because i haven't publicized it which means no one's here yet but while you're getting ready i am going to be using the sample set of papers so you can check those out on aqa just put sample set 2022 in and you'll find the papers that i'm actually going to be using so the question that they have in the sample set is a predictable one that might actually come up in this year's exam actually so it's an extract where capuler is bullying juliet and trying to get her to marry paris it's the sickness carrying one where he's massively insulting her and if you want to find that to follow along it's act 3 scene 5 okay and the question is starting with this moment in the play explore how shakespeare presents relationships between adults and young people in romeo and juliet now i'm going to say to you that you really should not start with the extract if you want grades 7 8 and 9. you can but it's more difficult and i'll explain why in a minute okay let's imagine you're on grades four five and six that's what you're aiming for by all means start with the extract because there'll be loads of quotations in there that you can easily use but if you want the higher grades do not do that because you are rewarded for having an argument if we jump into the mark scheme it says a candidate's response excuse me is likely to be critical and exploratory yes but a well structured argument well you can't really present an argument if you're starting with a quotation or a passage which isn't at the beginning of the play it's actually really difficult to do so let's explore what that might look like so my planning time which is a maximum of five minutes i'm going to spend thinking right if i didn't have an extract and i just had that title about adults and young people how would i answer it and i'm always going to go to my thesis statement because writing a thesis statement is going to help me work out what shakespeare was up to when i put down shakespeare's purpose in this way i'm therefore going to get much higher marks because that's at the top of the mark scheme being able to interpret what the writer is up to so what would i put in to show the examiner that i know i've got a really good thesis statement okay so i've got probably three reasons that he's exploring adult and child relationships the first one comes from the source poem which was by arthur brooke written about a hundred years before the play and so well actually i'm not quite sure of that time limit but it doesn't matter you don't want to mention that in the exam you are going to mention that there is a source poem in the source poem the teenagers are presented as rebellious and untrustworthy the poem is a warning to parents it's a didactic message saying look you really got to keep an eye on these kids because they will take any opportunity to get up to mischief and ruin your lives your daughters you can lock them up but they'll still get out and have sex with somebody else and you just won't be able to marry them off to the people that you want to and your family will be doomed to economic failure because you can't rise up the social hierarchy by marrying your daughter off to someone of suitable status so you know that was what shakespeare's audience was expecting as the moral but shakespeare got married when he was only 18 to anne hathaway when she was 26 and at least two months pregnant so one interpretation of this is that it was a forced marriage which i happen to think is a little rubbish i prefer the interpretation that this is a love match she was much older than him but he was still attracted to her the pregnancy was probably a really easy way to force both families to let them get married whereas had she not been pregnant they might have intervened and said it's not a suitable match and the other evidence i've got that actually i think their marriage was pretty cool is in london shakespeare simply lived in the equivalent of student accommodation he lived in lodgings in other people's houses and he sent all his money and remember he's the equivalent of a millionaire at the time from what he's earning he sends all his money back to stratford and buys his wife and kids like the biggest house in stratford you get the luxury he says i will just live like a normal person in london so he definitely puts his wife first so you can use that context to argue that shakespeare wants to present um this idea of marrying for love as a good thing as raised marriages are a bad thing he's against them and then you can see that once we get into the plot of how juliet's marriage is arraigned arranged you can see that he wants us to sympathize with the young lovers whereas in the brook poem we're supposed to sympathize with the parents who've gone to all this trouble to arrange a brilliant match and and juliet's just ruined it okay so that's my first part of my thesis that shakespeare is trying to change the audience's perspectives about arranged marriages now secondly he's going in a little bit deeper and he's looking at the consequences of a patriarchal society so he's then exploring how damaging it is to have a society which is completely dominated by men and so he looks at the impact on women so juliet but also he's going to look at the impact on lady capulet who has kind of bought into this patriarchal society so much that she's passing on her own experiences straight on to juliet and she's going to really force juliet to get married when she's still only 13 and by the way that was not a thing in elizabethan england the average age of marriage was around 23 to 26 depending on where you lived and whether you were male or female so you know about the same as it was in the uk in the 1960s it was not a common thing at all the audience would have been horrified to see them being forced into marriage at such a young age okay so there's the damage to the women we can also include into that the nurse who also buys into this idea that early marriage and acquiring an influential husband is the most important thing for a young girl because that's what she does to juliet then a more sophisticated answer which most students won't get to is the impact that it's going to have on the men so men because they are in control need to assert their dominance they're all armed they all carry swords and daggers as was the custom in elizabethan times and so they're all lethal they're all able to kill somebody else or be killed by someone else every single minute of the day and so to combat this kind of mad weaponry they evolved etiquette around honor and dueling and behavior which is why tibbles and mercutio are so obsessed with fighting and even benvolio who's the voice of reason in the play is still really keen to see to see romeo fight tibot when he's challenged so this is a terrible wrong in society that shakespeare's trying to correct and he was actually involved with the famous family feud at the time which many people think the play might be loosely based on i don't think it is i think it's based on the poem however there was a very famous feud only about a year before the play was published in which two warring families in england um set against each other and it involved loads of the nobles in court it and then it actually went um to the high court shakespeare was kind of loosely involved with some of the minor characters so this perspective about what's happening in society in elizabethan england is also leading him to think look can i do anything in my play to outline how appalling this level of violence is in society and that's why the play starts with a brawl now that's an overview of my thesis statement and the kinds of ways my essay can develop you're not going to write all that in your thesis statement but you are going to write down three things that shakespeare is trying to do so he's addressing brook's idea that parents shouldn't trust their children he's showing how the patriarchal society damages women's lives and he's showing how the patriarchal society also glorifies violence amongst men and damages their lives so that's really three sentences to sum up all that context that i've given you i hope your brain is not exploding make a few notes about that don't try and get it down word for word you won't remember it but just make a few notes because you'll use it tomorrow oh i'm so excited excuse me ah t i must be english i prefer coffee but somehow i'm excited by t right what else is going in my essay plan well i've spent maybe a minute two minutes writing those three sentences out for myself so what am i now going to add for my plan okay i'm going to go straight in with how the play begins it begins with highly sexualized and violent imagery now if you haven't studied this then you might not want to include it in your essay but if you have then that's where you're going in so you've got samson and gregory and they're really joking being really ladish but about really serious matters so they're trying to provoke a fight remember everybody's armed someone's going to get injured for sure they're having the last two brawls and there's the risk of death but also they're fantasizing and we can see this from all the descriptions of naked weapons and putting the maids up against the wall they're fantasizing about forcing women of the opposite family to have sex with them i'm not going to go into what that means because youtube will go oh i don't want to monetize that sort of content but you know what it means and shakespeare's not sitting there condoning it i mean you might argue that he's having a laugh about it and he expects the audience to laugh but when we see the events of the play you can see that that laughter is there to lull us into a false sense of security so the adults in this play have created a society in which this violence towards other men but also sexual violence towards women is condoned we could add to that that both lord capulet and lord montague want to join in the fight so they're actually promoting it so that the prince has to intervene so their moral standards have influenced the young males in society to be violent and to disrespect women okay that's brilliant no one else is going to be writing that way why shakespeare has started to play this way so i'm already in the examiner's head on the grade nine my next point is i'm going to talk about the feud being an ancient grudge which has now broken out to new mutiny in other words it's the males in this society now at the time of the play who are reinvigorating an old grudge that had died you know there'd been a period without violence and they brought it back and so we can clearly see that the adults are at fault here you can also dip into the prologue and talk about that line which naught could remove other than the death of the lovers in other words they've created a feud which cannot be solved until the children are dead so in some sense the adults sacrifice the lives of romeo and juliet in order to save their own family life which is kind of bizarre so they have to ruin the family life first but then at the end of the play they're going to give up the feud because of the death of their children and the prologue sets that up as the only cure the only cure was the children's death right let's go on now to capulet's approach to the marriage so we can look at capulet's refusal to marry off juliet and you're going to cite this you know letter withers two more summers in her prime and all this how he initially doesn't want juliet to marry because she's too young and then that sudden switch once tibal has died and he now forces her into marriage in two days whereas before it was like you know wait two years so this seems highly irrational but in the patriarchal society it doesn't it's totally rational because capulet has lost influence he has lost a member of his family in tibolt who was influential and powerful he's alienated the prince because there's been another brawl and so how does he get back into favor with the prince well paris is related to the prince that's where he's going to go and therefore he's using this as a way to promote the interests of his own family he has to act quickly because after all someone else might marry paris and now it's urgent that juliet does that because it's going to raise the influence of his own family now that's an important change from the source poem in the poem they waited quite some time after tibble's death to arrange this marriage and it was lady capulet's idea so why does shakespeare change that well because he's making a point about men and the patriarchal society so he deliberately makes it juliet's father who makes this decision because he's saying to his audience hey this is what's wrong with our society in elizabethan england now men have too much power over women and they don't pay enough attention to the effects that they're having on women's and daughters lives right so i've got that arc where i'm going to put the change in capulet's view about the marriage i'm going to add in obviously the violence and hey presto when i come to the exam question that is the extract and now i can put it into my essay where it belongs because it's now part of a coherent and structured argument yeah right where did i say i was going to go next well i can keep developing the idea of men being an issue or i can go into the issue with women tactically it depends how far i've got in my exam but i'm definitely going to go into women now and then i'll probably come to the friar if i've got time i'm going to put the fryer in as my conclusion because he kind of ends the play or at least he ends juliet's life so the relationship with young people okay let's go to the effect on women well obviously lady capulet so we've got this quotation from capulet where he talks about women being too early marred when they're too early married and we can argue that that's based on his own experience because juliet's mother tells us that she was not just married but had given birth to juliet much upon these days that julia is in other words at the same age juliet is now so before she was 14 lady capulet had already given birth to juliet which is a big time shocker really isn't it i mean getting married so young is one thing but then putting your really immature body through pregnancy is quite something else we also find out the detail that all her brothers and sisters have died and we can infer from that that possibly this is because she's having children so young now lady capulet also puts pressure on juliet to marry and this is right at the start when they first talk about paris and she starts saying to juliet look not only was i married and giving birth when i was your age but she said there's lots of young girls in in verona now who are younger than you who are already making these really good matches so she's being super competitive with juliet and saying look you can't afford to hang about till you're 14 you know what do you think you're playing at because all the eligible men with titles and fortunes they're all going to be married off to your mates who are 12 and 13. you know you can't afford to hang about you've got to grab that fruit while it's ripe which is kind of appalling isn't it we could sort of understand it if they were making a political alliance but they're not julia and and these young women are being used to breed heirs like they're being forced into sexual relationships where they're not there just to enjoy you know sex at the time in elizabethan england they're there to actually get pregnant and give birth and what isn't mentioned explicitly here is that the death during birth was quite high you know mothers had something like a one in 20 chance of dying every time they gave birth so i mean that's massive especially as obviously there's no contraception so your chances of getting pregnant are pretty high and therefore your chances of having more than one child are very high and so your chances of dying in childbirth are very high and the capulets like are wishing that on their own daughter because she's financially much more valuable to them when she's married somebody of influence remember paris is related to the prince but he's also county paris so a count and therefore superior to capulet who is only a lord so it counts above the lord okay what about the nurse well the nurse is presented as a character who's not entirely trustworthy because she betrays the parents and she also betrays juliet first she betrays the parents because they've entrusted her with bringing up juliet and what has she done she's just arranged this marriage with the friar behind the parents backs now what motivates the nurse isn't so much that juliet is going to have a brilliant marriage with a brilliant match you know so she's not thinking like a parent she's thinking like she was when she was 12 so the nurse is completely obsessed with sex and so she's totally excited that juliet is going to seek happy nights to happy days it's the sexual experience that she's so excited about for juliet and this is why she tells this story of her husband laughing his head off when juliet fell over when she was three and the nurse's husband said well when you've got a bit more wit about you you'll learn to fall on your back because obviously this is a metaphor for being sexually available sex is going to be loads more fun than falling over and smacking your head and you're going to use your wit your cunning your planning to get a man to have sex with you so that is exactly what juliet does this is what her childhood has trained her for and what does she do well as soon as her parents say look we're going to introduce you to this guy at the ball called paris and check him out see if you like him she sees through their plan she doesn't believe that there's going to be a big delay why not because of the intervention of lady capulet putting all that psychological pressure on about these younger girls already snapping up all the local guys the rich local guys so she knows what her mother is planning she doesn't know that her dad is being a bit more reasonable because that conversation happens just with paris juliet never finds out about it all she knows is that mother pressing pressing pushing get married get kids get rich so what does she do she latches on to the first person she sees who she really fancies and that is romeo now you've got a chance whether you want to analyze this or not but the sonnet that they share in the ball is instigated by romeo but juliet takes over and controls the pace so she is the one who pretends that she doesn't want to kiss him but who leads him to not kissing her hand but to kissing her on the lips she is in control of that seduction which is exactly as it is in the poem so juliet encourages romeo now it might have resulted in nothing but obviously romeo turns up underneath her balcony in her garden and she seizes her opportunity but it's a patriarchal opportunity she can't as in the modern day form a relationship and see how it goes and experiment and so on over months and years no she can't do that instead she says look we can't have sex because we're not married i know you want to have sex you know i want to have sex we both fancy each other madly can't happen unless we get married and so she tells romeo what satisfaction can still have tonight like what are you playing at mate you know the rules of a patriarchal society you ain't getting what you want because i ain't getting what i want however there is one way to get what you want go and arrange a marriage and then come back and tell me about it tomorrow and romeo because he's been brought up in this patriarchal society thinks well i can do better than that let's get married tomorrow like let's jump the gun let's accelerate this that wouldn't sound mad to me at all says romeo that sounds like a perfectly rational decision so izzy rational this is where the friar comes in so we can use the friar's adult relationships with romeo to talk about how he should have been a much better influence the friar says they stumble who run too fast in other words he knows that arranging this marriage is too quick but he is tempted to marry them off in order to stop the feud so you could blame this on the adults who are ruining the veronese life by having the feud and therefore you could understand the friar taking this risk or you can say the friar is way way way beyond the bounds of reasonable behavior there's absolutely no way that he should do this and he's taking a huge risk he's also going against god's values in the sense that he's deceiving the families he's marrying these children in secret for a possible hope that they will end the feud but equally it's possible that this will escalate the feud i mean he doesn't know he's being incredibly foolish shakespeare does that with a catholic friar because catholics had been well the religious practice of catholicism anyway had been banned in england the monasteries had all gone the friaries are all gone and so it was really easy to say that friar's making these mad decisions because he's catholic this is part of the propaganda at the time but if we get back to the question of he's also a catholic adult who should know better and he doesn't now if we follow his ark through the play we can see that he is responsible for juliet's death he could have confessed to having married them when tybalt was killed that is when juliet is desperate and part of her reason for committing wanting to commit suicide isn't that romeo is banished part of a reason is that romeo sorry is that she's got to marry paris and this would be a sin that should lead her soul to go to hell she is deeply religious she knows that she'll go to hell if she marries paris now here's the other problem the other major adult in her life is the nurse and what does the nurse say she says i think paris is a better match you'd be better off if you married him romeo's a dishcloth compared to the eagle that is paris well that's just expediency isn't it that's just thinking about what's going to help her out so the nurse never gets discovered for her part in the marriage so she's protecting herself but also she's risking juliet's soul which is going to go to hell if she marries when she's already married in the eyes of god that's why juliet says beshrew thy soul and our men because she's thinking about the religious implications she's not just being a ridiculous teenager who's overreacting emotionally she's saying no in our world we only live here a short time but it's our eternal life we have to worry about and i'm going to spend eternity in hell if i marry paris well i need to find a way out now that decision therefore isn't the stupidity of youth it's encouraged by the nurse because she doesn't give juliet a way out that will save her soul and now we can look at how it's encouraged by the friar so initially the friar tries to save her by faking her death letting her escape to mantua to join with romeo her soul will be fine but when this plan goes wrong he hotfoots it over to the crypt to find where she is and there she is he can see that romeo's dead she wakes up and she sees that romeo's dead what's he gonna do well he says i've got i've got a cunning plan let's get you to a nunnery and you can go and become a nun and like juliet obviously is hold on i'm lying here next to my dead husband who's the thing i love most in the world we only had sex well for her it's yesterday because she'll have no sense of the you know the 420 hours or 240 hours whatever it is that she's been out with this drug so to her it feels like yesterday she's just lost her virginity she's had this wonderful night of passion it's been everything she hoped apparently according to the conversation they have afterwards and obviously she's desperate to see her husband again larry is dead so what's she going to do well she's already talked about committing suicide and the friar's already tried to stop that before what's she going to do now well obviously things are even worse now romeo's not just banished she's gonna kill herself isn't she well what does the friar do he runs away he says oh i can't possibly let people discover me and find out what a naughty boy i've been i'll just abandon you to your fate now you have to decide how likely it is that that fate would be killing yourself now i personally take the view that it was a very high probability and that the friar could have guessed that and you know even if he thought there was only a five percent chance he should have said right okay dude i'll take the wrap you're coming with me uh i'm gonna sort it out with your family i'll confess what i've done we'll wipe the slate clean and you can start again at least you won't have to marry paris he's dead so you know there's a lot to live for here but the friar puts his own interests first and he sacrifices juliet's she dies then we come to the ending of the play which is where the capulets the males get back together as it were like you know bros before hoes and all that it's not me speaking this is the men and you know they get together oh yeah we're gonna build a gold statue to julia and we'll build one two uh romeo and everything will be hunky-dory and let's stop feuding it's been a bit naughty hasn't it it's got in the way so they end up like feud's over but what happens to romeo's mum she died like of grief because romeo's dead and uh well she actually died before romeo was dead sorry she she died because he was banished so we can see that the adults have destroyed their children's lives and in doing so have destroyed their own so what is shakespeare's message at the end of the play it's not just that this is a story of woe it's that the adults were responsible they have created the society that bred this desperation for the young people to get married because they can't have sex in any other way and it's also bred this male violence that has led to the feuding escalating which has led to uh tubal challenging romeo them having a fight that was fatal and so all of the things that go wrong in the play we can lay at the foot of the adults if we so choose now obviously if i'm right answering a different question i might argue completely another way you know i'm just being tactical based on what the question is so i really hope that comes up tomorrow actually if the sample paper is prophetic but you've seen what you've got to do i've got a zoom call with another school good luck tomorrow see you on the other side i know this turns off somehow orientation is locked