Examiner's Grades and Comments for the Sample Essays

Sample Essay #1

Suggested source for the text:

Shakespeare, W. 2009. Richard III. Ed. Siemon, JR. London, UK. The Arden Shakespeare (an imprint of Methuen Drama).

Examiner’s comments

Criterion	A	B	C	Total
Marks available	5	10	5	20
Marks awarded	4	5	4	13

This written assignments is well written but is uncertain in structure and again tends towards generalization, especially in the second half of the piece where the student brings her performance into play and tries to establish its link to the text.

The register and voice are not secure in the work; it begins quite abruptly with only a short introduction (no harm in that, but brevity requires a concise and focused style, here we have an emotive style). The first paragraphs are midway between a commentary that summarizes content and an analysis that scrutinizes style. The student has made an error in not incorporating an explicit connection between analysis and the subsequent acting issues the piece engenders. The sequential run through the piece, with quotations being used as very clear signifiers to character and plot but not necessarily to style, is indicative of a manner of using quotation that limits the analysis—the embedded quotation is part of the register of the student’s voice and becomes a part of it. “Stand out” quotation, especially if, as here, it is of some length, severely inhibits the development of that individual voice and clashes another voice (Shakespeare’s) against it. The student, because she quotes passages rather than images or single lines, feels the obligation to explain the quotation before she interprets or analyses it, with the consequent dilution of her voice and the preponderance of the playwright’s. This is a pity because the student, despite some infelicities of expression, does have much to say and is insightful with the text.

The by now familiar switch of register into the collective pronoun midway through the written assignment introduces what is essentially a transition paragraph and sets the context for the final (and almost by now redundant) section on the staging of the piece. Again there is some irrelevance here, but there is a well-written and observant paragraph that does give the examiner the background to the staging, the relationship to the audience (always important) and the dramatic intentions of the performance.

Here the student is exposed a little by her difficulty with the piece as drama. She is eager and genuine in her determination to realize the latent drama of the passage and uses some good staging ideas to illustrate how this drama might be demonstrated to an audience, but this piece of the work does repeat some of the content of the opening paragraph and never quite gets beyond a broad emotional brush stroke of the scenic picture. The movement of feeling, the shifts and uncertainties are caught at times but in a strictly linear “up and down, loud and quiet” way. The pattern of emotions that are captured through a subtle encounter with the language of the text translated into the action of the performer is rarely evident here.

Take this extract, for example.

Using the people in freeze to yell at or look up and down and using my disgust on them I showed the audience my anger and despair. I think I managed to pass all the emotions as my tone changed from high to low, I cried, I yelled and had a good eye contact with the audience. Moving around but not while talking, not to confuse the audience, I made everyone in the audience part of the play.

Because this is not accompanied by textual analysis (after all, it is the text that creates this response) it is strangely de-contextualized and less effective than it deserves to be. It can be visualized but not to any precision. Compare it to the following (from example 10 in this document).

Following this I decided to include a climax and anticlimax by varying the tone and speed of my voice after the enjambment “a little shaking of my arm … and thrice”, when the pauses in punctuation are less frequent and the enjambments quicken the pace of the passage “so piteous and profound … as it did seem”. My movements become more frantic and marked, with a particular high tension in the upper part of the body, until I reach the apex of my despair with “as it did seem to shatter all his bulk … and end his being”.

Here there is specificity and an attention to style with action accompanying text and demonstrably created by the emotional conditions the style of the text is able to capture. The first writer is adopting the correct position, she is thinking about registering emotions, she is thinking about movement and action, she is aware of the audience, but the lack of specific focus means that she is not able to move into the higher levels under criterion B.

The irregularity in the structure and the varying register do compromise the grade in criterion C but this is offset by the passionate and clearly engaged tone of the voice. The unfocused and generalized realization in the final paragraphs again register energy and conviction but the piece only comes alive as a visceral statement, not as a complex piece of theatre.

Sample Essay #2

Suggested source for the text:

Shakespeare, W. 1998. Hamlet. Second revised edition. Ed. Barnet, S. New York, USA. Signet Classic.

Examiner’s comments

Criterion	A	B	C	Total
Marks available	5	10	5	20
Marks awarded	5	10	5	20

This written coursework takes a risk from the start, opting to look at three different passages from Shakespeare’s Hamlet in order to demonstrate changes in the character of Ophelia through the play. In order to make a success out of this approach the student will need to be careful about structure (it will need to be tight) and presentation (the language will have to be concise).

In common with many intelligent students this student is not afraid to work through the criteria as a unity, not as distinct entities, and thus the analysis of the pieces is organically connected to the performance of them. The focus is on what needs to be understood of the literature so that the literature can reveal its drama through acting out the scenes.

The focus on how words sound, how lines work, how they are structured and what stylistic choices have been made by the playwright to what overall purpose is brilliantly maintained through the three scenes. The structure of the written assignment is straightforward in that it simply follows the sequence of the scenes with the analysis of the language, often the context, and invariably the other actor (Polonius or Hamlet) being followed by staging decisions and actor choices. The student usually writes in the first person but makes subtle design comments using “we” (for example, the note on lighting); she is also very insightful in her perceptive linking of scenes with incisive commentary. Not all the metaphorical language is examined—it does not have to be—but there is enough interpretation here to satisfy the examiner as to the student’s understanding of figurative language. Uses of terminology like “enjambment” or anaphora, from the French and Greek, are not attempts to impress the examiner. On the contrary, they are part of an analysis of rhetorical devices that an actor needs to appreciate and see in order to follow the cues the writer is offering her for accurate performance of the verse.

The written assignment is conventionally framed by a brief, not altogether successful, introduction (not quite sure of the need for the quotation from Brecht) and a conclusion that, again, could have been more thought provoking, but what lies between is work of the highest standard.