This is an anonymous request from a subscriber.
My teacher wrote:
16/30 marks.
The reason why you haven’t done well is you haven’t engaged with the extract and you have not made the extract the focus of your essay. You MUST ANSWER the question and YOU MUST focus your answer on the extract. Zoom in on words and use context.
I don’t want to be disrespectful to my current teacher but I genuinely don’t quite understand what I did wrong or need to do. I think I used the extract and have addressed the question.
If I follow your advice, which makes sense to me, the extract is a hint and whilst you should use it in the answer you don’t need to spend the whole essay on it.
My current teacher seems to tell us to focus very much on the extract and analyse it on word level, and I think she might be teaching a particular style but maybe not the general way.
The Question
Starting with this extract explain who Shakespeare presents the Father -
Daughter relationship in this extract, and the wider play.
Miranda. If by your art, my dearest father, you have 85
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to the welkin's cheek,
Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel, 90
Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,
Dash'd all to pieces. O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart. Poor souls, they perish'd.
Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere 95
It should the good ship so have swallow'd and
The fraughting souls within her.
Prospero. Be collected:
No more amazement: tell your piteous heart
There's no harm done. 100
Miranda. O, woe the day!
Normally, I say start chronologically.
I don’t have to say that here, because the extract is from the beginning of the play - so tracing the relationship chronologically is going to be easy.
Student Essay
In Shakespeare’s The Tempest Prospero’s and Miranda’s Father Daughter relationship is presented as complex and multi-layered. Beside Ariel, who Prospero hides from Miranda & Caliban, it has just been the two of them alone on the island since Miranda was very young. We can undoubtedly say they have had a tight relationship.
On the one hand, Prospero cares for Miranda and wants the best for her. Throughout the play we see his unwavering efforts to protect her “virgin knot”, her virginity, arguably one of the most important facets of a woman at the time. This would mean she could marry well and secure her own future. However alternatively we see that their relationship is perhaps not so perfect as Prospero uses exactly this aspect of Miranda’s purity and marriage potential to use her as a pawn in his political game to secure the return of his own dukedom, getting revenge on those who usurped him. For her part Miranda, whilst naive and innocent, does not always follow her father’s wishes and could be considered to be slightly rebellious at times.
In this extract we see Miranda’s strong compassionate nature, as she places the blame and labels Prospero as the creator of the storm. Due to her sympathetic nature, she condemns her father’s actions with an unexpected confidence, challenging him “If by your art, my dearest Father….. allay them”. The stressful syllable that falls on “you have” emphasises Miranda’s suspicion and makes the audience aware that Prospero is indeed the cause. It is clear she is naive about his motives but questions why he would “put the wild waters” in “a roar” and is obviously angry with him at harming the people on board.
Miranda’s compassion and empathy is evident in the emotions of her speech. The repeated use of “O” as she exclaims how she suffered with them and cries out with them emphasising her anger and the polyptoton within the semantic field of suffering highlights this further. The last line of her main speech is cut short, showing her very emotional state. Miranda’s attitude to Prospero here foreshadows future disobedience.
This extract may create the impression to the audience that there is a slightly tense relationship, even though Prospero seeks to assure Miranda no harm has come to the male occupants of the ship. In the next scenes we see a controlling side to Prospero when we realise he has withheld their history from her, she is “ignorant to what thou art” and during his explanation he repeatedly asks her “dost thou hear”, to which she eventually replies “ your tale, sir, would cure deafness” which can be a reply to convey how engaging his story is, but may also be a slightly sarcastic reply that he is really going on too long. Most probably, due to the patriarchal society in the Elizabethan/ Jacobean era, Shakespeare is conveying that she is actually expressing fascination in the story, but for a modern day audience it would be nice to think that Shakespeare was actually pushing slightly feminist views and giving Miranda a slightly sarcastic line, and perhaps Prospero was taking too long to explain.
Finally, when Prospero doesn’t want her to see things after he has finished telling her how they arrived on the island, he uses his magic “thou art inclined to sleep”, again showing a controlling side, which to a modern day audience might seem more shocking than to Shakespeare contemporaries who were used to fathers controlling the females in their family.
Prospero has however been a “schoolmaster” to Miranda, giving her a good education and he genuinely seems to care for her as we see him name her a “cherubim” that sustained him when they were cast away.
As mentioned earlier Prospero uses Miranda as a pawn to gain his dukedom back, in that he ensures Ferdinand and Miranda fall in love. In an aside to the audience whilst he is hidden but observing the two, again Shakespeare chooses to show how Prospero controls her even when he is hidden: he says “it goes on I see, as my soul prompts it” - meaning she is part of his big plan.
That Prospero seems to genuinely want Ferdinand to earn Miranda by setting him tasks on one hand again shows Prospero controlling the narrative, but the other interpretation is that Prospero wants their love to be true and wants a happy marriage for Miranda. Again we have this paradox of a controlling but caring Father.
As Miranda’s slightly rebellious nature was foreshadowed in the extract, when she meets Ferdinand and falls in love with him, even though her father is pretending he doesn’t encourage the two to fall in love, she forgets his “precepts” and “prattles too wildly”, definitely going against what she perceives to be her father’s instructions not to talk to Ferdinand. Miranda is not quite the submissive controlled daughter we might think.
Later in her relationship with Ferdinand, as they play chess she says, “dear sir, you play me false”, implying she is clever enough to spot him cheating, and confident enough to tell him so. Again it would be interesting to suggest that Shakespeare is championing women and making her less of a naive character than she may initially seem.
Miranda & Prospero have a multi-layered relationship and it is easy to condemn Prospero as a bad father, being controlling and using Miranda. However, in the Jacobean period patriarchal dominance was normal. In fact one could equally argue that Miranda for the time period was quite a rebel challenging her father and not doing as she was told.
The use of Miranda as a bartering chip in a political power games might seem shocking to a modern day audience. In the court of James I, and to the audience watching the play at the time, this would not be shocking. Marriages of political allegiance were common and so we can conclude that the Father/Daughter relationship depicted in the Tempest was quite representative for the time.
At the end of the play Miranda has a husband she is happy with, and Prospero has regained his Dukedom. Shakespeare has sought to show that rulers (and his analogy as a father) who are driven by the wrong motives are unhappy. Whilst initially very vengeful and controlling, Prospero eventually overcomes his own inner Tempest and chooses “virtue” over “vengeance” against his usurpers. Despite using Miranda in his power struggle, we are left feeling that Prospero has ensured that Ferdinand and Miranda are genuinely in love, and that the ending is a happy conclusion.
1095 words
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This is What Students Do to Get Grade 7 on Romeo and Juliet
I’m writing a guide to how to write essays on Romeo and Juliet, using essays written in the exam and marked by senior examiners.
This is the pattern I have found for grade 7 answers.
As you can see, this student has written way more than a normal, or indeed the longest, grade 7 answer.
However, I don’t want to give this a grade 8, because it doesn’t really deal with why Shakespeare presents the relationship in this way. Yet this is implied in the conclusion.
And take a look at it, it far exceeds all the requirements of a grade 8, so I have no choice.
Grade 8 it is.
This is what I wrote back:
Your teacher is being logical - the question asks you to start with the extract. But you do in fact do that anyway. You write plenty about the extract.
This has perhaps made her see the extract as the most important part of the question, whereas it is mainly a way to give lower ability students something to write about.
New teachers are taught to do loads of language analysis by their tutors, placement schools and what they share on Twitter. This is not required. I imagine she has less than 10 years’ experience which might explain her caution.*
Without marking your essay in detail, it is definitely at least ‘thoughtful’, so would fall in this mark range:
*I realise that this can sound patronising. I don’t mean it to be. AQA refuse to give out examples of essays at each grade. Teachers are left with having to guess how to match the criteria to each essay.
And AQA also dish out lots of advice about how to teach essay writing which (when you compare it to what actually gets the grades in the exam) is just plain wrong.
Mr S thanks for sharing. Could you possibly share a few points you would add/ make regarding the relationship that would be fitting for / model a grade 9 level answer?
I find myself constantly battling against this sort of teaching as a tutor. It’s not the teachers’ fault as you say Dominic.