What the examiner said

F663 Poetry and Drama pre-1800

General Comments:

The paper generated a wide range of responses, ranging from the pre-rehearsed and formulaic to the intellectually inspiring.

The best answers were fluent, interesting and well-informed, wrestling closely with the question.

Weaker answers fell into familiar traps – treating the question in a descriptive or narrative way, for example, or regurgitating practice essays rather than answering the question as set, or offering simplified or generalised interpretations of characters and contexts.

Critical views (AO3) were often used well – we have moved away from the ‘critic as cake

decoration’ approach to a much more flexible, cogent treatment of critics where they are often used to enrich and drive forward an argument. Feminist criticism was again much in evidence this year and was used to good effect when it enhanced a sense of the complexity of a text, but less so when it was used to endorse simplified responses not fully based on evidence. Critics such as Coppelia Kahn, Harold Bloom, Emma Smith and Jonathan Dollimore were well used to add intellectual vigour to their candidates’ essays. Some candidates displayed an impressive ability to orchestrate a range of critical perspectives to produce an alert and sensitive reading of the text.

There is still some evidence that AO weightings are not fully assimilated, so that contexts (AO4) can be cited too insistently in Section A or neglected in Section B. Context can be something of a blunt instrument; very broad or generalised assertions about contexts are often the hallmark of weaker candidates who may claim variously that Ford lived in a society of misogynists, Prospero was a sadistic coloniser, or that the age of Chaucer should not have been so patriarchal. Under the pressure of timed exam conditions, it is understandable that candidates sometimes revert to such shorthand assertions, but more successful candidates do tend to have at their fingertips a more nuanced sense of context and a greater sense of the significance of specific details.

This said, the great strength of the exam is that it is not prescriptive and allows candidates to express their intellectual personalities and inclinations, so that differently-minded but equally able candidates will approach the same question in markedly individual ways, one pursuing a more historicist angle, another based around difference performance histories of a play, a third weaving together critical views to build an argument. All can be equally successful. What matters above all is for detail to be deployed effectively in the service of an effective argument and for the candidate to do justice to the complexity of the texts studied.