You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
AO3 — the assessment objective concerned with context — carries significant weight in A-Level English Literature. For Paper 1 Section A, you need to demonstrate understanding of the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which Shakespeare wrote, and how these contexts shape his treatment of love. This lesson provides the essential contextual knowledge for the set plays, focusing on marriage, sexuality, race, religion, and the law.
Paper 1, Section A: Shakespeare (AQA 7712). Set text: Othello, with reference to Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale and The Taming of the Shrew.
AO Focus in this lesson Weight here AO1 Building arguments in which context is integrated, not bolted on Developed AO2 Reading how contextual ideas (honour, race, betrothal) are encoded in the language Developed AO3 Dominant. Marriage law, the double standard, race in early modern England, religion, the Great Chain of Being Dominant AO5 How contextual knowledge opens up rival interpretations (e.g. Loomba on race) Supporting Section A assesses AO1, AO2, AO3 and AO5 (not AO4). The dominant objective here is AO3, but with a crucial caveat: context earns marks only when it is used as a lever on meaning. A free-standing history lecture scores nothing; a contextual insight woven into close reading scores highly.
The golden rule of AO3: never write a paragraph of historical background. Write a sentence of context attached to a piece of text — "Because a wife's chastity was, under the honour code, the foundation of her husband's public identity, Othello experiences Desdemona's supposed betrayal not as private grief but as the annihilation of his social self: 'Othello's occupation's gone' (3.3.357)." That is context doing work.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Age of marriage | Legal minimum was 12 for girls, 14 for boys — but most people married in their mid-to-late twenties |
| Parental consent | Expected (and socially enforced) but not legally required for those over the age of consent; however, marrying without consent could result in disinheritance |
| Betrothal (troth-plight) | A formal promise to marry, which had legal force — a couple who had exchanged vows and consummated the relationship were considered married in the eyes of the Church |
| Dowry | The bride's family provided a dowry (money, property, goods) to the groom's family; the size of the dowry was a major factor in marriage negotiations |
| Jointure | The groom's family settled property on the bride that she would receive if widowed — her financial security |
| Coverture | Upon marriage, a woman's legal identity was absorbed into her husband's — she could not own property, sign contracts, or bring legal actions independently |
In The Taming of the Shrew, the financial negotiations between Petruchio and Baptista are dramatically foregrounded. Baptista promises "the one half of my lands" after his death and "in possession twenty thousand crowns" (2.1.121–22). The scene makes explicit what polite convention usually conceals: marriage is a commercial transaction.
Claudio and Juliet's situation in Measure for Measure reflects the confusion surrounding betrothal. They have exchanged vows and consummated their relationship, but have not yet had a church wedding — and under Angelo's strict enforcement of the law, Claudio is sentenced to death for fornication. This plot point depends on the audience understanding the legal ambiguity of pre-contract.
AO3 — Context: Shakespeare's own daughter Susanna sued one John Lane for defamation in 1613 after he alleged she had committed adultery, and his younger daughter Judith married Thomas Quiney, who had fathered an illegitimate child. The social realities of sexual behaviour in early modern England were often more complex than the legal and religious ideals suggested.
The Church of England taught that sex was permissible only within marriage and only for the purpose of procreation. Extra-marital sex — whether fornication (between unmarried people) or adultery (involving at least one married person) — was a sin and could be prosecuted in the ecclesiastical courts.
In practice, sexual morality was enforced far more strictly for women than for men:
| Standard | For Women | For Men |
|---|---|---|
| Virginity | Essential for an unmarried woman; its loss destroyed her marriageability and social standing | Not expected; sexual experience was often seen as a mark of masculine maturity |
| Adultery | A devastating social and legal offence; an adulterous wife could be divorced and left destitute | Condemned in theory but widely tolerated in practice; male infidelity did not carry the same social stigma |
| Prostitution | Prostitutes were stigmatised, punished, and marginalised | Male customers faced no equivalent social punishment |
This double standard is central to Measure for Measure, where Angelo condemns Claudio to death for fornication while himself attempting to coerce Isabella into sex. The play exposes the hypocrisy of a system that punishes men for what it would destroy women for, while the enforcers of that system are themselves corrupt.
In Othello, the entire tragedy depends on the weight given to female chastity. Desdemona's supposed infidelity is not merely hurtful to Othello — it is, in the logic of the play's world, an existential catastrophe. Othello's honour, his public identity, his sense of self — all depend on Desdemona's fidelity.
Key Definition: Cuckoldry — the state of a husband whose wife is unfaithful — was one of the most pervasive anxieties in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. The cuckold was depicted as wearing horns (a visual symbol of his humiliation) and was the object of public ridicule. The fear of cuckoldry pervades Shakespeare's work, from the comic (the jealous Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor) to the tragic (Othello, Leontes).
Othello is Shakespeare's most sustained engagement with race, and understanding the racial dynamics of the play requires careful contextual knowledge.
| Factor | Detail |
|---|---|
| Black people in England | There was a small but significant black population in Elizabethan London — servants, musicians, traders, and diplomats |
| Elizabeth I's proclamations | In 1596 and 1601, Elizabeth issued proclamations ordering the deportation of "blackamoors" — though these were likely prompted by economic anxieties rather than racial ideology in the modern sense |
| The Moor | The term "Moor" was used loosely to describe people from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Islamic world; it did not correspond precisely to modern racial categories |
| Racial prejudice | While Elizabethan racial attitudes differed from modern racism, there was widespread prejudice against people of African descent, associated with ideas about savagery, sexual excess, and the devil |
The play opens with Iago and Roderigo using viciously racist language to describe Othello and Desdemona's relationship:
"Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe." (1.1.88–89)
Brabantio cannot believe that Desdemona would willingly choose Othello:
"She is abused, stol'n from me, and corrupted
By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks." (1.3.61–62)
The assumption that a white woman's love for a black man must be the result of witchcraft reveals the depth of racial prejudice in Venice. Shakespeare gives Othello the most eloquent verse in the play, directly contradicting the racist stereotypes voiced by other characters — but the tragedy unfolds in part because those stereotypes have a structural power that individual eloquence cannot overcome.
AO5 — Critical Interpretations: Ania Loomba argues that Othello internalises the racial stereotypes of Venetian society — that when he succumbs to jealousy, he becomes the "savage" that Venice always feared he was. Ben Okri reads Othello as a man destroyed not by his nature but by a racist society that will never fully accept him, however eloquently he speaks its language.
Measure for Measure is deeply engaged with questions of religious morality, mercy, and justice.
| Context | Relevance |
|---|---|
| The title | "Measure for Measure" is a biblical phrase (Matthew 7:2): "For with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" — suggesting that justice should be proportional |
| Isabella's novitiate | Isabella is about to enter the Order of Saint Clare (the Poor Clares), a strict religious order that demanded complete withdrawal from the world |
| Angelo's Puritanism | Angelo's strict enforcement of moral law echoes Puritan calls for stricter sexual discipline in Jacobean London |
| The bed-trick | The bed-trick (substituting Mariana for Isabella) depends on the pre-contract between Angelo and Mariana — a betrothal that makes their sexual union technically legitimate |
| Mercy vs. Justice | The play stages a theological debate between strict justice (Angelo) and mercy (Isabella, the Duke) that echoes Protestant and Catholic positions on salvation |
AO3 — Context: Shakespeare's London was a city where the theatres existed in constant tension with Puritan moralists who wanted them closed. Measure for Measure can be read as engaging with this cultural conflict: the play's Vienna, like Shakespeare's London, is a city where law, morality, and sexual desire are in perpetual conflict.
Love in Shakespeare always operates within a social hierarchy:
Elizabethan society was understood through the metaphor of the Great Chain of Being — a divinely ordained hierarchy stretching from God through the angels, the monarch, the nobility, the commoners, the animals, and down to inanimate matter. Disruptions to this hierarchy — a woman defying her father, a subject defying the king, passion overcoming reason — were understood as violations of the natural order.
Exam Tip: The best use of context is integrated — woven into your analysis of language, form, and structure, not presented as a separate paragraph of historical information. When you make a contextual point, always connect it to the text: "Shakespeare's audience, familiar with the homily on marriage, would have heard Kate's final speech as either sincere conformity or knowing subversion of a language they heard every Sunday."
Context should serve your argument, not replace it. Effective contextual analysis:
The most important contextual point about Othello is that the play opens with race weaponised. Before Othello speaks a word, Iago and Roderigo define him for the audience through a torrent of racist imagery:
"Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe." (Othello, 1.1.88–89)
The contextual reading here is not "Elizabethans were racist" — that is too crude to earn marks. The analytical point is how the racism works in the language and what cultural assumptions it activates. The animal metaphor ("ram," "ewe," "tupping") reduces a marriage to bestial copulation, drawing on a contemporary discourse that associated blackness with hypersexuality and the demonic. The colour antithesis — "black ram," "white ewe" — maps a moral binary (corruption vs purity) onto skin, and the repetition "now, now, very now" creates a lurid sense of an outrage happening at this instant, designed to inflame Brabantio. Crucially, Shakespeare puts this language in the mouths of the play's least trustworthy characters, and then gives Othello the most dignified verse in the play — so the play both deploys the racist discourse and invites us to see it as ideology. But the tragedy turns on the fact that Iago's slander, though false, draws on assumptions with real social power: when Brabantio cannot conceive that his daughter chose Othello freely — "She is abused, stol'n from me, and corrupted / By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks" (1.3.61–62) — he reveals that the entire Venetian establishment shares the premise that a white woman could not love a Moor without witchcraft. This is context as a structural force, and it is exactly what Ania Loomba means when she argues that Othello is finally destroyed by a society whose racial logic he has himself absorbed.
Exam Tip: When you deploy context, attach it to a word or image, not to a character or a century. "The animal imagery activates a Renaissance discourse linking blackness with sexual excess" is AO3 fused with AO2. "Elizabethans were prejudiced" is neither.
A frequently neglected dimension of AO3 is the material context of performance — the physical and institutional conditions under which these plays were first staged. This is not antiquarian detail; it shapes how the plays make meaning.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.