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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 |
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 |
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 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 in English poetry and drama and much of Shakespeare's plays are 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 purposes 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 which is much more irregular in its rhythms than verse. Prose tends to be akin to what we 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 |