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You need to provide some contextual information which should be relevant and appropriate to what you are writing, and not just random information like a list of all the plays Shakespeare wrote.

Contextual research could include:

• historical
• social/political/cultural
• biographical

It is essential that you make sure that the details you include in your work are relevant to the question you are answering.

You can use the library and/or the internet to research contextual information such as:

• Shakespeare’s life
• your play and its genre (for example, the genre could be tragedy)
• the theatres in which the plays were first performed
• the social/historical/cultural settings of your play
• the social/historical/cultural settings of Elizabethan/Jacobean England

You must not give huge, lengthy chunks of contextual information in your controlled assessment as these will not be awarded marks.

You must not simply regurgitate facts about Shakespeare’s life or about Elizabethan/Jacobean England.

You must focus your contextual knowledge on the key terms of the questions, making sure it is included in a meaningful way so that it highlights the points you wish to make in your argument.