OxfordAQA A-Level English Literature: Aspects of Dramatic Tragedy (9675)

This guide covers Unit 1 Aspects of Dramatic Tragedy, the first of four units in OxfordAQA International AS & A-Level English Literature (9675), Version 5.3, for International AS exams from May/June 2018 and A-level exams from May/June 2019. As the opening unit, it establishes the genre-focused analytical approach that the rest of the qualification builds on.

Where this fits in 9675

Units 1-2 (Aspects of Dramatic Tragedy, Place in Literary Texts) 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 introduces the genre-focused approach that continues into the A-level’s crime-writing unit. The two units share a common analytical demand — treating a genre as a set of conventions to be debated, not a checklist to confirm — even though Unit 3’s genre (crime and mystery) is quite different from tragedy in its conventions and history.

Syllabus coverage

OXFORDAQA INTERNATIONAL AS & A-LEVEL ENGLISH LITERATURE (9675) — UNIT 1 ASPECTS OF DRAMATIC TRAGEDY

Unit 1 explores tragedy as a dramatic genre through ten prescribed plays, five per section, fixed for the life of this specification version and printed in full below. Section A (Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy): Shakespeare’s Othello, King Lear and Hamlet, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (B text) and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Section B (later dramatic tragedies): Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Friel’s Translations. The unit examines how playwrights use and adapt tragic conventions such as the tragic hero, catharsis and dramatic irony. This list is current as of Version 5.3; confirm with your teacher which specific two plays (one per section) your own centre has chosen to study.

How to approach it

Because this unit is genre-focused rather than single-text-focused, build a working definition of “tragedy” as a set of contested conventions. The specification itself describes these in plain English rather than technical vocabulary – the flaws, pride and folly, blindness and insight of tragic protagonists, and the capacity of tragedy to move an audience through pity and fear – and states explicitly that there is no exhaustive list of the aspects of tragedy. Greek critical terms such as hamartia and catharsis describe the same ideas and are useful optional vocabulary, but the specification’s own plain-English framing, not a fixed Greek terminology, is the required frame. Practise discussing how each set play both uses and departs from tragic convention, since genre debate is typically rewarded over simple feature-spotting. Feature-spotting identifies a convention is present; genre debate asks whether the play’s use of that convention is straightforward, subverted, or genuinely ambiguous — and it is this second, more evaluative move that separates a strong response from an adequate one. As these are studied as plays, keep staging and performance choices in view alongside language and structure, since dramatic effect is central to how tragedy works on an audience — a purely textual reading that ignores staging misses a genuinely significant part of how tragic effect (catharsis, dramatic irony) is actually created in performance. Building a small bank of critical perspectives on tragedy as a genre, which you can apply to and challenge using your set texts, strengthens responses beyond straightforward plot-and-theme analysis, since contextual and critical interpretation is credited alongside close textual analysis in how this unit is marked.

Assessment at a glance

Unit 1 (Aspects of Dramatic Tragedy) is a 2-hour, closed-book written exam worth 50 marks – 50% of the International AS and 20% of the full International A-level. This drop in weighting from 50% to 20% reflects that the full A-level adds Units 3-4 on top of the existing AS content, rather than Unit 1 itself becoming less demanding. Section A (25 marks) is a passage-based question on the candidate’s chosen Elizabethan or Jacobean tragedy; Section B (25 marks) is an essay question on the candidate’s chosen later dramatic tragedy. Candidates answer one question from each section, writing on two plays in total, so the closed-book quotation bank built for revision needs to cover both plays with equal depth, not favour one over the other.

OxfordAQA has published a revised 9675 specification (Version 5.6) for first teaching from 2027, with a refreshed set-text list – affecting cohorts starting from 2027, with first AS exams in May/June 2028. The revised specification also renames this unit, replacing a word in its title throughout the contents page, the at-a-glance table and the mark-scheme exemplification – confirm the current unit name with your teacher or centre once your cohort moves onto the revised specification. The Unit 1 structure described above (two sections, 2 hours, 50 marks, closed book) is unchanged between versions. On the board’s final-examinations date: OxfordAQA’s own qualification page currently states two different final AS dates for existing cohorts on the current specification – 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, and always confirm which specification version applies to your own examination year before finalising which edition of your set texts to buy.

Why two plays from two different periods

Section A requires an Elizabethan or Jacobean tragedy (Shakespeare’s own era or shortly after); Section B requires a later dramatic tragedy from a different period. This deliberate spread across periods is designed to test whether a candidate’s understanding of tragic convention genuinely transfers, rather than being tied to the specific historical and theatrical conventions of a single era — the unit’s title names “dramatic tragedy” as a genre spanning centuries, not a period study of any single era’s theatre — a strong response to both sections shows the same critical fluency with the genre’s core conventions (the flaws, pride and folly of tragic protagonists; catharsis through pity and fear) regardless of which century the play was written in.

Building a genre-focused, not just play-focused, response

Because both sections are marked on how well a candidate engages with tragedy as a genre, a response that only analyses the chosen play’s plot, characters and themes — without connecting that analysis back to tragic convention specifically — will underperform even where the underlying textual knowledge is strong. Before writing, it helps to identify explicitly which tragic conventions the question or extract engages with, and whether the play uses, subverts, or complicates each one, rather than assuming genre engagement will emerge naturally from a well-written general essay. A brief planning note naming the specific convention at stake, before writing the main response, keeps this genre focus visible throughout rather than only in an introduction.

Official specification

OxfordAQA International AS & A-Level English Literature specification PDF, Version 5.3 — oxfordaqa.com.