Aspects of Dramatic Tragedy (9675): Revision Notes

Condensed for the final weeks. For the full explanation, use the Aspects of Dramatic Tragedy study guide.

Unit 1 at a glance

2 hours, closed book, 50 marks = 50% of the International AS, 20% of the full International A-level.

Section	Focus	Marks
A	Passage-based question, chosen Elizabethan/Jacobean tragedy	25
B	Essay question, chosen later dramatic tragedy	25

Two plays in total — one per section.

Core tragic conventions to know cold

Genre debate, not feature-spotting, is what separates a strong response from an adequate one: identifying that a convention is present earns limited credit compared with debating how straightforwardly, ambiguously or subversively a given play actually uses it.

• Tragic hero — a protagonist whose downfall drives the play.
• Hamartia — the hero’s fatal flaw or error of judgement.
• Catharsis — the emotional release/purging the audience experiences through witnessing the tragedy.
• Dramatic irony — the audience knowing something a character does not.

The specification itself describes these ideas in plain English — the flaws, pride and folly, blindness and insight of tragic protagonists, and the capacity of tragedy to move an audience through pity and fear — rather than setting out a required list of Greek critical terms. Treat “hamartia” and “catharsis” above as useful shorthand for revision, not the required frame: use them as a debate, not a checklist — does each play use, complicate, or subvert the convention?

Section A — the passage

Ground your answer in close reading of the given extract’s language and dramatic method first, then connect outward to how that moment functions within the play’s tragic structure as a whole.

Section B — the essay

A sustained genre-focused argument across the whole play, using well-selected (memorised, since closed book) evidence from multiple points in the text.

Staging matters

Since these are plays, not novels, always keep performance and staging — how a line might be delivered, blocked or received by an audience — alongside language analysis, since dramatic effect is central to how tragedy actually works on an audience rather than something that emerges purely from the written text.

Why two plays from two different periods

Section A requires an Elizabethan or Jacobean tragedy while Section B requires a later dramatic tragedy from a different period, and this deliberate spread is designed to test whether your understanding of tragic convention genuinely transfers across eras, rather than being tied to the theatrical conventions of a single period. A strong response to both sections shows the same critical fluency with core conventions — the tragic hero, hamartia, catharsis — regardless of which century the play was written in, so revise both plays with a consistent focus on the shared critical ideas — the flaws, pride and folly of tragic protagonists; catharsis through pity and fear — rather than treating them as two unrelated period studies.

Building a genre-focused response

A response that only analyses plot, character and theme, without explicitly connecting that analysis back to tragic convention, will underperform even with strong textual knowledge, since both sections are marked on genre engagement specifically. Before writing, identify which tragic conventions the question or extract actually engages with, and whether the play uses, subverts or complicates each one — a brief planning note naming the specific convention at stake keeps this genre focus visible throughout the response rather than only in the introduction. Building a small bank of critical perspectives on tragedy that can be applied to and challenged using your own set texts also strengthens a response beyond straightforward plot-and-theme analysis, since critical interpretation is credited alongside close textual analysis.

Where this unit sits in the qualification

Units 1-2 (Aspects of Dramatic Tragedy, Place in Literary Texts) together form the International AS; the full International A-level adds Unit 3 (Elements of Crime and Mystery) and Unit 4 (Literary Representations). Studying tragedy as a genre in Unit 1 establishes the genre-focused analytical approach — treating a genre as a set of conventions to be debated, not a checklist to confirm — that continues into Unit 3’s crime-writing content later in the course, even though crime and mystery’s own conventions and history are quite different from tragedy’s.

Exam traps

• Feature-spotting tragic conventions without debating how the play uses or departs from them.
• Section A answers that ignore the given passage and write a general essay instead.
• Forgetting the exam is closed book — a focused, memorised quotation bank per play is essential.
• Confusing which specification version applies — a revised 9675 for first teaching from 2027 exists alongside the current Version 5.3.

Confirming which specification version applies

OxfordAQA has published a revised 9675 specification, Version 5.6, for first teaching from 2027. As well as a refreshed set-text list, this revision renames this unit, replacing a word in its title throughout the contents page, the at-a-glance table and the mark-scheme exemplification. The Unit 1 structure covered in these notes — two sections, 2 hours, 50 marks, closed book — is unchanged between versions, but the prescribed plays and the unit’s exact title differ, so always confirm which specification version and set-text list applies to your own examination year before finalising which editions of your set texts to buy or which quotation bank to build for revision. The board’s own qualification pages also state two different final-AS dates for the revised specification in different places — May/June 2027 (with a final resit in November 2028) in one place, and January 2028 (with final A2 exams in October/November 2028) in another. This guide cannot resolve which governs; always confirm directly with OxfordAQA or your centre which date applies to you.

Self-test

1. How many plays does Unit 1 require, and across which sections?
2. Define hamartia.
3. Why should tragic conventions be treated as debatable rather than a checklist?
4. What proportion of the full International A-level does Unit 1 represent?

Answers: 1. Two plays — one Elizabethan/Jacobean tragedy for Section A, one later dramatic tragedy for Section B. 2. The tragic hero’s fatal flaw or error of judgement that precipitates their downfall. 3. Because the highest marks reward genuine critical debate about how a play uses, complicates or subverts genre conventions, rather than simply identifying that a convention is present. 4. 20% of the full International A-level (also 50% of the International AS).