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Literary Terms
Literary Terms for Romeo and Juliet
| Literary Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| alliteration | repetition of initial consomant sounds |
| allusion | an indirect reference to a person, place, or event in literature that would be widely understood (usually from the Bible, mythology, or history) |
| aside | dramatic convention by which an actor directly addresses the audience but is not supposed to be heard by the other actors on the stage |
| blank verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter |
| comedy | a play which ends happily |
| comic relief | humorous speeches and incidents in teh course of the serious action of a tragedy; frequently comic relief widens and enriches the tragic significance of the work |
| conceit | unusual comparison between two very different things (extended or exaggerated metaphor) |
| couplet | a pair of successive verses which rhyme |
| foil | character whose treaits are the opposite of another character and who thus points up strengths and weaknesses of the other character |
| foreshadowing | the use of hints or clues to reveal future events |
| groundlings | the poor class of people who stood around the platform of the stage to see the plays |
| the heavens | the turret, the huts, and the canopy area of Shakespeare's stage; usually decorated with signs of the zodiac |
| hell | the area below the stage |
| hyperbole | conscious exaggeration used to heighten effect. Not intended literally, hyperbole is often humorous |
| iambic pentameter | a line consisting of 5 feet (iambs) with an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable |
| imagery | the use of images, especially in a pattern of related images, often figurative to create a strong unified sensory impression |
| verbal irony | to say one thing and mean the opposite |
| dramatic irony | a reader knows something that a character in the story does not |
| situational irony | a discrepancy is shown between what the audience expects and what actually happens, something unexpected |
| metaphor | a comparison of two things, often unrelated |
| oxymoron | rhetorical antithesis, juxtaposing two contradictory terms |
| pathos | qualities of a fictional work which stimulates emotions of pity, sorrow, or tenderness |
| personification | figurative language in which inanimate objects, animals, ideas, or abstractions are endowed with human traits or human forms |
| pit | the sunken area in front of the stage |
| poetic justice | ideal that judgment that rewards virtue and punishes vice |
| prologue | that which comes before |
| pun | humorous use of a word to suggest two literal meanings at one time |
| pyramid plot line | the acton of Shakespeare's plays follows the silhouette of a pyramid with the climax coming in the third act, characters and conflicts in first act, rising action in second act, falling action fourth act and resolution of conflicts last act |
| simile | figurative comparison of two thins, often dissimilar, using the connecting words "like" or "as" |
| soliloquy | a character (usually alone on stage) speaking his innermost thoughts aloud |
| sonnet | 14 lines of poetry rhyming: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Usually written in iambic pentameter |
| tragedy | representations of serious actions which turn out disastrously. Major character meets a disastrous end. |
Created by:
Lidiak
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