Quick questions on Reading Shakespeare as drama: analysing dramatic method - Eduqas A-Level English Literature

The decisive analytical move is to read every feature for its effect on the audience. A soliloquy does not just "tell us how the character feels"; it lets the audience hear a thought the other characters cannot, creating intimacy or complicity. Dramatic irony makes them watch a character walk into danger they cannot see. Always ask: what does this do to the people watching?

"Shakespeare grants the audience privileged access through the soliloquy, isolating the speaker so we hear the thought the court cannot. The verse, controlled and public elsewhere, here fractures into questions and self-interruption, so the form exposes a mind divided against itself, and the audience, alone with that mind, is drawn into a complicity the other characters are denied." The method (soliloquy, verse, staging) is read for audience effect.

"The character is confused and does not know what to do." Upgraded: Shakespeare stages the indecision through a soliloquy whose self-interrupting verse enacts a mind unable to settle, and by isolating the speaker he makes the audience the sole witness to a doubt the court never sees. Character study becomes dramatic analysis.

What does it mean to read a play as drama rather than as a story? [2 marks]

Why does the phrase "Shakespeare presents" help an answer? [2 marks]

Analyse how Shakespeare uses dramatic method to shape the audience's response in a printed extract from your play. [part i; marked out of 30]