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EnglandEnglish LiteratureQuick questions
Component 2: Drama
Quick questions on Comparing across drama texts: building AO4 connections - Eduqas A-Level English Literature
6short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What is connect by idea, not by plot?Show answer
A connection is not "both plays have a death scene". That is plot. A real AO4 connection links the two plays at the level of idea and method: "both plays stage death as a public spectacle, but where the Jacobean tragedy makes it a moment of horrified communal witness, the modern play makes it banal and administrative, so the two dramatise mortality through opposite registers". The connection is conceptual and analytical, and it carries a point about meaning.
What is a model AO4 connection?Show answer
"Both plays make ambition theatrical, but they locate it differently. Marlowe isolates Faustus in soliloquy, so ambition is an inward overreaching the audience watches reason itself into ruin, a private tragedy staged as self-address. Prebble, by contrast, externalises ambition into corporate spectacle, choruses and projections that make overreaching collective and systemic, so there is no single soliloquising mind to pity.
What is a weak connection upgraded?Show answer
"Both plays are about ambitious people who fail." Upgraded: where Marlowe stages ambition as inward overreaching in soliloquy, inviting tragic pity, Prebble disperses it into corporate spectacle, refusing a single mind to pity, so the same concern pulls one play towards tragedy and the other towards satire. Plot becomes an analytical connection.
What is q1?Show answer
What makes a connection AO4-worthy rather than a plot observation? [2 marks]
What is q2?Show answer
Why is a "two mini-essays then a comparison" structure fatal to AO4? [2 marks]
What is q3?Show answer
Compare how your two dramatists connect the individual to the society around them. [Section B; marked out of 60]
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