What and How to Revise for your Shakespeare exam (Edexcel A Level English Literature Component 1A)

This is the first in a series of articles offering advice for preparing for the Edexcel English Literature A Level. I have taught this specification for several years and (so far) nobody has failed! Hopefully that means my advice will be useful to you.

Students are often unsure what and how to revise for English, so in this article, I will share my top tips to revise your Shakespeare play effectively.

Before you start, make sure you know exactly what the assessment objectives for this question are. You are assessed for:

• AO1: your ability to write an informed, convincing essay; your use of relevant concepts and terminology.
• AO2: your ability to analyse the ways meanings are shaped in texts.
• AO3: your ability to understand the significance of relevant context (in particular, the literary context of either tragedy or comedy)
• AO5: your ability to consider and engage with different interpretations, particularly those from the Critical Anthology.

Shakespeare Revision Tips

If you haven’t started already, start now! Remember that Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. I hope the following tips will help you prepare effectively.

1. It may sound obvious but make sure you have read – and preferably, reread – the play. Hopefully you will have done this in class, but you may have been asked to read some bits yourself (you would not be the first students to think reading homework was optional!) Keep in mind that a first reading will often be hard – you may not understand it first time, but you will understand more about it every time you reread it.
2. Watch several versions of the play. Shakespeare didn’t write these plays to be read and studied; he wanted to entertain people in a theatre, so watching performances is the best way to understand (and remember) the play as a whole. The way directors and actors interpret and present the play can also be referenced in essays for AO5. A word of warning though: don’t just rely on watching a film or theatre production – examiners are unimpressed when students write about the fish tank scene in Romeo and Juliet as it’s pretty unlikely that is what Shakespeare had in mind!
3. You will have the text in the exam, so you don’t really need to learn quotations off by heart, but it is helpful to know where they are in the text so you don’t waste valuable exam time searching for particular quotations. A useful revision tip is to write summaries of each scene on cards with the Act/Scene numbers on the back of the card; spread them out on the floor in front of you and try to arrange them in the right order. Keep doing this so you know the sequence of events in the play really well. Pay particular attention to where key scenes are (soliloquies, confrontations, deaths etc); these are likely to be useful for a range of exam questions and will also be useful markers to help you navigate your way around the play.
4. Know the terminology which is relevant to this unit (think soliloquy, blank verse, iambic pentameter, rhyming couplets, prose, dramatic irony…). If you don’t know these already, try writing them on notes and sticking them in places where you will see them often (the places that worked for me were my dressing table mirror, the biscuit tin and the back of the bathroom door!)
5. Make mind maps of the key themes and characters. Your teacher will probably have given you a list of themes to revise but, if not, they are easy to find using online study guides. Use different colours for different themes – this can act as a memory jogger and also just make it more engaging to look at. Once you have made these, don’t just put them in a folder and forget about them: keep reading them; try to reproduce them from memory; add quotations to them; or reduce them to fewer words.
6. Spend a lot of your revision time planning essays; do this for all of the main characters and themes. For each one, think of what your thesis would be; find evidence from the play that would help you argue this; plan the analytical points you would make about this evidence; think about any relevant links to context and which critics you could refer to. Going through the planning process thoroughly as part of your revision should save you from having to think an idea through from scratch in the exam.
7. Do some active revision – you don’t need to be shut in your room for months leading up to the exams! Go for a walk or a coffee with a friend in your class and talk through how you would answer questions on certain characters or themes. Not only will you benefit from another person’s perspective on this, but being able to argue your ideas will really help to boost how confident you feel about your knowledge of the text.
8. Having said that, make sure you do some timed essays; you will have approximately 80 minutes for this exam. If you will be handwriting in the exam, you need to do your essay practice by hand too. Try to think of this like training for a marathon – you wouldn’t do that without training, so make sure your hand can keep going for the whole exam (2 hours 15 minutes in total) and that you can get your essay written in that time. Get these marked and pay close attention to the feedback; be willing to do them again until you are happy with your mark. Your teacher should be willing to mark extra timed essays but, if not, try my proofreading service.
9. Make sure you know about any relevant social, historical, biographical or cultural context that might have influenced Shakespeare when he wrote the play. Think about how an audience would have reacted to the play when it was first performed and why this might be a different reaction to your own reaction. Most importantly, make sure you know the generic conventions of the genre you are studying (Comedy or Tragedy) so that you can see which parts of your play typify this genre and can comment on any which don’t.
10. Some students find it quite difficult to remember which critic from the Critical Anthology said what. A useful tip to help with this is to do all of your work on each critic using a different colour or on different colour paper. This really helped me when revising for my degree finals – I can still see my notes on their different coloured paper now over 30 years later! The different colour can act as a memory trigger, for example, you may remember that all your Nuttall notes about Pleasure and Tragedy are on green paper so hopefully you won’t mix them up with your Kastan notes on purple. (If you are too easily excited by lovely stationery like me, having a range of different coloured papers and nice pens to write with can actually make revision a bit more enjoyable.)
11. Try to reduce each critical essay to a few clear bullet points that you understand – paraphrasing it can make it much easier to get to grips with and remember. For each bullet point, think of evidence from the play to support or refute that idea. Make sure you can find that evidence in the book.
12. If there are parts that you don’t understand as you’re revising, make a list of questions for your teacher or tutor. They are there to help you so use them! This is a good reason to start revising now as teachers are not going to be available to help you in the early hours of the morning of your exam!

Although not a revision tip, I would also advise you to make sure the book you are revising from is the same edition of the book that you will be given in the exam. Most schools will provide you with a clean copy of the text in the exam and, if you have not used this edition before, you will find it much harder to locate the quotations you need to find.

Look out for my next article on How to Revise the Other Drama text.