Dramatic Terms
Antagonist: a character or force in opposition to the main character
(protagonist).
Aside: Words spoken by an actor directly to the audience, which are not “heard” by the other characters on stage during the play. The aside functions as a method by which the character voices his or her inner thoughts to the play’s audience.
Atmosphere: the mood established by events, places, or situations.
Catastrophe: The action at the end of a tragedy that initiates the denouement or falling action of a play. E.g. the dueling scene in Act V of Hamlet in which Hamlet dies, along with
Laertes, King Claudius, and Queen Gertrude.
Catharsis: The purging of the feeling of pity and fear that, according to Aristotle, occur in the audience of tragic drama. The audience experiences catharsis at the end of the play, following the catastrophe.
Character: An imaginary person that inhabits a literary work. Literary characters may be major or minor, static (unchanging) or dynamic (capable of change).
Climax: The turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. It represents the point of greatest tension in the work.
Comic Relief: The use of a comic scene to interrupt a succession of intensely tragic dramatic moments. The comedy of scenes offering comic relief typically parallels the tragic action that the scenes interrupt. They occur regularly in Shakespeare’s tragedies. E.g. the opening scene of Act V in Hamlet, in which a gravedigger banters with Hamlet.
Complication: An intensification of the conflict in a story or play. Complication builds up, accumulates, and develops the primary or central conflict in a literary work.
Conflict: A struggle between opposing forces in a play, usually resolved by the end of the work. It may occur within a character as well as between characters.
Denouement: The resolution of the plot of a literary work. E.g. in Hamlet, the denouement takes place after the catastrophe with the stage littered with corpses.
Exposition: The first stage of a dramatic plot in which the necessary background information is provided (setting, time, locale). E.g. Act I of Hamlet.
Foil: A character who contrasts and parallels the main character in a play. E.g. Laertes in
Hamlet is a foil for the main character.
Foot: a metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Iamb: an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. E.g. to-DAY.
Iambic Pentameter: a line of verse that has five poetic feet, each consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, for a total of ten syllables. E.g. Shakespeare’s “Sonnet
XVIII”:

Shall I compARE thee TO a SUMmer’s DAY?
Thou ART more LOVely AND more TEMPerATE:
Rough WINDS do SHAKE the DARling BUDS of MAY.
And SUMmer’s LEASE hath ALL to SHORT a DATE.
Irony: three types – dramatic, situational, and verbal
1.
Dramatic Irony: a situation in which the audience knows of present or future circumstances that a character does not.
2.
Situational Irony: when there is a discrepancy between expected results and actual results.
3.
Verbal Irony: when a speaker says one thing but actually means something else. E.g. sarcasm and understatement.
Meter: The measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems/plays.
Monologue: A speech by a single character without another character’s response (a silent listener).
Pathos: a quality of a play’s action that stimulates the audience to feel pity for a character.
Pathos is always an aspect of tragedy. Characters that arouse a feeling of pathos are usually young, innocent, and undeserving of their fate.
Protagonist: the main character in a literary work.
Recognition: the point at which a character understands his or her situation as it really is.
E.g. Othello’s understanding of the reality of the events in Act V of Othello.
Resolution: The sorting out or unraveling of a plot at the end of a play, novel, or story.
Reversal: The point at which the action of the plot turns an unexpected direction for the protagonist (they learn what they did not expect to learn).
Rising Action: a set of conflicts and crises that constitute the part of a play’s or story’s plot leading up to the climax.
Soliloquy: a speech in a play that is meant to be heard by the audience but not by the other characters on the stage. If there are no other characters present (usually the case), the soliloquy represents the character thinking aloud. E.g. Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech.
Subplot: a subsidiary or subordinate or parallel plot in a play that coexists with the main plot. This second story is complete and interesting in its own right.
Tragic Flaw: a weakness or limitation of character resulting in the fall of the tragic hero.
Also …
Alliteration, Assonance, Connotation, Denotation, Foreshadowing, Hyperbole, Imagery,
Oxymoron, Metaphor, Personification, Plot, Point of View, Setting, Simile, Symbol, Theme,
Tone, Tragedy, Tragic Hero