WAEC SSCE - Literature In English - 2013 (Drama & Poetry)

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John Fletcher's "Upon an Honest Man's Fortune" is a meditation on free will and self-determination, and in the course of praising the self-made honest man it mounts a firm case against astrologers and all who claim that the stars govern human destiny.

Man is his own star. The poem's controlling argument is that a virtuous man is the maker of his own fortune. In the famous lines, "Man is his own star, and the soul that can / Render an honest and a perfect man / Commands all light, all influence, all fate." If the human soul, through honesty, controls light and fate, then the astrologers who read fate in the heavens are usurping a power that in truth belongs to human character. Nothing, the poem insists, falls to such a man "too early or too late."

Our acts are our angels. Fletcher relocates destiny from the sky to conduct: "Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, / Our fatal shadows that walk by us still." The forces that shape a life are one's own deeds, the good or evil that a person does, not the movements of distant planets. This directly denies the astrologer's premise that celestial bodies dictate events.

The charge against astrologers. The case against them therefore has several strands. First, they are frauds who claim to foretell what no star determines. Second, they preach a fatalism that robs men of moral responsibility, teaching people to blame the heavens rather than their own choices. Third, they degrade human dignity by making men the puppets of the stars when in fact the honest soul "commands" fate. The wise and upright man rules the stars; the astrologer would enslave him to them.

Conclusion. The poem's verdict is that astrology is empty and even harmful. By insisting that virtue and action, not planetary influence, decide an honest man's fortune, Fletcher exposes the astrologers as deceivers who deny free will and moral accountability. The case against them is, at bottom, a defence of human freedom and responsibility.

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Femi Osofisan's Women of Owu, an African reworking of Euripides' tragedy about the fall of a city, gives the supernatural an important role. The gods and ancestral deities frame the human suffering, comment on it, and raise disturbing questions about divine justice and responsibility for the destruction of Owu.

The gods frame the action. The play opens and closes with the supernatural. The deities, chief among them Anlugbua, the founding ancestral god of Owu, appear above the ruined city. Their presence lifts the historical fall of Owu onto a cosmic plane, so that the massacre of men and the enslavement of the women are seen as part of a larger struggle involving the gods.

They expose divine indifference and complicity. A central concern is the failure of the gods to save Owu. Anlugbua, who founded and once protected the town, arrives too late to prevent its ruin, and the deities are shown quarrelling, shifting blame and pursuing their own grievances while human beings are slaughtered. Osofisan uses this to question a world in which the powerful, whether gods or conquering armies, allow the innocent to suffer.

They pronounce judgement and prophecy. The supernatural also delivers warning and retribution. The gods foretell that the victorious allies who sacked Owu will themselves meet disaster on their journeys home, so that the play insists that cruelty and injustice will be punished in time. This prophetic function gives the tragedy a moral shape.

They deepen the political meaning. By setting divine forces behind the conquest, Osofisan enlarges his criticism of imperial aggression and needless war, suggesting that both earthly and heavenly powers must answer for the ruin of a people.

The supernatural is therefore not mere decoration; it frames the tragedy, exposes the failure and complicity of the powerful, pronounces future judgement, and reinforces the play's protest against the horrors of conquest.

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Marriage is the central concern of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. It supplies the plot, motivates almost every character, and gives Wilde his target for satirising Victorian attitudes to love, class and money.

Marriage drives the plot. The action springs from two courtships: Jack Worthing's desire to marry Gwendolen Fairfax and Algernon Moncrieff's pursuit of Cecily Cardew. Every complication, the double identities as "Ernest," the deceptions, the confrontations, arises from the characters' efforts to marry the partners they want. The play ends, as comedy demands, in the promise of three marriages.

Marriage as a social and financial transaction. Through Lady Bracknell, Wilde exposes the Victorian view of marriage as a business arrangement rather than a union of hearts. Her interrogation of Jack concerns his income, property, politics and pedigree, not his affection for her daughter. She approves of Cecily only after learning of her large fortune, revealing marriage as a market governed by wealth and social standing.

The idealised name over the man. Gwendolen and Cecily both insist that they can only love a man called Ernest, valuing an ideal image and a name above the real character of a suitor. Wilde mocks the romantic illusions and superficial standards that Victorian young women were taught to bring to marriage.

Contrasting views of matrimony. Algernon's cynical epigrams ("in married life three is company") and Lady Bracknell's mercenary calculations sit beside the young lovers' romantic enthusiasm, so that the play surveys marriage from several angles, all treated comically.

Conclusion. Marriage is thus supremely important in the play, both as the engine of the plot and as the theme through which Wilde satirises the snobbery, hypocrisy and mercenary calculation of Victorian society. It is the subject on which nearly every joke and every twist depends.

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Kobina Sekyi's The Blinkards is a satirical comedy set in colonial Cape Coast, and it presents African life in two contrasting forms: authentic African custom on one side, and a foolish, blind imitation of European ways on the other. The very title, referring to people who wear blinkers, points to those who cannot see the value of their own culture.

Genuine African life through custom and tradition. Sekyi presents true African life through its rich traditions. The play shows respect for elders, communal solidarity, the use of the mother tongue Fante, proverbs and courtesy, and above all the customary marriage rites. The traditional betrothal and marriage, conducted with the proper family negotiations and ceremony, are presented as dignified and meaningful, embodying the settled values of the community.

The distortion of African life by imitation. Against this, Sekyi satirises the anglicised Africans who despise their own heritage. Characters such as Mrs. Brofusem, who has returned from England, and the young Mr. Okadu ape European dress, speech, food and manners, scorning African clothing, language and customs as inferior. Their slavish mimicry is presented as ridiculous and self-destructive, a betrayal of their own identity.

The voice of balance. The educated lawyer Mr. Onyimdze represents true wisdom. Though Western-trained, he keeps his African values and marries in the traditional way, showing that education need not mean the loss of one's culture. Through him Sekyi presents the ideal of an African who embraces the good in his own life while resisting empty imitation.

Comic exposure. The clash of the two ways of life produces the play's comedy, but beneath the laughter lies a serious plea for cultural pride.

African life is therefore presented both as a source of dignity and worth, seen in its customs and communal values, and as something endangered by the blind imitators who despise it. Sekyi urges his people to value their own heritage rather than lose themselves in foreign fashions.

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The African poem "Homeless not Hopeless" sets the fortunes of the rich and the poor side by side and shows that, far from being separate worlds, the two are bound together in a single web of dependence and consequence. A good answer identifies the several ways the poem links them.

Economic dependence. The wealth of the rich is drawn from the labour of the poor. The comfort, buildings and prosperity that the affluent enjoy rest on the work, sweat and service of those who own little. In this sense the fortunes of the rich are built upon the poor, so that the two cannot be separated.

Shared physical space and mutual visibility. The poor and the rich inhabit the same city or society; the homeless live in the shadow of the mansions. Their nearness means the fortune of one is always in the sight of the other, and the poverty of the poor is a direct measure of, and reproach to, the abundance of the rich.

Moral and social interdependence. The poem suggests that the security of the rich is never complete while the poor are desperate. Neglect of the poor breeds discontent, crime and unrest that threaten the very comfort of the wealthy, so that the fortunes of the two classes rise and fall together. Conversely, the compassion or hardness of the rich shapes whether the poor sink or rise.

Hope as the equalising link. The title itself, "Homeless not Hopeless," links the two by insisting that material poverty does not extinguish human worth or aspiration. The poor share with the rich the same humanity and the same capacity to hope, so that dignity, not wealth, becomes the common ground uniting them.

Conclusion. The fortunes of the rich and the poor are linked economically, spatially, morally and in a shared humanity. The poem uses this interdependence to protest against inequality and to argue that the well-being of one class cannot finally be divorced from the fate of the other.

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Sergius Saranoff, the Bulgarian cavalry officer in Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man, is Shaw's vehicle for satirising the romantic idea of the heroic soldier. On the surface he is the dashing war hero; on examination he is brave but foolish, theatrical rather than professional.

The accidental hero. Sergius wins fame by leading a reckless cavalry charge against the Serbs at Slivnitza. It succeeds, but only by luck: the enemy had been supplied with the wrong ammunition and could not fire. Bluntschli, the professional soldier, dismisses the charge as the suicidal folly of an amateur, comparing Sergius to Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Militarily the charge should have been a massacre; Sergius is celebrated for an act of ignorance, not skill.

Romantic idealist, poor strategist. Sergius approaches war as a stage on which to display glory and honour. He knows nothing of the practical craft of soldiering that Bluntschli embodies, the man who carries chocolates instead of cartridges because food keeps a soldier alive. Precisely because he broke the rules of war and won, Sergius is passed over for promotion, a bitterness that helps to disillusion him.

Disillusionment. By the play's development Sergius grows cynical about the whole profession. He resigns his commission and delivers his famous verdict that soldiering is "the coward's art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm's way when you are weak." The romantic hero comes to despise the very heroism the world praises in him.

The poseur off the battlefield. His conduct in love mirrors his conduct in war. He preaches the "higher love" to Raina while flirting with the servant Louka, proving that his heroic and noble poses are a performance rather than a settled character.

Conclusion. My impression is that Sergius is physically courageous but professionally incompetent, a brave but vain amateur whose reputation rests on accident and posturing. Through him Shaw deflates the glamorous myth of the soldier and champions instead the unromantic competence of the realist Bluntschli.

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In John Donne's metaphysical poem "The Sun Rising," the persona addresses the sun directly, and his attitude moves through scorn, defiant superiority and finally a gracious condescension, all serving to exalt the lovers' bond above every worldly power.

Scorn and impatience. The poem opens with insult. The persona calls the sun a "busy old fool, unruly Sun" and a "saucy pedantic wretch" for intruding through curtains to disturb the lovers in bed. He resents the sun's authority over time, its power to summon schoolboys, apprentices, courtiers and huntsmen to their duties, and he insists that love is not subject to the sun's seasons, hours or days.

Defiant superiority. The persona then belittles the sun's supposed strength. He boasts that he could eclipse the sun's beams merely by closing his eyes, but will not, because that would mean losing sight of his beloved. He hyperbolically claims that his mistress contains all the riches of the Indies and that she is "all states" while he is "all princes." Compared to their love, all worldly honour is mimicry and all wealth is alchemy, mere counterfeit.

Gracious condescension. In the final stanza his tone softens into a lofty generosity. Since the lovers are the whole world, the sun, being old and needing rest, can perform its duty of warming the world simply by shining on their bed: "Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; / This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere." The sun is thus demoted from tyrant to servant of the lovers.

Conclusion. The poet's attitude to the sun is therefore one of playful contempt turning to triumphant assertion of love's supremacy. By mocking, then commanding, the sun, Donne dramatises the metaphysical conceit that the lovers' private world is the true universe, before which even the sun must bow.

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In Femi Osofisan's Women of Owu, Maye Okunade is the commander of the allied army of Ijebu, Ife and their supporters that razes the ancient Owu Kingdom to the ground. The play, an adaptation of Euripides' The Trojan Women set against the nineteenth-century Yoruba wars, exposes the gap between the noble reasons Maye offers for the war and the greed and personal grievance that truly drive it.

The stated, public reason: liberation and free trade. Maye and his allies present the assault as a war of liberation. They claim to have come to break Owu's stranglehold on commerce and to reopen the great Apomu market, which Owu had seized and closed, thereby strangling the trade of neighbouring kingdoms. He casts himself as a deliverer freeing oppressed peoples from Owu's arrogance and its practice of enslaving fellow Yoruba. This lofty language of freedom and justice is the banner under which the coalition marches.

The personal reason: the recovery of Iyunloye. Beneath the political excuse lies a private wound. Maye's wife, Iyunloye, had been taken from him to Owu, an echo of Helen of Troy in the source play. His desire to recover her and to avenge the insult to his honour is a powerful private motive that he conveniently dresses in the robes of a just war. The personal and the political are deliberately blurred.

Ambition, plunder and the hypocrisy of the "liberators". Osofisan makes it clear that imperial appetite drives the war as much as any principle. The allies covet Owu's wealth, its people and its land. Once the city falls, the "liberators" loot the shrines, enslave the surviving women and murder the royal child Aderogun, behaving no better than the tyranny they claimed to overthrow. The Erelu and the chorus of Owu women repeatedly puncture Maye's justifications, showing that the rhetoric of liberation masks conquest.

Conclusion. Maye Okunade's reasons for attacking Owu are therefore layered: an official pretext of liberating trade and freeing oppressed peoples, a personal thirst to reclaim his abducted wife and salve his honour, and an underlying hunger for plunder and power. Osofisan uses this mixture to condemn all wars fought behind the mask of high ideals, insisting that the true victims are always the innocent women left to mourn.

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Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is subtitled "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People," and humour is the very substance of the play. Wilde uses several kinds of comedy to entertain the audience and, beneath the laughter, to satirise the manners and hypocrisies of Victorian upper-class society.

Verbal wit, epigram and paradox. The play sparkles with clever one-liners that reverse ordinary sense. Algernon declares that "in married life three is company and two is none," and that "the truth is rarely pure and never simple." Such paradoxes make the audience laugh while quietly exposing the shallowness of the values being mocked. The dialogue treats trivial matters (cucumber sandwiches, muffins) with grave seriousness and serious matters (marriage, death, morality) with airy triviality.

The pun on "Earnest". The whole plot turns on a comic pun. Both Gwendolen and Cecily long to marry a man named Ernest, confusing the name with the moral quality of being earnest. Jack and Algernon each pretend to be "Ernest," and the double meaning generates both farce and satire on Victorian earnestness.

Comedy of situation and "Bunburying". The invented invalid friend Bunbury and the fictitious wicked brother Ernest allow the men to lead double lives. The resulting mistaken identities, the two women both engaged to "Ernest," and the farcical confrontations create sustained situational humour.

Character as comic satire. Lady Bracknell is the great comic creation, her absurd interview of Jack (treating a lost handbag as a social disqualification) ridiculing the snobbery and mercenary marriage market of her class. Miss Prism, Canon Chasuble and the servants all add further layers of comedy of manners.

Farcical resolution. The discovery that Jack was the baby left in a handbag at Victoria Station, and is really named Ernest, resolves everything in a burst of improbable, delightful coincidence.

Conclusion. Humour in the play is therefore not mere decoration; through wit, paradox, puns, farce and comic characters, Wilde entertains richly while satirising Victorian hypocrisy about marriage, class, respectability and morality.

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A strong answer on the changes in the persona in the African poem "Expelled" traces how the speaker moves from one emotional and moral condition to another across the poem, showing the experience of expulsion or banishment as a process of transformation.

The persona at the start. At the opening the persona is typically presented in a settled, secure or hopeful state, belonging to a place or community and confident of acceptance. This initial condition establishes a base line against which the later change is measured, so that the reader feels the weight of what is lost.

The turning point of expulsion. The central event is the expulsion itself, the moment the persona is cast out, rejected or driven away. This produces a sharp emotional shift from belonging to alienation, from security to vulnerability. The persona's tone darkens into pain, shame, anger or bewilderment as the reality of rejection takes hold.

The changed persona. After the expulsion the persona is altered: no longer innocent or trusting, but wiser, more bitter, or hardened by the experience. The change may be for the worse, a fall into loneliness and disillusion, or paradoxically for the better, a new self-awareness, resilience or determination born of suffering. Either way the persona who emerges is not the one who began the poem.

Significance of the change. The transformation carries the poem's meaning, whether about injustice, the pain of exile, loss of innocence, or the growth that hardship forces upon a person. The reader is invited to judge the causes and consequences of the persona's changed state.

Conclusion. The persona in "Expelled" changes from an initial state of belonging and security, through the crisis of rejection, to a final condition of alienation and altered self-knowledge, and this movement is the emotional and thematic heart of the poem.

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Mr. Okadu is one of the chief comic and satirical figures in Kobina Sekyi's The Blinkards. He is a young anglicised African, and Sekyi uses him to embody and ridicule the cultural blindness that gives the play its title.

He is a leading blinkard. Okadu is a young man who has come under the spell of European fashion and despises everything African. He affects English dress, English speech and English manners, and he looks down on his own language, food and customs as beneath him. In him the folly of blind imitation is concentrated and exposed.

He is a source of satire and comedy. Much of the play's humour flows from Okadu's absurd behaviour. His exaggerated attempts to appear European, his affected talk and his contempt for his own people make him laughable. Through this comic portrait Sekyi criticises the educated young Africans of the colonial period who were ashamed of their identity.

He represents cultural alienation. Okadu illustrates the danger of losing one's roots. By rejecting African values in favour of foreign ones he becomes a rootless figure, neither truly European nor properly African. He stands as a warning of what happens when imitation replaces genuine self-respect.

He serves as a foil. Okadu's shallow mimicry contrasts sharply with the balanced wisdom of the traditional and the sensibly educated characters, who keep their African dignity. This contrast sharpens Sekyi's message that education should not mean self-contempt.

The role of Mr. Okadu, therefore, is to personify the blind imitator of European ways. He advances the play's satire, provides much of its comedy, and serves as a foil that highlights the value of cultural pride that Sekyi wishes his audience to embrace.