Download Shakespeare Vocabulary - Brunswick City Schools

Shakespeare Vocabulary
Alliteration: the repetition of the same sound at the beginning of a word, such as the repetition of b
sounds in Keats's "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" ("Ode to a Nightingale") or Coleridge's
"Five miles meandering in a mazy motion ("Kubla Khan").
Allusion: a brief reference to a person, event, place, or phrase. The writer assumes will recognize
the reference.
Aside: A device in which a character in a drama makes a short speech, which is heard by the
audience but not by other characters in the play.
Blank Verse: A poem written in unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Couplet: A stanza of two lines, usually rhyming.
Dramatic Monologue: The occurrence of a single speaker saying something to a silent audience.
Dramatic Irony: when the words and actions of the characters of a work of literature have a
different meaning for the reader than they do for the characters. This is the result of the reader
having a greater knowledge than the characters themselves.
Foil: a character opposite in personality to another character in the story, usually the same sex and
the same age.
Foot: The basic unit of measurement in a line of poetry.
Free Verse: Unrhymed Poetry with lines of varying lengths, and containing no specific metrical
pattern.
Iamb: A metrical pattern of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable.
Irony: the discrepancy between what is said and what is meant, what is said and what is done, what
is expected or intended and what happens, what is meant or said and what others understand.
Pun: A play on words wherein a word is used to convey two meanings at the same time.
Rhythm: Recurrences of stressed and unstressed syllables at equal intervals, similar to meter.
Soliloquy: In drama, a moment when a character is alone and speaks his or her thoughts aloud. In
the line "To be, or not to be, that is the question:"
Sonnet: A lyric poem of fourteen lines whose rhyme scheme is fixed. ABABCDCDEFEFGG
Tragedy: According to A. C. Bradley, a tragedy is a type of drama, which is pre-eminently the story
of one person, the hero. "Romeo and Juliet" and "Antony and Cleopatra" depart from this, however,
and we may view both characters in each play as one protagonist. The story depicts the trouble part
of the hero's life in which a total reversal of fortune comes upon a person who formerly stood in high
degree, apparently secure, sometimes even happy.