Important Drama Terms

1. Important Drama Terms

2. Aside • In a play, words spoken by an actor to the audience, but not supposed to be heard by the other characters in the play.

3. Blank Verse • Poetry that is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse is often unobtrusive and the iambic pentameter form often resembles the rhythms of ordinary speech. William Shakespeare wrote most of his plays in blank verse.

4. Catharsis • The purging of the feelings of pity and fear that, according to Aristotle, occur in the audience of tragic drama. The audience experiences catharsis at the end of the play, following the catastrophe.

5. Catastrophe • In drama, particularly the tragediesof classical antiquity, the catastrophe is the final resolution in a poem or narrative plot, which unravels the intrigue and brings the piece to a close. In comedies, this may be a marriage between main characters; in tragedies, it may be the death of one or more main characters. It is the final part of a play.

6. Comedy • Comedy is a word that Greeks and Romans confined to descriptions of stage-plays with happy endings. Much comedy contains variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, repetitiveness, and the effect of opposite expectations.

7. Comic Relief • The use of a comic scene to interrupt a succession of intensely tragic dramatic moments. The comedy of scenes offering comic relief typically parallels the tragic action that the scenes interrupt. Comic relief is lacking in Greek tragedy, but occurs regularly in Shakespeare's tragedies.

8. Concealment • A dramatic convention that allows a character to be seen by the audience, but remain hidden from fellow actors.

9. Exciting Force • Themoment that follows the introduction (also called exposition) of a drama and initiates the rising action (also called development); it consists of a resolution on the part of the protagonist to accomplish some major goal, the pursuit of which constitutes the chief action of the play.

10. Foil • A character who contrasts and parallels the main character in a play or story.

11. Foreshadowing • Hints of what is to come in the action of a play or a story.

12. History Play • In the First Folio, the plays of William Shakespeare were grouped into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies. The histories were those plays based on the lives of English kings. Therefore they can be more accurately called the "English history plays," a less common designation.

13. Iambic Pentameter • A rhyme scheme in which each line consists of ten syllables. The syllables are divided into five pairs called iambs or iambic feet. An iamb is a metrical unit made up of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. • A line of iambic pentameter flows like this: baBOOM/ baBOOM / baBOOM / baBOOM / baBOOM.

14. Irony • A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature. In verbal irony, characters say the opposite of what they mean. In irony of circumstance or situation, the opposite of what is expected occurs. In dramatic irony, a character speaks in ignorance of a situation or event known to the audience or to the other characters.

15. Monologue/Soliloquy • A speech by a single character without another character's response.

16. Oxymoron • a combination of contradictory or incongruous words “grimly gay” “jumbo shrimp” “perfectly inadequate”

17. Paradox • a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet is perhaps true. In George Orwell's Animal Farm, the words "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others"

18. Shakespearean Sonnet Structure • There are fourteen lines in a Shakespearean sonnet. The first twelve lines are divided into three quatrains with four lines each. In the three quatrains the poet establishes a theme or problem and then resolves it in the final two lines, called the couplet. The rhyme scheme of the quatrains is ababcdcdefef. The couplet has the rhyme scheme gg. This sonnet structure is commonly called the English sonnet or the Shakespearean sonnet.

19. Tragedy • A type of drama in which the characters experience reversals of fortune, usually for the worse. In tragedy, catastrophe and suffering await many of the characters, especially the hero.

20. Pun • thehumoroususe of a word or phrase so as to emphasize or suggestitsdifferentmeaningsor applications; a play on words.

21. 5 Act Structure • Act I: Exposition or Introduction • Act II: Rising Action • Act III: Climax • Act IV: Falling Action • Act V: Resolution