Eduqas A-Level English Language and Literature: Component 2 Drama overview quiz quiz

A single closed-book Shakespeare essay on one studied play, with no extract and no second section at all

An unseen drama comparison in which two plays met cold are compared against the clock with no preparation

A 2 hour paper worth 30 percent, in two sections: a Shakespeare question (extract plus essay) and a post-1900 drama essay

A coursework folder on two whole plays, marked entirely by the centre and moderated by the board rather than sat as an exam

Two entirely different Shakespeare plays studied and set side by side for comparison

Only the verse scenes balanced against the prose scenes, with nothing else considered

Two competing named critics whose published readings of the play must be weighed up

Close analysis of the printed extract and a whole-play argument the extract anchors

The blank verse is meaning: metre, enjambment, caesura and the grammar of the lines shape the dramatic effect

Because the verse lines are simply far easier to quote accurately from memory than the prose passages are

Because the exam directly tests your own ability to scan the metre of the lines and mark up the stresses correctly

Because what the lines actually say does not matter, only how the verse sounds when it is read out loud

Because a soliloquy always rhymes throughout and so must be read as a self-contained lyric poem

It exposes a character's mind to the audience while concealing it from the stage, making the audience complicit

Because a soliloquy is in fact always spoken directly to another character who is present on the stage

Because a soliloquy is in fact always written in plain prose rather than in verse, which marks it out clearly as private speech

By paraphrasing in your own words what each of the characters says to the others in turn across the scene

By counting up the number of separate lines each of the characters speaks and then comparing those running totals across the scene

Through discourse and pragmatics: turn-taking, floor control, interruptions, adjacency pairs, politeness, face and implicature

By identifying the rhyme scheme and metrical pattern of the lines and reading the dialogue as a verse form

Purely through the playwright's stage directions, which carry all the work of building each character

Through the printed cast list at the front of the play, which sets out who each character really is

Through the private imagination of each member of the audience alone, working quite independently of the words actually spoken

With no narrator to describe them, characters are built through their characteristic lexis, syntax and register

The order and pacing of scenes, the placing of climax and reversal, and the parallels that create irony or tension

A plain summary of the plot of the play, retold scene by scene from the opening through to the closing curtain

The total number of acts the play is divided into and how evenly the running time is shared between them all

The full list of characters set out at the very front of the script, in the order in which they each first enter the action

With a printed extract supplied and a comparison against a second modern play

As a single essay in Section B, without an extract, with the play known from memory

As a creative rewriting task in which a scene is recast in a different genre or form

Alongside the Shakespeare extract in Section A, as part of the same combined question

Reading the play as though it were simply a novel that happens to be written in dialogue

Reading only the most famous set-piece speeches and skipping over the rest of the script

Reading the play as drama written for performance, not as a story to summarise

Reading the play as if it were a single long poem to be scanned for metre and rhyme

Because real stage productions are simply very easy to describe in detail from memory, which is what AO5 most rewards on this paper

Because AO5 on the drama paper rewards naming as many published critics as possible and quoting their differing verdicts on the play

Because the staging implied by a play is never assessed at all on this paper, so the AO5 marks fall entirely on a close reading of the bare words on the printed page instead

A play is realised differently in different productions, so holding competing stagings live and asking which the text supports turns interpretation into analysis

Read as meaning: the use of space, silence, entrances and the playing of a line are part of what the play does in the theatre

Ignored entirely, since only the words on the printed page truly matter and the staging is irrelevant to meaning

Described purely from one particular real production you happen to have seen, taking its choices as the only ones

Treated as something wholly separate from the text itself, a much later addition made by the director that has no real bearing on it

Writing far too much about the whole of the play from memory and neglecting the printed extract entirely

Analysing the printed extract in detail and stopping, forgetting the question is about the whole play

Quoting the blank verse far too often and at far too great a length throughout the whole answer

Spending too long considering the genre and conventions of the play rather than its language