The significance of violence and revenge, humour and moments of happiness

The idea

Tragedy is not unrelieved gloom. AQA asks you to weigh how violence and revenge drive the action, and how humour and happiness shape our response. Violence may be physical, verbal or structural; revenge supplies motive and momentum, often trapping the avenger in a cycle that destroys him. Humour can come from wit, bawdy exchange, a fool, or dramatic irony; moments of happiness often occur early, making later loss sharper. In Othello, Iago's jokes and the reunion in Cyprus give pleasure before the murder; in Hamlet, the gravediggers' comedy sits beside the fencing match. Track where these moments fall, who controls them, and how they alter pity, fear and judgement.

What earns the marks

• Explains how violence functions in the play: as physical act, threat, language or structural disruption, and what it reveals about power and disorder.
• Analyses revenge as motive and as moral problem, showing how the pursuit of vengeance consumes the avenger and spreads harm beyond the original wrong.
• Examines humour's dramatic sources, such as wit, puns, bawdy, the fool or gravedigger, and explains its effect on tension, character and audience sympathy.
• Discusses moments of happiness or harmony, often early or brief, and shows how they intensify later catastrophe by contrast.
• Uses precise textual evidence and integrates quotation into argument rather than listing examples.
• Connects these aspects to the tragic genre, considering how they shape pity, fear and the audience's final judgement.

Common mistakes and how to put them right

• Treating humour as mere comic relief with no tragic function.

  Put it right by analysing how comedy exposes character, foreshadows disaster or deepens irony.

• Assuming revenge is simply justified because the initial wrong was real.

  Put it right by weighing the avenger's methods, delays and collateral damage.

• Describing violence only as bloodshed.

  Put it right by including verbal cruelty, threats, psychological coercion and structural shocks.

• Ignoring moments of happiness because they seem irrelevant.

  Put it right by showing how early joy or reconciliation makes the ending more painful.

Exam tips

• Plan by aspect: one paragraph on violence, one on revenge, one on humour, one on happiness, each linked to the tragic whole.
• Embed short quotations and analyse individual words rather than paraphrasing long speeches.
• Use connectives such as 'however' and 'therefore' to show how comedy or joy qualifies the tragic tone rather than replacing it.
• Keep the tragic hero's arc in view so each aspect is tied to his downfall, not treated as an isolated theme.