GCSE English Literature: Analysing Shakespeare Guide

Language choices

Shakespeare's language rewards close analysis — look at imagery, verse versus prose (higher-status characters often speak in verse), and rhetorical techniques, always linking these choices to their effect.

Characters and relationships

Track how a character's relationships and motivations develop across the play, and consider how other characters, and the audience, are meant to view them at different points.

Themes

Identify the play's central themes (such as ambition, power or love) and how they are explored through plot, character and language across multiple scenes, not just in the extract given.

Historical and social context

Understanding Elizabethan or Jacobean attitudes — towards kingship, gender, or the supernatural, for example — can explain why characters act as they do and how an original audience might have responded differently to a modern one.

Common mistakes

• Retelling the plot instead of analysing the writer's choices.
• Only discussing the given extract and ignoring the play as a whole.
• Adding context as a disconnected fact rather than linking it to the point being made.