Free·GCSE English Literature
Free GCSE English Literature Questions and Answers
12 questions, one from each topic, with the answer that takes every mark and what it is worth. Nothing to sign up to and nothing to download — they are on this page.
Shakespeare, The nineteenth-century novel, Poetry since 1789, Comparing poems, Modern prose and drama, Unseen poetry, Unseen prose, Context that earns marks and Writing about literature
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33 Is this a dagger which I see before me,
34 The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee:—
35 I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
36 Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
37 To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
38 A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Analyse how Shakespeare uses the dagger to present Macbeth’s state of mind.
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The full-mark answer · 8 marks
Macbeth does not submit to the vision, he interrogates it: the speech is built of questions, and he reaches “A dagger of the mind, a false creation” by his own reasoning. The man having the hallucination is also the man diagnosing it, so what is presented is not the loss of reason but reason continuing to work while it watches itself fail. The dagger points the way he has already decided to go, which makes it a projection of intention rather than a summons.
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30 Out, damned spot! out, I say! One; two. Why, then ’tis time to do’t.
31 Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
32 fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who
33 would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
Explain the effect of Lady Macbeth speaking in prose in the sleepwalking scene.
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The full-mark answer · 6 marks
Lady Macbeth commanded in blank verse in Act 1; here she has prose, and prose without shape — short sentences, an interrupted count, a rebuke to a husband who is not present. “Hell is murky!” arrives between two unrelated thoughts. Verse had been the form of her authority, so its loss is not a sign of her collapse but the collapse itself, taking place in the arrangement of her sentences.
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1 Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching,
2 grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which
3 no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as
4 an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose,
5 shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue;
Name the technique in Dickens’s description of Scrooge, and quote the words that show it.
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The full-mark answer · 3 marks
Dickens uses a simile: “Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire” . The comparison is extended past the point of likeness, because flint is a stone that produces fire when struck. The line therefore claims not that Scrooge is incapable of warmth but that no one has yet managed to draw it out of him — which is the premise the rest of the novella tests.
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1 Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching,
2 grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which
3 no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as
4 an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose,
5 shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue;
Explain the effect of the accumulating adjectives in the opening description of Scrooge.
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The full-mark answer · 6 marks
The adjectives accumulate without conjunctions, so the sentence has nowhere to stop, and almost all are present participles of things done with a hand: squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching. Avarice becomes an action in progress rather than a quality — not a man who is greedy but a man in the act of gripping — and the absence of pause makes it look compulsive.
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Name the form of Ozymandias and state one way the poem departs from it.
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The full-mark answer · 3 marks
Ozymandias is a sonnet of fourteen lines in iambic pentameter, but its rhyme scheme follows neither the Petrarchan nor the Shakespearean pattern: it interlocks where both would divide, and the turn falls mid-line at “Nothing beside remains” instead of at a line break. A form built to guarantee order is used for a poem about an order that did not last.
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9 And on the pedestal these words appear:
10 ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
11 Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
12 Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
13 Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
14 The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Explain the irony created by the inscription on the pedestal.
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The full-mark answer · 6 marks
The inscription was written to make rival rulers despair of equalling Ozymandias. Set in “Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare” , the same words produce despair of a different kind: not of matching him but of outlasting anything. Shelley does not refute the boast, he lets it be carried out more completely than intended, so the irony is not that the command failed but that time obeyed it too well.
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Write a comparative topic sentence for a response on power in two poems.
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The full-mark answer · 5 marks
Both poems locate power in something that outlasts the powerful, but they disagree about what survives: in Ozymandias it is a sculptor’s reading of a tyrant’s face, while in London it is a habit of mind manufactured in the people power acts on.
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The back room of BRIGGS & SON, Drapers. Evening. A table laid for four with a
cloth that has been ironed and a cloth underneath it that has not. On the wall,
a photograph of the shop front and a framed certificate. Through the doorway,
the darkened shop, its counters under dust sheets. ARTHUR BRIGGS, sixty, is
setting out the chairs. NORA, his wife, comes in with a tureen and puts it
down, and moves the certificate half an inch straighter as she passes it.
ARTHUR. He’ll see a proper table, any road.
NORA. He’s seen a proper table before, Arthur.
Explain what the opening stage direction establishes before a word is spoken.
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The full-mark answer · 4 marks
Before anyone speaks, the direction establishes that this household maintains appearances to exactly the depth they will be examined: the cloth that shows has been ironed and the one beneath it has not. Behind the room the shop stands under dust sheets, so the business the table is being laid to celebrate has already stopped trading. The audience is given the gap between the surface and the fact before a line is delivered.
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1 My grandfather kept his quarter-acre straight
2 as a ledger: every row a ruled line,
3 the beans staked upright, the onions in their neat
4 battalions. None of it was mine.
13 My hands know something. They have kept it back
14 all these years and they are not telling me what.
15 It is not the words.
16 It is the kneeling.
Name the form of the poem and state what the form is doing for it.
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The full-mark answer · 3 marks
The poem is written in quatrains with half-rhyme rather than full rhyme. The regularity matches its subject — a man who kept his rows ruled — and the form gives way exactly where the poem does, the final stanza breaking two of its lines short at the point the speaker picks up a fork he does not know how to use.
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They sent me out to the long field with a jug of tea for the men, and told me
to mind how I went and not to run, which meant the jug was full. The gate was
open, which it never was. I remember that because I remember thinking somebody
would get told off for it, and hoping it would not be me.
Explain what the narrative voice tells you about the speaker.
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The full-mark answer · 5 marks
The voice is doubled: a child experiencing the afternoon and an adult arranging it afterwards. The child’s share is the open gate and the fear of being blamed for it; the adult’s is the ordering — I remember that because, That was the second thing — which belongs to somebody who has been over the memory many times. The narrator is exact about a jug of tea and has still not said what had happened in the field, and that combination is what the voice reveals.
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Explain the difference between context that earns marks and history that does not.
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The full-mark answer · 6 marks
The difference is not quantity. A context sentence earns when it could not be written without the text in front of you: the divine right of kings is a fact about a century, while ‘because kingship was divinely appointed, Shakespeare answers the murder with disorder in nature rather than an investigation’ is a claim about a play. Delete the text and see whether the sentence survives. If it does, it is history.
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Write a topic sentence that makes an argument rather than an observation.
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The full-mark answer · 5 marks
Macbeth’s guilt is presented as a quantity rather than a feeling, which is why he measures it against an ocean and his wife against a spot.
What the book adds
These are the answers that score everything. GCSE English Literature Questions & Answers is the other half: the same questions answered weakly, middlingly and strongly, the mark each version scores, what separates them, and the mark scheme behind it — a hundred questions across every topic, written for the teacher marking them rather than the pupil sitting them.