Download Drama Terms

Elizabethan Terms:
0 The Elizabethan Era was named after Queen
Elizabeth I of England (who reigned from
1558-1604).
0 Renaissance: A period of rebirth, originating
in Italy in the 1300’s. This was a time during
which great accomplishments were made in
science, art and literature (lots of change)
Elizabethan Terms (cont.):
0 Elizabethan Drama: Playwrights turned away
from writing about religious subjects and
began writing more sophisticated plays,
drawing on ancient Greek and Roman models.
Concepts in Drama
0 Soliloquy: A speech by a person who is talking to him/herself;
used to reveal their inner thoughts and feelings to the audience
0 Monologue: A talk/speech by a single speaker who is speaking
alone but others can hear them (kind of like a solo in a musical)
0 Aside: Words spoken so as not to be heard by the other
characters, but are intended for the audience only (think Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off).
0 Foreshadowing: Verbal or dramatic hints in the play of what will
happen later.
0 Foreboding: Verbal or dramatic hints that something bad or
tragic will happen later.
Concepts in Drama:
0 Tragedy: Plays where disaster falls upon the
hero/heroine (unlike comedies where everyone gets
married in the end, in tragedies, the characters usually
die in the end)
0 Tragic Hero: A character who makes an error in
Judgment or has a fatal flaw, which leads to their own
demise or the demise of others (example:
Batman/Bruce Wayne from Dark Knight Rises)
0 Foil: A character who contrasts well with another
character in order to highlight the differences
between the two (example: Mufasa vs Scar in The Lion
King/ Harry Potter and Ron)
Concepts in Drama:
0 Apostrophe: An address to someone who is
absent and cannot hear the speaker or to
something nonhuman that cannot understand.
An apostrophe allows the speaker to think aloud.
0 Symbolism: when a person, place, or thing
figuratively represents something else. Often the
idea is abstract while the symbol is concrete.
0 Stage Directions: an instruction in the text of a
play, especially one indicating the movement,
position, or tone of an actor, or the sound effects
and lighting
Concepts in Drama:
0 Allusion: A reference, in literature, to something either
directly or by implication
0 Dramatic Irony: When the audience knows what is going
on, but the characters do not
0 Verbal Irony: The literal meaning is the opposite of the
implied meaning. Must occur in spoken dialogue.
0 Cosmic Irony: The suggestion that a god or fate controls
and meddles with human lives
0 Comic Relief: An amusing scene, incident or speech
introduced into serious or tragic elements in order to
provide temporary relief from tension, or to intensify the
dramatic action
Concepts in Drama:
0 Motif: Recurring idea (pattern) in literature
0 Anachronism: Object out of place/time (like a
computer in the wild west)
0 Pun: the humorous use of a word/phrase to
suggest two or more meanings at the same time
(a deliberate joke)
0 Ambiguity: The use of a word or expression to
mean more than one idea (non-humorous)
0 Oxymoron: a figure of speech in which apparently
contradictory terms appear in conjunction
Form and Structure Terms:
0 Meter: Poetic measure; the arrangement of
words in a regularly measured, patterned, or
rhythmic lines/verses
0 Blank Verse: Verse where the lines do not
rhyme, but they share the same meter (usually
iambic pentameter)
Form and Structure Terms:
0 Iamb: An unstressed syllable followed by a
stressed syllable
0 Iambic Pentameter: five verse feet with each
foot in an iamb (ten syllable line with the
pattern going stressed, unstressed, stress,
unstressed)
Poetry Terms:
0 Couplet: two consecutive lines of poetry that
rhyme
0 Quatrain: a poem or stanza within a poem,
always consisting of 4 lines.
Poetry Terms:
0 Sonnet: 14 line poem written in iambic
pentameter
0 English (Shakespearean) Sonnet: Has 3
quatrains, and ends with a couplet. A
Shakespearean sonnet has a specific rhyme
scheme (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG)
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee