Drama Literary Terms All my Sons

act

one of the main divisions of a play or opera



aside

short speech heard by the audience but not by the other characters in the play



alliteration

a repetition of similar sounds, usually consonants or consonant characters, in a group of words



character

a person, or anything presented as a person, in a literary work



couplet

two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme



closed couplet

A rhymed couplet forming a complete thought or syntactic unit



comedy

a literary work which is amusing and ends well



drama

a story acted out, usually on a stage, by actors and actresses who take the parts of specific characters



dialouge

a conversation between characters



stage directions

A playwright's descriptive or interpretive comments that provide readers (and actors) with information about the dialogue, setting, and action of a play



conventions

unrealistic devices or procedures that the reader (or audience) agrees to accept



epilogue

An appendix (usually a concluding address) to a play



foil

a character in a play who sets off the main character or other characters by comparison



figurative language

language that is not intended to be interpreted in a literal sense



figure of speech

an example of figurative language that states something is not literally true in order to create an effect



iambic pentameter

every line is ten syllables



imagery

language that appeals to any sense or any combination of senses



petrarchan sonnet

a fourteen-line lyric poem consisting of two parts: the octave (or first eight lines)and the sestet (or last six lines)



genre

a literary type or form



monologue

a long, uninterrupted speech (in a narrative or drama) that is spoken in the presence of other characters



irony of situation

result of an action is the reverse of what the actor and audience expected



dramatic irony

the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not



verbal irony

contrast is between the literal meaning of what is said and what is meant



quatrain

usually, stanza or poem of four lines



repetition

the return of a work, phrase, stanza form, or effect in any form of literature



Shakespearean sonnet

a fourteen-line lyric poem consisting of three quatrains (four line stanzas) and a concluding couplet (two rhyming lines)



pun

usually, the humorous use of a word or phrase to suggest two or more meanings at the same time



scene

a division with no change of locale or abrupt shift of time



sestet

the last six lines or a Petrarchan sonnet



octave

the first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet



set

scenery and staging of a dramatic production



soliloquy

a speech, usually lengthy, in which a character, along on stage, expresses his or her thoughts aloud



sonnet

a fourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in rhymed iambic pentameter (in lines of ten syllables with a stress on every other syllable)



staging

The spectacle a play presents in performance, including the position of actors on stage, the scenic background, the props and costumes, and the lighting and sound effects



stanza

a group of lines forming a unit in a poem



suspension of disbelief

a willingness to suspend one's critical faculties and believe the unbelievable; sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment



tragedy

in general, a literary work in which the central character meets an unhappy or disastrous end



tragic flaw

A weakness or limitation of character, resulting in the fall of the tragic hero



metaphor

a comparison between two unlike things with the intent of giving added meaning to one of them



extended metaphor

a metaphor that is extended through a stanza or entire poem, often by multiple comparisons of unlike objects or ideas