Narrates a story with conflicts, tensions, and actions through character dialogues.
Divided into acts and scenes for dramatic significance.
Writers present feelings, emotions, and ideas through characters.
Monologue
Spoken verse within plays that gives insight into the speaker's innermost thoughts and feelings.
Speech is given while other characters are on stage.
Often comes during a climactic moment.
Reveals hidden truths about a character, their history, and their relationships.
Soliloquy
In drama, a moment when a character is alone on stage and speaks their thoughts aloud.
Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights used soliloquies extensively, especially for villains.
Example: Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, where he questions the worth of living and reasons for not ending his life.
Satire
Literary tone used to ridicule or make fun of human vice or weakness.
Intent of correcting or changing the subject of the satiric attack.
Aim is not to amuse but to arouse contempt.
Stock Characters
A stock character is a stereotype.
Relies on cultural types or names for personality, manner of speech, and other characteristics.
Examples: The Professor, The Nurse, The Damsel in Distress.
Foil
A character that makes another seem better by contrast.
Dramatic foil Example: Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
Chorus
A single person or group of people who serve mainly as commentator(s) on the characters and events in the play.
Adds to the audience’s understanding of the play by expressing traditional moral, religious, and social attitudes.
Used to interpret and recall past events, to comment on the actions of the characters in the play, or to foretell the future.
Stage Directions
Instructions written into the script of a play.
Indicate stage actions, movements of performers, or production requirements.
Not spoken by the actors.
Fourth Wall
Imaginary wall that separates the events on stage from the audience.
The stage is constructed with a cutaway view of the house.
The audience can look through this invisible "fourth wall" and look directly into the events inside.
Comedy
A literary work which is amusing and ends happily.
Modern comedies tend to be funny, while Shakespearean comedies simply end well.
Shakespearean comedy also contains items such as misunderstandings, puns, and mistaken identity to allow for comic relief.
Tragedy
A serious play in which the chief character passes through a series of misfortunes leading to a final, devastating catastrophe.
Traditionally divided into five acts:
Act 1: Introduces characters in a state of happiness or at height of power, influence, or fame.
Act 2: Introduces a problem or dilemma.
Act 3: Crisis point.
Act 4: Main characters fail to avert the crisis, and disaster occurs.
Act 5: Reveals the grim consequences of that failure.
Romeo and Juliet is considered a drama and a tragedy.
Shakespearean Sonnet
Sonnet form used by Shakespeare.
Composed of three quatrains and a couplet in iambic pentameter.
Rhyme pattern: abab cdcd efef gg.
Stressed/Unstressed Syllables
Stressed syllable: Part of a word said with greater emphasis.
Unstressed syllable: Part of a word said with less emphasis.
Iambic Pentameter
A line of verse with five metrical feet, each consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable followed by one long (or stressed) syllable (10 syllables per line).
Example: Two households, both alike in dignity.
Couplet/Triplet/Quatrain
Couplet = 2 line stanzas
Triplet = 3 line stanzas
Quatrain = 4 line stanzas
Figurative Language
Includes metaphors, similes, alliteration, paradox, oxymoron, hyperbole, foreshadowing, allusion, etc.
Pun
A play on words in which a word is used to convey two meanings at the same time.
Example: Mercutio's "grave man" pun in Romeo and Juliet.
Conceit
Comparison or extended metaphor between two very unlike things, whose dissimilarity is very obvious.
Example: “A broken heart is a damaged clock.”
Verbal Irony
Words literally state the opposite of the writer's (or speaker's) true meaning (sarcasm).
Example: A parent sarcastically offering to pick up after their child.
Situational Irony
Events turn out the opposite of what was expected.
What the characters and audience think should happen isn't what eventually happens.
Example: Missing a date to go to a ballgame, then running into the date with someone else.
Dramatic Irony
The audience perceives something that a character in the story does not know.
Example: Horror movie characters walking in the woods late at night and in Titanic viewers know the ending.
Antithesis
Literally means “opposite” – it is usually the opposite of a statement, concept, or idea.
Example: “That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
Aside
A character's dialogue is spoken but not heard by the other actors on the stage.
Used for giving the audience special information.
Example: When a movie character is speaking directly to the camera.
Apostrophe
Refers to a speech or address to a person who is not actually present.
Example: Juliet's line “O, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”