Context Matters: How an Author Decides What to Write.

Have you ever wondered why Charles Dickens decided to write about 3 Ghosts and a lonely man at Christmas? What about why Shakespeare made a play about two star-crossed lovers, destined to be torn apart by a family feud?Neither have I.

Just kidding! As an English tutor, I might be a little bit nerdier than the average person when it comes to understanding why authors write the things they do, but it can actually be a really useful tool for picking up marks in your English Literature essays. In this blog post, part of a series on Understanding the Assessment Objectives, I’ll look at how understanding an author’s life makes it so much easier to understand their writing, and how to turn that into marks.

Shakespeare

Shakespeare wrote 154 Sonnets and 39 plays in his life. He was a prolific writer, and wrote about everything and anything you could think of, always someone who felt emotions deeply enough to dedicate so much time into putting them on paper. His plays and poems explore the ideas of love, fate, the gods, revenge, and the eternal struggle of good vs evil.But why? Why spend so much time actually writing about all this? I’m glad you asked.AQA actually encompasses this question in an assessment objective called AO3, context at the time. Authors experience things in their lives which affect them, sometimes deeply enough to cause them to write plays and poems about the event.

In Shakespeare’s case, he lived under two different monarchs, wrote plays centred in Italy, Greece, Scotland, and challenged stereotypes around gender and societal male dominance. It’s impossible to ignore the role that social influence played on his intentions (AO2 analysis) when writing his plays.When making good analysis of his characters or quotes, those social factors become very relevant as they could give us the reasons for why Juliet is so naïve, or why Lady Macbeth is so domineering and emasculatory. The characters themselves do not have feelings or make their own choices, they’re written that way by the author and so, in a way, they’re tools for the author to express their opinions or feelings about something.

An Inspector Calls and A Christmas Carol

Take the play An Inspector Calls, for example. This play exists entirely as a criticism of the way society was ordered in 1912. Rich people controlled too much of society, and had far too much of a say in who could work and who could not. Eva Smith is a device used by the author, J.B. Priestley, to express his political views (which we might call socialist). His characters critique the capitalist way of living, amassing immense wealth and holding contempt for the poor people who make the money for you through their work. These characters do not do this because they want to, but because J.B. Priestley has written them to act as that tool for critique. If we understand this context, then we can analyse Eva’s situation, or Shiela’s maturing into a woman who rebels against her capitalist parents much easier. These characters all represent something wrong with society at the time – Inspector Goole for example represents J.B. Priestley’s judgement on the family, he exposes the way they lie to each other and ruin a young woman’s life simply through lack of empathy. 

When we look at A Christmas Carol we see a similar story. Dickens was a man who saw inequality ruining his society, and created a character like Scrooge, miser, money-lending shark, preying on the most vulnerable, and sent ghosts to scare him into being a better member of society. Dickens makes Scrooge the device that represents the redemption of the upper class, wealthy through exploiting the poor, and shows that they can still fix the errors of their ways and work towards the betterment of society. This is not something that Scrooge just does because he has free will, he has been created by Dickens to represent that political opinion to drive change in the world he lived in, and so whatever happens in any novel or play is an indication of a feeling or opinion the author holds.

So What?

The point is that AQA is looking for you to be able to link this into your general comments and analysis on the text. When we analyse Lady Macbeth to show that she is cruel, and targets Macbeth’s weaknesses through sexist comments, the social commentary there is that Shakespeare wants her character to be a tool that tears down expected gender norms at the time. She does what she does in spite of the expectation that she is a good wife before anything else.

The audience would watch this and hate her, be surprised at her audacity, believe she had been written as an example to wives of what not to be, for example. However, in the modern day, we would look at Lady Macbeth completely different – gender norms have changed, the expectation of women has generally changed too. Overall, this shows us just how important the context at the time of writing, reading, or watching is. The lives of authors change what they want to write and inform what their characters do in the action. The lives we have lived change how we see and understand those events too - the context of the time becomes deeply linked with the work itself.

What we should be aiming for when trying to get AO3 marks is talking about how or why the link with the context is relevant to the events of the play, or the decisions of the author. When we can start seeing those events that influence the author, and how those express themselves in the characters and their actions, AO3 becomes a breeze.