A-Level English Literature — Poetry, Drama & the Novel

Drama as performance

• Analyse dramatic method and its effect on an audience - Shakespeare and other drama are staged, not just read.

Structure and form

• Act/scene structure, exposition, climax, peripeteia, anagnorisis, catastrophe; dramatic irony; tragedy/comedy/history conventions (the tragic hero, hamartia, catharsis - Aristotle).

Dramatic and poetic technique

• Soliloquy, aside, dialogue, monologue; blank verse (iambic pentameter) vs prose (status/register); imagery, wordplay and rhetoric; stage directions, staging, props; silence.

Character, conflict and audience

• Protagonist/antagonist, foils, status/power shifts; conflict; how audiences are positioned to judge.

Interpretation

• Different productions and critical readings change meaning (AO5); consider staging and its effect.

Analyse the play in performance - structure, verse/prose, soliloquy and staging - and how they shape the audience's response, within a tragic/comic frame.

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