The Formalist Critics.” (560 Handout).
Brown, John Russell. Introduction. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. By A. C. Bradley. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1992.
Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”
Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Kesey. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1994.
347-58.
De Man, Paul. “Semiology and Rhetoric.” Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Kesey.
Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1994. 359-69.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Eagleton, Terry. “Literature and History.” Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Kesey.
Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1994. 428-35.
Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: U of Chicago P:
1989.
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Culture.” Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Kesey. Mountain
57
View, CA: Mayfield, 1994. 445-50.
Guetti, Barbara. “Resisting the Aesthetic.” Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Kesey.
Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1994. 394-401.
Hirsch, E. D. “Objective Interpretation.” Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Kesey.
Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1994. 17-28.
Karolides, Nicholas. “Theory and Practice: An Interview with Louise M. Rosenblatt.”
Language Arts, 77.2: November 1999. 158-70.
Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel of Fire. New York: Meridian, 1958.
Montrose, Louis. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the
Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1996.
Payne, Michael, Ed. A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory. Oxford: Blackwell,
1996.
Schoer, Mark. “ Technique as Discovery.” (560 Handout).
Sinfield, Alan. “Give an Account of Shakespeare and Education, Showing Why You
Think They Are Effective and What You Have Appreciated About Them.
58
Support Your Comments with Precise References.” Political Shakespeare: New
Essays in Cultural Materialism. Ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield.
Ithaca: Cornell UP: 1985.
Wimsatt, W. K. “The Structure of the Concrete Universal.” Contexts for Criticism. Ed.
Donald Kesey. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1994. 82-90.
59
Appendix: Shakespeare Questions 1911-2001
2000 AQA English Literature Advanced (Open Book and Traditional Formats)
1. At his death Roderigo cries ‘O damned Iago! O inhuman dog!’ Is there nothing more to Iago than what
Roderigo says?
2. Examine the ways in which audiences are invited to be conspirators in the tragedy of Othello, the
character.
3. Read the following extract from Act II Scene 1, then:
i)
Examine the different methods Shakespeare uses to present the characters in this extract.
ii)
What is the appeal of this quick-changing sequence for an audience in the theater?
4. With close reference to three of Iago’s soliloquies, show how Shakespeare develops the audience’s
understanding of his character at these particular moments in the action of Othello.
5. Remind yourself of Act II Scene I from:
DESDEMONA (aside) I am not merry . . .
to:
IAGO (aside) O, you are well tuned now! / But I’ll set down the pegs that make this music, / As honest as I
am.
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Then answer the following:
i)
Examine the different methods Shakespeare uses to present the characters in this extract.
ii)
What is the appeal of this quick-changing sequence for an audience in the theatre?
6. ‘Henry gains the throne, yet something is lost . . .’
Consider the gains and losses Shakespeare presents to the audience as a result of the change of
king in Richard II.
As part of your answer you should refer to two or three specific sequences.
7. Remind yourself of Act V Scene 5 from the beginning of the scene to: Enter a Groom of the stable
Then answer the following:
i)
Explore the methods Shakespeare uses to present Richard in this passage.
ii)
As the play draws to its conclusion examine the impact of this passage on an
audience.
8. What does Shakespeare have to say about loyalty in Richard II? You should include in your discussion
some consideration of :

Loyalty within the family

Loyalty to the crown

Loyalty within the wider community
9. How does Shakespeare present education and learning in The Taming of the Shrew?
In your answer you may refer closely to either two or three sequences or range more widely.
61
10. Remind yourself of Petruchio’s soliloquy at the end of Act IV Scene 1 from: ‘Thus have I politicly
begun my reign’ to the end of the speech. Then answer the following. Examine Shakespeare’s portrayal of
Petruchio at this point in the play by considering:

His attitude to courtship and marriage

The language he uses

The effect of this soliloquy on the audience.
11. Consider how Shakespeare engages your sympathy for two characters in The Taming of the Shrew.
12. How far do you agree with the view that The Tempest is about different kinds of power and control?
In your response you should refer to two or three specific sequences where power and control are
central issues.
13. Remind yourself of Act III Scene 3 from the stage direction Solemn and strange music to:
PROSPERO Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou / Performed, my Ariel: a grace it had, devouring
(18-85)
Then answer the following.
i)
Examine the different methods Shakespeare uses to present character in this sequence.
ii)
Discuss some of the ways in which an audience might respond to this sequence.
14. At the end of the Masque Ferdinand says: ‘This is most majestic vision and / Harmonious charmingly.’
How far do you think his lines about the Masque sum up the play as a whole?
1991 Joint Matriculation Board English Literature Advanced
62
1. Context questions (eg Hamlet’s state of mind with attention to language, contrast character attitudes,
relate to significance to development of the play).
2. “The tragic interest of the play Hamlet is divided between the pursuit of revenge and the character of the
hero.” Discuss.
3. “ ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ ” and the older generation is entirely responsible.” How
far do you agree?
4. Discuss the contribution to Twelfth Night of the various scenes of deception and trickery.
5. “Twelfth Night has nothing serious to say about love.” Consider this comment.
6. “Troilus and Cressida is essentially a tragedy of two young lovers destroyed by hostile circumstances.”
Comment on this view.
7. “Shakespeare’s bitter commentary on the false glamour of love and war.” Discuss this opinion of the
play Troilus and Cressida.
1981 Joint Matriculation Board
1. Context questions from two plays (contextualise, “dramatic significance,” style—diction, imagery and
verse).
2. “In Cymbeline there is conflict between the complex human reality of evil and an ideal romantic world.”
How far do you agree?
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3. By what means does Shakespeare make dramatically effective “the triumph of forbearance and
generosity over resentment and vengeance” in Cymbeline?
4. Discuss the following comment on Antony and Cleopatra: “All the play’s complexities resolve upon a
single opposition, ‘Egypt is romantic but wrong, Rome is repulsive but right.’”
5. Discuss the following comment on Antony and Cleopatra: “Splendid poetry and variety of characters
cannot make up for the play’s lack of dramatic coherence. Indeed, they are largely responsible for it.”
6. To what extent would you agree that Henry V “celebrates English heroism in spite of all the play’s
damaging admissions about the victors and frankness about the human cost of their great endeavour”?
7. Discuss the view that “We remember Henry V as a character only because the play which bears his name
is dramatically effective.”
1971 Joint Matriculation Board
1. Context questions (as 1981)
2. “His nature is too noble for the world.” “He’s poor in no one fault but stored with all.” Discuss these
two comments on Coriolanus examining and criticizing the attitude towards his character and tragic
predicament which they represent.
3. “Quarrelling and fighting scarcely cease from the beginning to end, yet they only reflect, never
dominate, the fundamental stresses in Coriolanus.” Discuss with illustrations.
4. “Hamlet has been labeled in a number of ways, for example, as a historical chronicle, as a thriller or as a
philosophical drama, but no such label is completely satisfactory.” Discuss.
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5. Read the following passage and then answer the questions that follow . . . (i) Comment on Hamlet’s
madness with specific reference to the ways in which it is regarded by the characters speaking in this
passage. (ii) Elucidate the difference in the language and verse of the speeches by Ophelia and the King.
(iii) In what ways does Polonius’s speech reflect his character and behaviour? Support your answer by
reference to other passages in the play.
6. What is the importance of either Rome in Corialanus or Denmark in Hamlet? Relate your answer at
some length to the importance of place(s) in any one other Shakespeare play.
7. Examine the hero’s relationship with his mother in either Coriolanus or Hamlet and then consider the
relationship of parent and child in any one other Shakespearean play.
1961 Universities of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham.
1. Context questions (turn into modern English, situate, points of dramatic interest).
2. What features in Falstaff’s character and conduct make him a memorable comic creation?
3. “A feeling of exhaustion and futility pervades Henry IV Part II.” Discuss giving reasons and
illustrations.
4. How and with what degree of success does Shakespeare convey the impression of Cleopatra’s “infinite
variety”?
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5. For what reasons would you describe the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra as tragic? What methods does
Shakepeare use to evoke the sense of tragedy?
1951 Universities of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham.
1. Context questions (put in own words, relate to the argument of the play, explain verbal difficulties,
points of dramatic or literary interest).
2. Describe and comment upon the various attitudes to war which are expressed in King Henry V.
3. What contribution is made to this play by the scenes in which Pistol is involved?
4. Comment on and illustrate Shakespeare’s dramatic presentation of history in King Henry V.
5. Examine Hamlet’s reasons for (i) producing The Mousetrap and (ii) refraining from killing his uncle
when he finds him at prayer. What light do these incidents throw on Hamlet’s character?
6. Describe the various comic elements in Hamlet and say what they contribute to the total effect of the
play.
7. How does Shakespeare sustain our interest during the time which elapses between the play scene in
which Claudius’s guilt is confirmed and the duel scene?
1941 Universities of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham.
1. Context questions (as 1951).
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2. Discuss one of the following statements:
(a) “It is as a story of thrilling events that Hamlet appeals to modern playgoers.”
(b) “Hamlet’s character is thrown into greater relief by the characters of Laertes, Horatio and
Fortinbras.
(c) Poetry, humour and topical interest are all effectively blended in Hamlet.
3. “In Imogen Shakespeare has depicted virtue without insipidity.” Discuss.
4. Illustrate Shakespeare’s stagecraft from this treatment in Cymbeline of either (i) the battle scenes or (ii)
the final denouement.
5. What is added to Cymbeline by the mountain scenes?
1931 High School Certificate
1. Context questions (as 1941).
2. Set down the evidence provided by the play regarding the extent of Hamlet’s love for Ophelia and
discuss the bearing of this on the whole tragedy of Hamlet.
3. What light is thrown on Hamlet’s character by his dealings with either Horatio or the players?
4. Discuss the relative part in arousing Othello’s jealousy played by (a) Iago’s cunning and (b) Othello’s
temperament.
5. Illustrate and discuss the extent to which Othello’s love for Desdemona is based (a) upon his judgment
and (b) his imagination.
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6. The prologue to Romeo and Juliet tells of a “pair of star-crossed lovers” (extract). How far is this a
correct description of the story and a just comment on the fate of Romeo and Juliet?
7. Illustrate and discuss the part played by two of the following: (i) the nurse’s garrulity (ii) Mercutio’s
fancy (iii) old Capulet’s character (iv) Romeo’s sentimentality.
8. What incidents and qualities of The Winter’s Tale justify our calling it a “romantic tragicomedy” and
how far is such a description applicable to the play as a whole?
9. Distinguish between Shakespeare’s notions of the qualities becoming (a) to womanhood and (b) to
girlhood by contrasting Hermione with Perdita.
10. What qualities in Falstaff make him (a) a comic character and (b) an appropriate figure in a history
play?
11. Comment on the character of Henry IV as a man and on his virtues as a king.
12. Set out a length those traits in Shylock’s character (a) which arouse our admiration and (b) which draw
forth our resentment.
13. Attempt to justify the methods by which Portia deprives Shylock of victory against Antonio and say
how far her use of these methods modifies your view of her character.
1921 Joint Matriculation Board (Chaucer and Shakespeare)
1. Contexts (comment on difficulties or points of literary interest)
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2. How does the dramatic structure of Henry IV Part II compare with that of Part I?
3. What special effects are introduced into Henry IV Part II by the scenes placed in Gloucestershire?
4. To what extent may the character of Hotspur be said to throw into relief the character of Prince Hal?
5. Write a short appreciation with illustrative quotations of Falstaff’s character.
6. “Falstaff engages the attention of the audience beyond what is required (almost beyond what is
permitted) by the general trend of the story.” Discuss this statement.
7. Mention any two passages of notable poetic value in the plays and discuss their appropriateness in their
dramatic setting.
Period:
8. Comment on the description of Richard II as “a sentimentalist.”
9. How far does the literature of this period reflect the social, political and intellectual activities of the age?
10. Trace in summary fashion the development of either tragedy or comedy during Shakespeare’s lifetime.
1911 Higher Papers
1. Write an essay on one of the following subjects:
(a) A comparison of Shakespeare and Spenser s characteristic products of the Elizabethan age.
69
(b) The Elizabethan age as mirrored in the work of Shakespeare and Spenser
(c) The realism of Shakespeare
(d) Spenser as a romanticist
(e) A comparison of the treatment of nature in the poetry of the Elizabethans and Wordsworth
(f) A consideration of the relative advantages of the drama and the novel for the delineation of
character.
2. Illustrate the manner in which Shakespeare brings out the contrast between the characters of Prince Hal
and Hotspur.
3. How far can Falstaff be defended from the charge of being (a) a liar (b) a coward?
4. Comment on the following passages paying special attention to the context of each: extracts follow.
Books for General Reading:
1. What were the characteristics of Plutarch’s Lives which in your opinion proved most attractive to
Shakespeare?
2. Discuss, with special reference to Hamlet, the dramatic use of soliloquy.