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Shakespeare Words
Term | Definition |
---|---|
aside | when a character speaks his or her thoughts aloud but is not heard by the other characters on stage |
blank verse | unrhythmed iambic pentameter(Shakespeare often wrote in blank verse) |
comedy | in dramatic work,usually light and humorous in tone and subject mater,often involving the triumph of characters over adverse circumstances |
elision | a form in which two or three words are contracted when one word ends with a vowel and the next one begins with a vowel("the express" becomes "th'express") |
epilouge | in dramatic works,a speech,usually offered in verse,in which an actor addresses the audience at the end of the play |
figurative language | language that makes use of figures of speech,especially metaphors |
First Folio | the first anthology of Shakespeare's works,put together and published by his friends in 1623,seven years after the playwright died |
iamb | a disyllabic metrical unit in which the first syllable is unstressed and the second stressed |
iambic pentameter | a metrical line of ten syllables comprising five metrical feet of iambs.Iambic pentameter is the most common meter English poetry and drama much of Shakespeare's plays are written in it |
meter | the regular rhythm that is created when syllables are stressed and unstressed in q systematic pattern |
metaphor | a figure of speech,in which for the proposes of description, two unalike things are compared or equated |
prologue | a speech at the beginning of the play that usually introduces the subject matter of the drama |
protagonist | the character who is of leading importance in a drama or narrative |
prose | language that is not written in meter and in which is much more irregular in its rhythms than verse.Prose tends to be akin to what we would consider "normal" speech. |
scansion | the analysis of a line of verse in metrical terms |
simile | a figure of speech in which unalike things are compared and connected by "like" or "as" |
soliloquy | a dramatic monologue that often seems to express the internal,even secret workings of a character's mind |
syncope | the contraction of a single word ("over" becomes "o'er) |
tragedy | a serious dramatic work in which a protagonist is troubled by some terrible conflict that results in dire events |
verse | used to describe lines written in metrical form,sometimes used simply to denote a piece of poetry |