Aspects of tragedy - Set texts: Drama and further texts — AQA A-Level English Literature
Test yourself on Aspects of tragedy - Set texts: Drama and further texts with AQA A-Level practice questions.
7 days Premium · Then free forever · No card, no charge
Aspects of tragedy - Set texts: Drama and further texts explained
The Great Gatsby is a modern tragedy that interrogates the American Dream through Jay Gatsby’s self-invention and his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan.
Read the full explanation
Students should analyse how Fitzgerald uses Nick Carraway’s retrospective narration to shape judgement, how symbolism (the green light, the valley of ashes, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg) creates tragic meaning, and how structure—rising parties, the Plaza confrontation, the shooting—produces a sense of inevitable waste. Contextual understanding of 1920s America, prohibition, class, and old versus new money should inform interpretation without reducing the novel to social history. When writing, integrate short quotations into a line of argument, track motifs across chapters, and evaluate how language, form and structure create tragic effects. Assessment rewards a coherent, evidence-based case about tragedy, not a list of features.
Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Pre-1900)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles is a pre-1900 tragedy that follows Tess Durbeyfield from rural innocence to social condemnation and death. Students should analyse how Hardy’s third-person narrator moves between sympathy and detachment, how setting and season structure Tess’s decline, and how fate, chance and social hypocrisy combine to destroy her. Key episodes—the death of Prince, the seduction or rape in the Chase, the loss of Angel’s love, the murder of Alec, and the arrest at Stonehenge—should be examined for their tragic patterning. Hardy’s use of pastoral, classical allusion, and biblical language deepens the sense of a fallen world. When writing, track motifs such as blood, birds, and the colour red, and evaluate how Hardy makes Tess both a victim and an agent. Assessment rewards a coherent case about tragedy supported by close analysis of language, form and structure.
John Keats: ‘Lamia’, ‘Isabella or The Pot of Basil’, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, 'The Eve of St. Agnes' (Pre-1900)
These four Keats poems give you a pre-1900 tragic core. ‘Lamia’ traces a serpent-woman made human whose wedding collapses when Apollonius exposes her, so Lycius dies. ‘Isabella’ shows a woman who buries her murdered lover’s head in a pot of basil and pines away. ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ presents a knight lured by a fairy woman and left on a cold hillside. ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ follows Porphyro and Madeline through ritual and elopement, shadowed by age, cold and death. Read each for the tragic pattern: desire, transgression, revelation, loss. Track how Keats uses form, imagery and setting to make suffering feel inevitable yet avoidable, and compare how knowledge destroys happiness.
Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman (drama)
Death of a Salesman is a modern tragedy built around Willy Loman, a failing salesman who clings to the American Dream while his family fractures. Miller uses memory, flashback and expressionist staging so past and present collide on one set. Willy’s illusions about success and popularity clash with Biff’s failure to ‘make it’, and Linda’s loyalty exposes the gap between Willy’s self-image and reality. The play raises the tragic question of whether a common man can be a tragic hero. Study Willy’s contradictions, the pressure of capitalism, and the way Miller makes the audience feel pity and fear through structure, dialogue and symbol, including the flute, stockings and seeds.
William Shakespeare: Richard II (drama) (Pre-1900)
Richard II functions as a tragedy of a flawed monarch. Students study how Shakespeare presents Richard’s fall from divine-right king to deposed prisoner, and how Bolingbroke’s rise exposes tensions between legitimacy, power and identity. The tragedy lies in political misjudgements, ceremonial language and self-dramatisation. Analyse how language and structure shape audience response: Richard’s lyrical, metaphor-rich verse versus Bolingbroke’s pragmatic, direct verse and silence; the deposition scene as a ritual stripping of kingship; the garden scene as political allegory; and the final soliloquy. Assessment requires close reading of extract and whole text, informed by tragic theory and contextual debate.
AQA English Literature B Poetry anthology (tragedy): Extracts from the Prologue of 'The Monk’s Tale' and The Monk’s Tale, ‘Jessie Cameron’, Extract from Paradise Lost, ‘Tithonus’, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’, ‘The Death of Cuchulain’, ‘Out, out…’, 'Death in Leamington', 'Miss Gee'
This anthology cluster explores tragedy across centuries and forms. Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale and its Prologue frame tragedy as a series of falls from prosperity, raising questions about fortune, providence and narrative authority. The extract from Paradise Lost presents Satan’s tragic grandeur and the consequences of ambition. ‘Tithonus’ dramatises immortal longing and decay, while ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ reads the Titanic’s sinking as an ironic, almost cosmic tragedy. ‘The Death of Cuchulain’ and ‘Out, out…’ examine heroic and ordinary death, and ‘Jessie Cameron’, ‘Death in Leamington’ and ‘Miss Gee’ show tragedy in social, domestic and ironic modes. You should compare how poets use voice, form, imagery and structure to create tragic effects, and how context shapes what counts as tragic.
Your focus
- Analyse how Fitzgerald’s narrative method and symbolism create tragic meaning.
- Evaluate the role of context in shaping the novel’s tragic vision without reducing it to social commentary.
- Construct a coherent argument about tragedy using integrated textual evidence.
Show all 18 objectives
- Analyse how Hardy’s narrative method, setting and imagery create tragic meaning.
- Evaluate the role of pre-1900 context in shaping the novel’s tragic vision.
- Construct a coherent argument about tragedy using integrated textual evidence.
- Analyse how Keats shapes tragic experience through form, structure and language in at least two of the set poems.
- Compare the presentation of tragic victims and agents across the poems using precise textual evidence.
- Evaluate how pre-1900 Romantic contexts inform the poems’ tragic concerns.
- Analyse how Miller uses dramatic form, structure and language to create tragic effect.
- Evaluate Willy Loman’s status as a tragic figure using evidence from the whole play.
- Explain how social and historical contexts shape the play’s tragic concerns.
- Analyse how Shakespeare uses language, form and structure to present Richard’s tragic downfall.
- Evaluate the significance of key dramatic moments, including the deposition scene and the final soliloquy, in shaping tragic response.
- Construct coherent arguments about Richard II that integrate close textual analysis with relevant contextual and theoretical perspectives.
- Compare how poets across the anthology use language, form and structure to create tragic effects.
- Analyse the significance of context in shaping different tragic modes and protagonists.
- Construct comparative arguments that connect poems through theme, form and tragic theory.
Aspects of tragedy - Set texts: Drama and further texts exam tips
Marking Points
- Analyse how Nick Carraway’s first-person retrospective narration mediates the reader’s sympathy and judgement, for example through his claim to reserve all judgements while making moral evaluations of Tom and Daisy.
- Explore how Fitzgerald uses symbolism to develop tragic meaning, such as the green light representing Gatsby’s incorruptible dream and the valley of ashes exposing the human cost of wealth.
- Examine how structure shapes tragedy: the delayed introduction of Gatsby, the escalating parties, the confrontation at the Plaza, and the abrupt violence of the shooting create a trajectory from aspiration to waste.
- Consider how context informs tragedy, including post-war disillusionment, prohibition, social mobility, and the conflict between inherited wealth and self-made fortune.
- Evaluate how language and imagery construct Gatsby’s romantic self-narrative and its collapse, for example the ‘extraordinary gift for hope’ and the ‘dead dream’.
- Connect the novel’s treatment of love, class and identity to wider tragic conventions such as hubris, hamartia, nemesis and the waste of potential.
- Analyse how Hardy’s narrator positions the reader to sympathise with Tess while also exposing her as a subject of social judgement, for example through direct address and ironic commentary.
- Examine how setting and season embody tragic trajectory, such as the fertile Vale of Blackmoor, the bleak Flintcomb-Ash, and the pagan resonance of Stonehenge.
- Explore how Hardy uses fate, coincidence and omens—the d’Urberville coach, the letter under the carpet, the death of Prince—to create a sense of inevitability.
- Consider how Victorian gender ideology and sexual double standards drive the tragedy, particularly the contrast between Tess’s punishment and Angel’s forgiveness.
- Evaluate how classical and biblical allusion frames Tess as a tragic heroine, for example references to Ceres, Artemis and the Fall.
- Analyse how language and imagery—blood, birds, red, white—create patterns of innocence, violation and sacrifice.
- Analyse how each poem constructs a tragic trajectory from desire through transgression to revelation and loss, using specific textual moments.
- Examine Keats’s use of form and structure, such as the Spenserian stanzas of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ and the ballad measure of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, to shape tragic effect.
- Discuss the role of knowledge and exposure, for example Apollonius’s gaze in ‘Lamia’ or the brothers’ discovery in ‘Isabella’, as agents of catastrophe.
- Consider how setting and atmosphere, including the cold hillside, the Gothic castle and the pot of basil, embody tragic isolation and decay.
- Explore the presentation of women and power, weighing whether Lamia, Isabella and the belle dame are victims, agents or both.
- Connect the poems to wider tragic conventions such as hamartia, peripeteia and the sublime, while recognising Keats’s Romantic reworking of them.
- Analyse how Miller’s use of memory and non-linear structure creates tragic tension between Willy’s illusions and his present failures.
- Examine Willy Loman as a possible tragic hero, weighing his flaws, his dignity and the social forces that shape him.
- Discuss the function of Biff, Happy and Linda in exposing or sustaining Willy’s self-deception and in widening the tragedy to the family.
- Consider how staging, lighting, music and set design carry tragic meaning, for example the flute motif and the shifting walls of the house.
- Explore the critique of capitalism and the American Dream, showing how material pressures contribute to Willy’s downfall.
- Connect the play to tragic conventions such as hamartia, recognition and catastrophe, while noting Miller’s modern adaptation of them.
- Analyse how Richard’s language shifts from ceremonial, divinely sanctioned rhetoric in the early acts to fragmented, self-questioning soliloquy after his deposition, and link this to the play’s tragic trajectory.
- Examine the structural significance of the deposition scene (Act 4 Scene 1), including the mirror episode, as a visual and symbolic undoing of kingship rather than merely a political event.
- Discuss Bolingbroke’s contrasting style — pragmatic, direct verse and strategic silence — and how this shapes the audience’s sense of Richard’s theatricality and political naivety.
- Use the garden scene (Act 3 Scene 4) as an allegorical commentary on England’s misgovernment, connecting the gardener’s practical advice to the play’s wider concern with order and stewardship.
- Consider how the play engages with Elizabethan debates about divine right, deposition and rebellion, without reducing the tragedy to a single political message.
- Explore Richard’s final soliloquy as an attempt to construct a coherent self through language, music and metaphor, and evaluate how far this succeeds or fails tragically.
- Compare how different poets present the tragic fall or reversal, from Chaucer’s de casibus pattern to Hardy’s ironic collision of human vanity and natural forces.
- Analyse the role of the tragic protagonist across the anthology: Satan’s heroic ambition, Tithonus’s deathless decay, Cuchulain’s heroic death, and the ordinary figures in ‘Out, out…’, ‘Death in Leamington’ and ‘Miss Gee’.
- Examine how form and voice shape tragedy: Chaucer’s narrative frame, Milton’s epic blank verse, Tennyson’s dramatic monologue, Hardy’s stanzaic patterning, Yeats’s ballad-like compression, Frost’s conversational blank verse, and Betjeman’s and Auden’s ironic tones.
- Discuss how context informs tragic reading: medieval fortune and providence, Milton’s theological epic, Victorian doubt and empire, Irish myth and nationalism, modern warfare and domestic ordinariness.
- Explore the anthology’s range of tragic endings — death, deposition, decay, accident, social ruin — and evaluate how far each text invites pity, fear, irony or protest.
- Use connections and contrasts between poems to build an argument about what tragedy means across the collection, rather than treating each poem in isolation.
Examiner Tips
- 💡Plan around the tragic focus of the question, selecting three or four episodes that let you track change across the novel.
- 💡Embed short quotations and analyse individual words or images rather than quoting long passages.
- 💡Use the text’s structure as an argument: show how Fitzgerald withholds, repeats or disrupts to create tragic expectation and loss.
- 💡Select episodes that show change across the novel, such as the Chase, Talbothays, Flintcomb-Ash and Stonehenge, to demonstrate structural awareness.
- 💡Use short embedded quotations and analyse Hardy’s diction, syntax and imagery rather than paraphrasing.
- 💡Link every point to the tragic focus of the question, showing how Hardy creates pity, fear or a sense of waste.
- 💡Plan around the tragic genre named in the question, selecting two or three poems that let you compare closely rather than surveying all four thinly.
- 💡Integrate contextual points about Romanticism, class and gender only where they sharpen your reading of the tragedy.
- 💡Use subject terminology accurately, naming stanza form, caesura, enjambment and imagery when you explain effects.
- 💡Anchor every argument in the text, using short quotations and precise references to staging and structure.
- 💡Address the tragic genre explicitly, showing how Miller both uses and transforms classical conventions for a modern audience.
- 💡Keep context purposeful, linking post-war American consumerism and family expectations to the play’s tragic vision rather than listing facts.
- 💡Plan your response around the extract’s dramatic methods first, then widen to the whole play, ensuring both are integrated rather than treated as separate essays.
- 💡Use precise dramatic terminology — soliloquy, aside, blank verse, caesura, enjambment, stage direction — and always connect technique to tragic effect.
- 💡Engage with alternative readings (e.g. Richard as artist-king versus Richard as irresponsible ruler) and use textual evidence to adjudicate between them.
- 💡Keep contextual references relevant and concise: divine right, deposition, Elizabethan succession anxieties, and the nature of kingship should illuminate the text, not replace analysis.
- 💡Anchor each comparative point in close analysis of a specific quotation, image or formal feature before moving to the next poem.
- 💡Use the anthology’s chronological and generic range to show how tragedy evolves, but avoid a simple survey — make evaluative judgements about continuity and change.
- 💡Prepare flexible groupings (e.g. heroic falls, domestic tragedies, ironic tragedies) so you can adapt to different questions.
- 💡Keep terminology precise: dramatic monologue, blank verse, ballad, de casibus, apostrophe, caesura, enjambment, volta, refrain.
Common Mistakes
- Treating Gatsby only as a victim of Daisy’s cruelty rather than analysing his own complicity in idealising her; correction: examine how his dream depends on possession and repetition of the past.
- Using context as a bolt-on paragraph about the 1920s without linking it to tragic effect; correction: integrate contextual points into the analysis of character, structure and symbol.
- Retelling the plot instead of analysing Fitzgerald’s methods; correction: focus each paragraph on a technique, its effect, and its contribution to the tragic arc.
- Describing Tess only as a passive victim and ignoring her moments of agency and defiance; correction: analyse how Hardy presents her choices, such as refusing to be a victim at Flintcomb-Ash or killing Alec.
- Treating the pre-1900 context as a separate paragraph about Victorian morality; correction: weave contextual understanding into analysis of character, plot and language.
- Ignoring the narrator’s role and writing as if events speak for themselves; correction: examine Hardy’s narrative voice, its sympathies and its ironies.
- Treating the poems as love lyrics only; correct this by identifying the tragic movement from illusion to disillusionment in each text.
- Retelling plot without quotation; correct this by embedding short, precise quotations and analysing individual words and images.
- Assuming all four poems share one identical tragic pattern; correct this by noting differences, such as the social critique in ‘Isabella’ versus the dream vision in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’.
- Reducing Willy to a simple victim of society; correct this by acknowledging his choices, contradictions and responsibility alongside social pressures.
- Ignoring stagecraft and treating the play as a novel; correct this by analysing Miller’s directions, lighting, music and expressionist set.
- Quoting long speeches without close analysis; correct this by zooming in on a short phrase and explaining how Miller’s language creates tragic effect.
- Treating Richard II as a straightforward history play and ignoring its tragic dimensions; correct this by analysing how Shakespeare shapes sympathy, suffering and catastrophe through tragic conventions.
- Assuming Richard is simply a weak king or a martyr without exploring the text’s ambivalence; correct this by weighing evidence of misrule against the pathos of his deposition and death.
- Quoting isolated lines without analysing dramatic method; correct this by commenting on verse form, imagery, staging, soliloquy and structural placement.
- Confusing the historical Bolingbroke with Shakespeare’s dramatic construction; correct this by focusing on the play’s language and dramatic choices rather than external chronology alone.
- Treating each poem as a separate case study without making comparative connections; correct this by grouping texts by theme, form or tragic mode and using cross-references.
- Assuming all anthology poems share one definition of tragedy; correct this by distinguishing classical, medieval, Shakespearean, modern and ironic tragic modes.
- Ignoring the extract from Paradise Lost as part of a longer epic; correct this by analysing how the extract’s placement and epic conventions shape its tragic effect.
- Reducing context to biographical facts; correct this by linking historical, theological and literary contexts to the poems’ language and structure.