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Shakespeare Terms
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Aside | When a character speaks his or her thoughts aloud but is not heard by the other characters on stage |
Blank Verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter (Shakespeare often wrote in blank verse) |
Comedy | a dramatic work, usually light and humorous in tone and subject matter, 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") |
Epilogue | 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 in 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 in English poetry and drama and much of Shakespeare's plays written in it |
Meter | the regular rhythm that is created when syllables are stressed and unstressed in a systematic pattern |
Metaphor | a figure of speech, in which for the purpose of description, two unlike things are compared or equated |
Prologue | a speech at the beginning of the plat that usually introduces the subject matter of the drama |
Protagonist | the character who is leading importance in a drama or narative |
Prose | language that is not written in meter and 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 | s figure of speech in which unalike things are compared and connected to "like" or "as" |
Soliloquy | a dramatic monologue that often seems to express th internal, even secret workings of a character's mind |
Syncope | the contraction of 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 donate a piece of poetry |