Question and pairing

Invented Paper 2 question: Discuss how and to what effect two works you have studied present the relationship between power and violence.

This model pairs William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth (c. 1606) with Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1958). It relies on detailed references, not direct quotations; Paper 2 does not require quotations. The comparison brings personal ambition into conversation with communal authority and the suppression of resistance, without assuming that these forms of power are the same.

The argument moves through legitimacy, insecurity and endings. In the figure, each stage shifts the comparison rather than just supplying another example of violence.

Model essay

Power may depend on violence. Yet using it can reveal the weakness of those who claim authority. In William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, violence does more than expose individual cruelty: it tests the relationship between personal action and collective permission. Shakespeare follows a celebrated warrior who tries to turn military distinction into kingship, destroying the loyalties that make rule possible. Achebe places an ambitious man within a community whose established practices eventually face a challenge from colonial institutions. Both writers expose the destruction that follows when strength is equated with violence. Their endings, though, point in different directions. Shakespeare’s tragic resolution leaves open the possibility of legitimate government after a tyrant’s death. Achebe shows how an expanding power can control people’s lives and then shape the account of their destruction.

At first, both works establish that physical force alone does not give violence authority. The community must approve it. In Macbeth, the wounded captain celebrates Macbeth’s brutality in battle because it serves Duncan’s kingdom. We hear about the protagonist before we meet him: Shakespeare lets another man’s report establish Macbeth’s reputation through the language of public honour. His later crimes do not, then, show a peaceful man becoming violent. Instead, he turns a capacity that has already earned rewards against his sovereign. Achebe also introduces Okonkwo through public achievement, including his wrestling victory and success in war. Alongside these achievements, the narrator places Okonkwo’s shame about his father. Communal prestige becomes tied to his private determination to escape perceived weakness. Both protagonists later act on qualities their societies have helped to reward.

That approval has limits. Before murdering Duncan, Macbeth articulates the obligations he is about to violate: Duncan is his king, his relative and his guest. Through the soliloquy, the audience hears Macbeth recognise these competing duties. He understands the restraints and deliberately rejects them. Achebe draws a comparable distinction in Things Fall Apart. When Okonkwo beats his wife during the Week of Peace, he faces religious condemnation because his aggression threatens the community’s relationship with its earth goddess. The priest’s rebuke separates Okonkwo’s wish to dominate from the clan’s rules. Neither protagonist, then, can claim that his violence simply makes him a representative of his society. Each crosses boundaries that reveal a gap between possessing strength and exercising legitimate authority.

Fear then makes violence self-defeating. Having gained the crown, Macbeth cannot accept the prospect that Banquo’s descendants may inherit it. He arranges Banquo’s murder, turning kingship into an effort to eliminate imagined threats. At the banquet, Shakespeare gives the consequences a theatrical form. Macbeth’s response to Banquo’s ghost disrupts a public ceremony meant to display royal stability; the audience sees fear governing the man who wants to perform authority. The ghost may be understood as supernatural punishment or as an embodiment of guilt. Either way, Macbeth cannot keep the consequences of his violence private. His effort to secure power makes his loss of control visible to others.

Achebe also links violent action to fear, though he places that fear within a sustained conflict over masculinity. Before Ikemefuna’s death, Okonkwo is warned not to participate because the boy regards him as a father. He nevertheless delivers a fatal blow, afraid of appearing weak. By giving readers access to this motive, the narrator prevents us from reading the act simply as obedience to communal authority. Its consequences also emerge through Nwoye. His attachment to Ikemefuna makes the killing a profound rupture, and his later attraction to Christianity connects with questions and suffering for which the existing order has given him no satisfying answer. Shakespeare gives Macbeth’s insecurity a disruptive presence on stage; Achebe follows the damage that Okonkwo’s defensive violence does to the family loyalties he expects to command. Neither man escapes the vulnerability he fears.

The parallel becomes more complicated when Achebe introduces a new political system. Here, violence is institutional rather than merely personal. After the church is destroyed, the District Commissioner invites Umuofia’s leaders to a meeting and has them detained. Their humiliation, along with the demand for payment, exposes the coercion beneath what looks like administrative procedure. An apparently civil invitation becomes a means of domination. Macbeth, too, sends agents to kill. The attack on Macduff’s household is a notable example: his fear now drives violence against people who pose no military threat to him. In both works, power operates through intermediaries. But the consequences differ. Macbeth becomes increasingly isolated by his tyranny, while the Commissioner’s coercion serves an expanding structure capable of subordinating the clan. Achebe gives the reader no reason to assume that abusive power must collapse simply because it lacks moral legitimacy.

The endings sharpen this difference. A military challenge gathers opposition to Macbeth’s rule and leads to his death. Malcolm’s final speech then begins the public work of rebuilding political order. After drawing the audience into the tyrant’s increasingly enclosed consciousness, Shakespeare returns us to a collective political scene. Restoration still requires further killing, however. Violence has not been abolished; it has been redirected towards removing tyranny. Okonkwo’s killing of a court messenger produces no comparable collective uprising in Achebe’s novel. The other messengers escape. The clan does not act as he expects. His subsequent suicide finally separates him from the community, whose customs prevent his clansmen from taking down his body. Macbeth faces an organised opposition that defeats him. Okonkwo’s last act of violence instead reveals that the authority he believes he is defending can no longer command unified action.

Achebe takes the struggle for power further, into representation itself. The Commissioner considers giving Okonkwo’s life only a small place in his proposed book about colonial rule. By this point, the novel has explored family relationships and religious practices, allowing competing perspectives within Umuofia to emerge. The Commissioner’s intended compression exposes the violence of an account that cannot recognise the people it claims to explain. Shakespeare closes with a new ruler addressing the survivors. Achebe closes with an official imagining how to write about the dead. Both connect political authority to the power to frame events, but with sharply different effects: Malcolm’s speech makes recovery conceivable, whereas the Commissioner’s projected narrative threatens to erase the complexity the reader has just encountered.

Neither work supports the belief that violence can secure authority. Macbeth destroys the relationships his kingship needs to survive. Okonkwo’s fear of weakness repeatedly damages his standing within his family and community. Yet the differences between their stories resist a simple shared moral. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, collective resistance can defeat tyranny, even if doing so requires force. Achebe’s colonial system can survive the exposure of its moral failures and turn suffering into evidence of its own supposed achievement. Read together, the works shift the question away from who can commit violence towards who can authorise it, who can resist it, and who gets to determine its meaning.

Working with the model

Follow the opening claim about collective permission through the discussion of communal limits and insecure authority to the endings. Where does each return develop the claim rather than repeat it?

How the response meets the task

Rather than catalogue violent incidents, the essay addresses the relationship specified in the question. It distinguishes physical force from authority that others accept. This distinction connects battle, domestic aggression, murder, colonial detention and narrative control without treating them as equivalent actions.

Paper 2 has a maximum of 25 marks. Criterion A, B1, B2, C and D each account for 5 marks. B1 and B2 form the two parts of Criterion B. Explaining how a work creates meaning is related to analysing the relationship between works, but each achievement earns marks separately.

The figure links these five assessment strands to identifiable features of the model. It separates what the essay knows from how it analyses and compares, then shows how it develops and expresses its argument.

Criterion A: Knowledge, understanding and interpretation

The response chooses details that bear directly on the question. Macbeth’s duties to Duncan show why the murder violates recognised obligations. In Achebe’s novel, the priest’s rebuke during the Week of Peace establishes that Okonkwo’s aggression cannot simply stand for the clan’s values. These references demonstrate knowledge because of how the essay uses them to argue, not because of how much story it recalls.

Calling violence destructive is only a starting point. The essay argues that both protagonists depend on relationships they damage while trying to appear strong. Yet it qualifies this shared interpretation: exposing the injustice of the Commissioner’s institutional power does not make that power politically ineffective.

Criterion B1: Analysis and evaluation of choices

The model identifies choices, then explains how they create meaning. The captain’s report introduces Macbeth’s violence as publicly honourable before readers or audiences gain access to his own perspective. Before Duncan’s murder, his soliloquy reveals that he understands the obligations he is about to break. Moving between these forms of presentation supports the distinction between reputation and responsibility.

Construction matters in the discussion of Achebe too. Access to Okonkwo’s fear changes the meaning of his participation in Ikemefuna’s death. Nwoye’s response takes the consequences beyond Okonkwo’s immediate intentions. At the ending, the Commissioner’s proposed compression contrasts with the novel’s developed social world, making narrative form part of the argument about domination.

The essay evaluates these choices by judging their significance. The banquet does more than create tension: an intended display of stability becomes evidence of insecurity. Likewise, the Commissioner’s imagined book does more than reveal prejudice. It threatens to replace complex lives with an account that serves colonial authority.

Criterion B2: Comparative analysis

Comparison changes how each work is interpreted. By examining communal limits, the essay avoids treating either protagonist as a straightforward embodiment of his society. It then contrasts Macbeth’s isolation with the Commissioner’s expanding institutional power. Moral failure, the comparison shows, does not produce the same political outcome in both works.

There is no need for equal numbers of similarities and differences. The essay’s strongest contrast comes from the endings. Malcolm’s public speech and the Commissioner’s projected book both frame what has happened, but one makes rebuilding conceivable while the other exposes the threat of erasure. The comparison concerns methods and implications, not just events.

Criterion C: Focus and organization

The introduction sets out a shared argument alongside a significant difference. From there, the body develops the relationship through legitimacy, insecurity and endings instead of finishing an account of one work before starting the other. Some paragraphs concentrate on a single work. Their claims and transitions still connect them to the comparison already underway.

Balance requires both works to contribute substantially to the reasoning; it does not require every paragraph to divide its words equally. The conclusion brings together the argument about authorising, resisting and interpreting violence rather than simply repeating the works’ outcomes.

Criterion D: Language

Formal language need not be indirect. Verbs such as redirects, exposes and distinguishes specify relationships between choices and meanings. The essay uses terms such as soliloquy, narrator and theatrical where they help explain the relevant literary form.

Careful qualifications sharpen the argument too. The discussion allows alternative understandings of Banquo’s ghost while maintaining its claim about public instability. Similarly, describing Malcolm’s rule as a possibility of recovery avoids treating the ending as proof that every political problem has disappeared.

Where the interpretation remains open

The model pays more attention to communal permission and political institutions than to supernatural authority in Macbeth. Another sustained reading could give the witches and equivocal predictions a larger role. That shift would change the emphasis, not automatically improve the response. The criteria reward the quality and relevance of analysis, not the quantity of features mentioned.

Take one paragraph from the model. Distinguish its textual reference, its explanation of a writer’s choice, its comparative inference and its contribution to the central argument.