AO5: The Critical Ghost that Haunts the A Level Lit Essay

AO5 (critical engagement) has a reputation.  It arrives in lessons and mark schemes like a spectral presence: vague, unsettling, prone to terrifying otherwise confident students into silence.  ‘Different interpretations’, it whispers. ‘Critical debate’ . ‘Alternative readings’.

Panic!  “What?  I have to learn all these critical quotes as well - who comes first - what if I can’t remember their names - how do I use them in an essay?”   Cue a desperate Google search (let’s be honest, nowadays the heaving lifting is going to be AI).  Cue a random quote taken out of context and shoehorned into paragraph three ‘because AO5’.

Let us gently but firmly exorcise this ghost.

AO5 Is Not About Sounding Clever. It Is About Thinking With Others.

At its heart, AO5 is not asking students to memorise critics.  It is asking something far more humane: Can you place your own interpretation of a text in conversation with other intelligent readers?

That is it.  And the good news? Critics are far more useful, and far more fun, if you treat them less like sacred authorities and more like clickbait you have strong feelings about.

Start With Living, Breathing Critics

If AO5 feels paralysing, it is often because students first meet it through critics who, to a man, are dead white men.  (Sorry, A. C. Bradley. Sorry, Wilson Knight.)

This is why I always start with Stephen Greenblatt.  Greenblatt writes with curiosity rather than intimidation . His work on Shakespeare, particularly Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Will in the World, models what AO5 actually looks like in practice:

• interpretation grounded in context

• argument driven by ideas, not jargon

• a sense that texts are alive inside power structures, not embalmed in exams

Students do not need to agree with Greenblatt.  They need to see how he thinks.  And the joy of Greenblatt is that you can do exactly that, just log onto YouTube and there he is, brilliant and faintly wrestling with the technology.  AO5 gold dust.

Find the Critics Who Blaze a Trail

Next, students need critics who shift the ground beneath the text.  Enter Marilyn French.

French’s feminist readings of Shakespeare, particularly in Shakespeare’s Division of Experience, are unapologetically bold.  She argues that Shakespeare’s tragedies repeatedly punish women for existing outside patriarchal control. Do you have to agree with her entirely?  Absolutely not.  Does she force you to rethink Desdemona, Ophelia, or Lady Macbeth?  Undeniably.

French teaches students one of the most important AO5 lessons of all:  Interpretations are shaped by ideology and pretending otherwise is the real bias.

Finally: Choose One Critic You Can Cheerfully Argue With

This is where AO5 becomes fun.  Every student should have one critic they respectfully, or gleefully, disagree with.  Someone whose ideas sharpen their own thinking through friction.

For Othello, there is no greater clickbait villain than Thomas Rymer.

Rymer loathed Othello.  Loathed it.  He dismissed the play as morally incoherent and famously claimed its moral was nothing more than ‘a warning to good housewives to look well to their linen’. Brilliant! 

And yet, Rymer is invaluable.  Because he reveals how violently interpretation is shaped by its moment. His moral absolutism tells us more about Restoration anxieties than Shakespeare’s intentions and recognising that is pure AO5.

Is There A Modern Rymer? 

If Rymer represents moral panic disguised as criticism, his modern equivalent is less prudish, but no less provocative.

Camille Paglia’s readings of Shakespeare (Sexual Personae and later essays) are ferociously anti-sanitised.  She resists feminist victim narratives, insists on the erotic power of figures like Desdemona, and treats Shakespeare as a pagan dramatist obsessed with sexual energy, not moral instruction.

Academics argue with Paglia constantly.  That is precisely why she is so useful.  She shows students something crucial: Disagreement is not failure.  It is critical engagement. 

Arguing with Paglia (with any of them), pushing back, refining, resisting, is AO5 done properly.