Romeo and Juliet — GCSE Revision | Quotes, Characters & Analysis

Romeo and Juliet — Exam Board Guide

AQA

Paper 1, Section A — "Shakespeare and the 19th-century Novel" · 1h 45min total · 30 marks + 4 SPaG · One question on a printed extract plus whole-play response · 50 minutes recommended

Edexcel

Paper 1, Section A — "Shakespeare" · 1h 45min total · 50 marks · Two questions: extract (20 marks) + essay (30 marks)

OCR

Component 01 (J282/01) — "Shakespeare and the 19th-century Novel" · 2 hours · Shakespeare section closed book

WJEC Eduqas

Component 1, Section A — "Shakespeare" · 2 hours total · 40 marks · Essay questions on whole play

Mark Scheme — What Examiners Look For

AO1: Personal response + textual evidence — tracking fate vs free will across the whole play; balancing sympathy and critical analysis; engaging with the Prologue's dramatic irony
AO2: Language, form and structure — the Prologue as sonnet (love and death intertwined); soliloquy; iambic pentameter vs prose (class markers); Petrarchan conceit; oxymoron; dramatic irony in tomb scene
AO3: Context — Elizabethan patriarchal society (arranged marriages; women as property); 1590s beliefs about fate and the stars; Italian source texts (Brooke's Romeus and Juliet, 1562); honour culture in Renaissance Verona; Catholic religion and Friar Lawrence's role
AO4: SPaG — AQA only, 4 marks

Top Exam Tip: The Prologue is a sonnet — Shakespeare's chosen form of romantic love poetry — but its content announces death. This structural choice tells you everything about the play: love and death are not opposites but the same thing experienced from different angles.