- Define and explain Critical Lenses in your own words
- Use key terms such as soliloquy accurately
- Apply what you have learned to new examples and questions
- Avoid the common mistakes learners make with this topic
This lesson focuses on Critical Lenses: apply feminist, Marxist and other readings to literary texts.
Apply feminist, Marxist and other readings to literary texts.
Key ideas
Context changes everything
Frankenstein was begun by the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley during the 1816 Year Without a Summer, amid fierce debates about science and creation. Reading it as a Gothic horror story is valid; reading it as an anxiety about scientific ambition is richer. A-level answers weave context into analysis rather than bolting it on.
Shakespeare wrote for the stage
His plays are scripts, not novels — meaning lives in performance. A soliloquy is a character thinking aloud to the audience; blank verse gives noble characters a musical rhythm, while prose often marks lower status or madness. Always imagine the scene in the Globe Theatre, not just words on a page.
Key term — soliloquy: A speech in which a character speaks their thoughts aloud, alone on stage. Hamlet's 'To be, or not to be' is the most famous example.
Analyse the opening line of Hamlet's most famous soliloquy: To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Identify the form: the line opens a soliloquy, so Hamlet speaks his private thoughts directly to the audience. Unpack the antithesis: to be (to live) is set against not to be (to die) — the whole speech balances two opposites. Notice the rhythm: the measured, near-iambic line gives the thought philosophical weight, as if thinking itself has a heartbeat. Connect to the play's concerns: Hamlet debates action versus inaction, the central dilemma of the tragedy. Conclude: eleven words state the play's driving question.
Answer: The line's antithesis frames existence as a choice between two opposites, its measured rhythm lends the thought philosophical gravity, and as a soliloquy it draws the audience into Hamlet's private dilemma between action and inaction.
- Confusing the narrator with the author The I of a novel is a constructed voice, not the writer. Analyse what the narrator does, not what the author supposedly felt.
- Bolting on context Context must illuminate the analysis: link the historical detail to a specific quotation or effect, not a separate paragraph of history.
Practice
A speech in which a character speaks their thoughts aloud while alone.
The audience knows Juliet is only sleeping while Romeo believes she is dead.
Mary Shelley; published in 1818.
Unrhymed iambic pentameter, used for noble speech in Shakespeare's plays.
Quick check
Which of these best defines "soliloquy"?
What is weak about writing Shakespeare uses a metaphor to show anger?
Why does poetic form matter?
- Critical Lenses: apply feminist, Marxist and other readings to literary texts.
- Context changes everything: Frankenstein was begun by the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley during the 1816 Year Without a Summer, amid fierce debates about science and creation.
- dramatic irony: When the audience knows more than the characters.
- Watch out for: confusing the narrator with the author