Romeo and Juliet Quiz 2 Drama and Poetry Terms Honors

Drama

A play

Tragedy

A drama that presents the downfall of a dignified character or characters who are involved in historically or socially significant events. Ends in catastrophe and usually death

Tragic Hero

The protagonist of a tragedy that fails or dies because of a flaw or a cruel twist of fate

Act

A larger division of dramatic text that indicates a shift in location or time

Scene

A smaller division of a dramatic text that indicates a shift in location or time

Stage Directions

Direction in text in a drama that tells the readers the actions of the characters

Prologue

A brief opening section to a play spoken by a single actor called "chorus"

Epilogue

A piece of writing at the end of a work of literature or drama, usually used to bring closure to the work

Dramatic Irony

The audience is aware of something that the characters onstage are not aware of.

Comic Relief

A humorous scene, incident or speech that relieves the overall emotional intensity

Dialogue

A conversation between two or more people.

Monologue

A long speech by one person to an audience of any number of people

Soliloquy

A long speech in which a character who is onstage alone expresses his or her thoughts and feelings aloud

Aside

Words spoken by a character in a play to the audience or to another character that are not supposed to be heard by the others onstage

Apostrophe

A figure of speech in which one directly addresses an absent or imaginary person, or some abstraction

Refrain

A repeated word, phrase, line, or group of lines; like the chorus in a song.

Rhyme

The occurrence of similar or identical sounds at the end of two or more words

Couplet

A series of two rhymed lines with a pattern, meaning that ends of two lines rhyme with eachother

Quatrain

A series/unit of four rhymed lines

Rhythm

A pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry.

Meter

Generally a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry.

Iambic Pentameter

The rhythm in which Shakespeare's plays and sonnets are written; Lines consist of an alternating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables

Blank Verse

Poetry in unrhymed iambic pentameter; "blank" means the poetry is not rhymed

Free Verse

A form of poetry that does not have a regular rhythm or a rhyme scheme.

Sonnet

A fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter and used to explore deeply felt issues. Typically a problem/issue and then a offers a "solution".

Shakespearean Sonnet

A sonnet that consists of 3 quatrains and a couplet
Ex. The whole Prologue in Romeo and Juliet

Paradox

An apparently contradictory statement that actually reveals some truth.

Oxymoron

To contradictory words, ex. jumbo shrimp, deafening silence, etc.

Allusion

A brief, usually indirect reference to another piece of literature.

Juxtaposition

To place side by side in order to compare

Pun

A play on the multiple meanings of a word on two words that sound alike but have different meanings

Connotation

The emotional and imaginative association of a word

Denotation

The dictionary/literal definition of a word

Inflection

a change in the form of a word (typically the ending) to express a grammatical function or attribute such as tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender