Unit 4 Shakespeare and Pre-1900 Poetry (YET01): Practice Questions

These are original questions written for Marlbridge, for revision and practice on this content. They are not reproduced past-paper questions, and they do not replicate the exam’s exact structure, question count or mark tariffs — examination boards hold copyright in their own papers. Use these alongside the official past papers available free from your board.

Related: Unit 4 revision notes · Unit 4 study guide

Unit 4 of Pearson Edexcel International A Level English Literature (YET01) asks for two 25-mark essays in two hours: one on a Shakespeare play and one on a pre-1900 poetry movement. Each question gives a statement to respond to, and each essay is assessed on AO1, AO2, AO3 and AO5. The questions below follow that pattern, one per set text and one per movement, with indicative content mapped to the assessment objectives. Answer one from Section A and one from Section B in timed conditions.

Section A: Shakespeare (25 marks each)

In your answer you must consider relevant contextual factors and different interpretations of the play.

1. Hamlet. “Hamlet’s delay is a sign of his moral seriousness, not his weakness.” Explore this view of the play.

2. King Lear. “The play’s real tragedy is Gloucester’s, not Lear’s.” Explore this view.

3. Measure for Measure. “The Duke is less a ruler than a manipulator.” Explore this view of the play.

4. The Taming of the Shrew. “The play mocks the very idea of a wife’s obedience.” Explore this view.

Section B: Pre-1900 Poetry (25 marks each)

In your answer you must consider relevant contextual factors and different interpretations of the poems. Refer to at least two prescribed poems from your movement.

5. Metaphysical Poets. “Metaphysical poets argue about love rather than express it.” Explore this view.

6. The Romantics. “For the Romantic poets, nature offers escape from human suffering.” Explore this view.

7. The Victorians. “Victorian poetry is haunted by loss.” Explore this view.

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Indicative content

These points are a guide to relevant material, not a checklist. Credit any well-supported response.

Question 1 (Hamlet)

AO	Indicative content
AO1	A clear position on “moral seriousness” versus “weakness”; accurate terminology (soliloquy, revenge tragedy, dramatic irony)
AO2	Soliloquies (“O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I”, “To be, or not to be”) showing self-reproach and reasoning; the play-within-a-play as a test of the Ghost; the prayer scene, where Hamlet refuses to kill Claudius at prayer; the sudden action of the final scene
AO3	Revenge tragedy conventions (Kyd); Protestant uncertainty about purgatory and ghosts; reception history, including Romantic readings of a sensitive, paralysed Hamlet
AO5	Weighs Coleridge’s view of Hamlet as over-intellectual against readings of delay as justified doubt about the Ghost; the Freudian reading (Ernest Jones); productions that play Hamlet as decisive or as unstable

Question 2 (King Lear)

AO	Indicative content
AO1/AO2	The double plot: Gloucester’s blinding parallels Lear’s madness; “I stumbled when I saw”; the Dover cliff scene; Gloucester’s death offstage, reported by Edgar, versus Lear’s onstage death with Cordelia
AO3	Jacobean anxieties about inheritance and the division of the kingdom; legitimacy and Edmund’s “Now, gods, stand up for bastards!”; Tate’s adaptation as reception
AO5	Is Gloucester a lesser echo or a more pitiable figure? Productions that make the blinding the centre of the play; critical readings of the subplot as commentary

Question 3 (Measure for Measure)

AO	Indicative content
AO1/AO2	The Duke’s disguise as a friar; the bed-trick and head-trick; his final proposal to Isabella, to which she gives no spoken reply; the structure of the last act as staged judgement
AO3	James I’s interest in the theory of kingship (Basilikon Doron); Jacobean debates about the regulation of sexuality; the problem-play category
AO5	The Duke as providential figure versus manipulator; productions that make Isabella’s silence a refusal; feminist readings

Question 4 (The Taming of the Shrew)

AO	Indicative content
AO1/AO2	The Induction with Christopher Sly framing the play as performance; Petruchio’s “taming” methods; Katherina’s final speech on wifely duty; the wager scene
AO3	Early modern ideas of marriage and patriarchy; shrew-taming traditions; reception: the play’s shifting reputation and modern adaptations
AO5	Katherina’s speech as sincere, ironic or strategic; productions that play it as defeat or as a shared game; feminist critiques

Question 5 (Metaphysical)

AO	Indicative content
AO1/AO2	Argument structures in “The Flea” (persuasion through a conceit), “To His Coy Mistress” (the three-part syllogism “Had we… But… Now therefore”), “The Definition of Love”; contrast with feeling in “A Valediction of Weeping” or Bradstreet’s “A Letter to her Husband”
AO3	The term “metaphysical” applied later (Dryden, Johnson); seventeenth-century learning and new science; the carpe diem tradition
AO5	Johnson’s criticism of “heterogeneous ideas… yoked by violence together” versus T S Eliot’s praise of the poets’ fusion of thought and feeling, before what he called the “dissociation of sensibility”

Question 6 (Romantics)

AO	Indicative content
AO1/AO2	“Ode to a Nightingale”: desire to “fade away” into the bird’s world, then the return to the “sole self”; “Tintern Abbey”: nature as a moral guide and source of memory; Blake’s “London” placing suffering in the city, not nature; “Lines Written in Early Spring”: “what man has made of man”
AO3	Industrialisation and urban poverty; the French Revolution; Romantic ideas of the imagination and the sublime
AO5	Escape versus engagement: readings of Romanticism as political protest (Blake, Shelley) against readings of withdrawal; new historicist criticism of Wordsworth’s omissions

Question 7 (Victorians)

AO	Indicative content
AO1/AO2	Elegy in In Memoriam VII (“Dark house”); Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” and “Drummer Hodge”; Rossetti’s “Remember” and “Echo”; Browning’s “My Last Duchess” as loss turned to possession
AO3	Religious doubt after Lyell and Darwin; the Boer War (Hardy); Victorian mourning culture; women poets and constraint
AO5	Loss as personal grief versus loss of faith or of social certainty; readings of the “Darkling Thrush” ending as faint hope or irony

What separates stronger answers in both sections. They respond to the statement throughout, weigh at least one alternative interpretation and judge it, use context to explain choices of form and language, and analyse methods in detail. Weaker answers summarise the play or poems and add a critic’s name at the end.

Frequently asked questions

Must I disagree with the statement? No. You can agree, disagree or qualify it. What matters is that you test it against evidence and alternative readings, which is how the statement invites AO5.

Can I use a production I watched online? Yes. The specification allows learners to use performances they have “seen or viewed” for different interpretations.

Should I quote critics word for word? Short, accurate critical phrases help, but paraphrase is fine. Evaluate the view; do not simply report it.

Official specification

Pearson Edexcel International Advanced Subsidiary/Advanced Level in English Literature, Issue 7, Unit 4 and Appendix 5 — qualifications.pearson.com.