Drama Terms 1 - 20
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20 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Drama | a literary form that recreates human life and emotions; a play meant to be performed before an audience by actors and actresses on a stage. It has both a written form ( a script) and a living form (the stage presentation). |
| Tragedy | - a play, novel, or other narrative depicting serious and important events in which the main character comes to an unhappy end or suffers a downfall. |
| Pathos | the quality which evokes sympathy and sense of sorrow or pity in a real situation or in a literary or artistic work |
| Comedy | - a type of drama that is humorous and has a happy ending. A heroic comedy focuses on the exploits of a larger-than-life hero. |
| Dramatic Convention | a device that a playwright uses to present a story on stage and that the audience accepts as realistic; a technique that substitutes for reality; these techniques give the audience information they could not learn from a straightforward presentation of action. Dramatic conventions include the following: concealment, soliloquy, and aside |
| Concealment | a dramatic convention that allows a character to be seen by the audience, but remain hidden from the other characters in the play |
| Soliloquy | an unusually long speech in which a character who is alone on stage, expresses his or her thoughts aloud. This allows the audience to know that character's personal thoughts and feelings which would Otherwise |
| Aside | a convention that allows a character on stage to speak directly to the audience or to another character on stage without being overheard by other characters on the stage |
| Stage Directions | instructions written by the dramatist (playwright) to describe the appearance and actions of characters, as well as sets, costumes, and lighting |
| Monologue | a long speech by a character in a play; other characters are present on stage |
| Dialogue | conversation between characters in a literary work |
| Pun | a play on the multiple meanings of a word, or on two words that sound alike but have different meanings |
| Blank Verse | poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Each line contains five metrical feet, or five iambs, consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Blank means that the poetry is not rhymed. |
| Iambic Penanmeter | - a line of poetry that contains five iambs. It is the most common verse line in English poetry, and in Shakespearean poetry, and the most like natural speech, other than free verse |
| Couplet | two consecutive lines of poetry that contain end rhyme |
| Sonnet | line lyric poem usually written in iambic pentameter. It can have one of several rhyme schemes. The two most common types of sonnet are Petrarchan and Shakespearean. |
| Dramatic Irony | when the audience or reader knows something important that a character in the play or story does not know |
| Situational Irony | when what we expect to happen is the opposite of what really happens |
| Verbal Irony | when a writer or speaker says one thing but really means something completely different |
| Farce | a type of comedy in which ridiculous and often stereotyped characters are involved in far-fetched, silly situations. The humor is based on crude physical action, slapstick, and clowning. Examples are: Abbott And Costello, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and the Three Stooges. |
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