How do I successfully include context in my essays?

Writing about context for any essay can be daunting, since it often seems difficult to know what to revise and remember for your exam as you don’t know what the question will be. In answer to this question, it is the relevance of the context that is the most important part not the inclusion of context in your essay. Simply sticking a paragraph on context in the middle of your essay will not gain you high marks since it may not be relevant to the points you are making and might therefore appear clumsy to the examiner. However, writing about context can be really stimulating and enjoyable! There are two key ways of ensuring that the context you include will make your essay successful. This example uses Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. 1) When you revise, try to remember context that is ‘broad’- that is, contextual information on your text that can be manipulated to many different types of question. For example, instead of remembering lots of specific facts and dates, e.g. ‘Shakespeare was born in 1564’, not particularly relevant to the text, try to remember context that is less specific but relevant to the play, such as, ‘In the Elizabethan era, it was widely believed that suicide damned you to Hell’. This is much more useful contextual knowledge to remember, as it is directly linked to the play. 2) Once you have chosen what context to revise, it is important to use it in the most relevant way. For example, instead of writing a separate paragraph on Elizabethan religious beliefs, you might use this context in a way that supports your answer to the essay question, which would gain you high marks. If the question was about the genre of the play as a tragedy, you might write about the death scene of Romeo and Juliet and insert this contextual knowledge into the paragraph about this scene. Having the awareness that to a contemporary audience their suicide will lead them to eternity in Hell as well as separation in life, enables you to discuss how the tragedy of the play is really climaxed at this point- as Shakespeare demands empathy for the two characters who have fallen from grace. The relevance of using context in this way and the interweaving into your point will impress the examiner as it reflects your sensitivity to the production of the text as well as your intelligent essay writing skills.