Drama Vocabulary
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Created by:
14TLScheibe on May 14, 2012
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28 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Act | One of the main divisions of a play or opera. |
| Aside | Short speech heard by the audience but not by the other characters in the play. |
| Comedy | A literary work which is amusing and ends well. |
| Stage Directions | A playwright's descriptive or interpretive comments that provide readers (and actors) with information about the dialogue, setting, and action of a play. |
| Drama | Story acted out, usually on a stage, by actors and actresses who take the parts of specific characters. |
| Conventions | Unrealistic devices or procedures that the reader (or audience) agrees to accept. |
| Monologue | A long, uninterrupted speech (in a narrative or drama) that is spoken in the presence of other characters. |
| Scene | A division with no change of locale or abrupt shift of time. |
| Soliloquy | A speech, usually lengthy, in which a character, alone on stage, expresses his or her thoughts aloud. |
| Staging | The spectacle a play presents in performance, including the position of actors on stage, the scenic background, the props and costumes, and the lighting and sound effects. |
| Suspension of Disbelief | A willingness to suspend one's critical faculties and believe the unbelievable; sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment. |
| Tragedy | In general, a literary work in which the central character meets an unhappy or disastrous end. |
| Tragic Flaw | A weakness or limitation of character, resulting in the fall of the tragic hero. |
| Chorus | A group of characters in Greek tragedy (and in later forms of drama), who comment on the action of a play without participation in it. |
| Recognition | The point at which a character understands his or her situation as it really is. |
| Foil | A character who contrasts and parallels the main character in a play or story. |
| Resolution | The sorting out or unraveling of a plot at the end of a play, novel, or story. |
| Reversal | The point at which the action of the plot turns in an unexpected direction for the protagonist. |
| Rising Action | A set of conflicts and crises that constitute the part of a play's or story's plot leading up to. |
| Stock Character | A character in literature, theater, or film of a type quickly recognized and accepted by the reader or viewer and requiring no development by the writer. |
| Round Character | A character whose personality, background, motives, and other features are fully delineated by the author. |
| Flat Character | A character whose personality can be defined by one or two traits and does not change in the course of the story. |
| Commedia 'Dell Arte | A form of theatrical improvisation developed in the 1500s which includes stock characters and farcical situations. |
| Deus Ex Machina | A god who resolves the entanglements of a play by supernatural intervention. The Latin phrase means, literally, "a god from the machine." The phrase refers to the use of artificial means to resolve the plot of a play. |
| Dramatis Personae | Latin for the characters or persons in a play. |
| Dialogue | The conversation of characters in a literary work/signified by quotation marks. In plays, characters' speech is preceded by their names. |
| Falling Action | In the plot of a story or play, the action following the climax of the work that moves it toward its denouement or resolution. |
| Hubris | The Greek term meaning excessive self-pride or self-confidence one's abilities. |
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