Drama+Terms


 * Literary Terms - Drama**


 * Note** - Many of the following terms are applicable to both drama and fiction.


 * 1) **Act** - An act is a major division of a play. Based on the Greek and Roman models of five divisions, Western drama adopted a five-act structure until the nineteenth century where three acts became the norm.
 * 2) **Antagonist** - The character who opposes the protagonist
 * 3) **Aside** - Brief comments by an actor who addresses the audience but is assumed not to be heard by the other characters on the stage.
 * 4) **Character** - Characters are the representations of human personalities in a literary work. Not all characters are representations of humans. Through the use of personification animals, objects, ideas, and natural elements can be given human characteristics and become characters. The dog in London's "To Build a Fire" is an important character, and in the same story, the man is at war with the cold.
 * 5) **Dynamic Character** - A dynamic character learns and grows through out the course of the story or play. Sammy in Updike's "A&P" may be a dynamic character while his friend Stokesie is not.
 * 6) **Flat Character** - The minor characters tend to be flat, meaning their personalities are not well developed. This is often a result of the constraints of the short story; however, some flat characters are intriguing partly because we know little about them.
 * 7) **Round Character** - In a short story only one, two, or three major characters receive a development of their personalities and become round characters.
 * 8) **Static Character** - A static character does not learn any lesson or grow from the story or action of a play. The characters from Jackson's "The Lottery" are static because they unquestioningly carry out the same ritual every year.
 * 9) **Stock Character** - Conventional character types whom the audience recognizes i immediately. Examples: the country bumpkin, the shrewish wife, the braggart soldier
 * 10) **Climax** - The climax is the portion of the plot where the highest tension exists. The rest of the plot has been building to this point and all the subsequent action can be seen as its result. Sammy's abrupt decision to quit his job in Updike's A&P is an example of a story's climax. The climax is followed by a period of falling action leading to some resolution of the conflict. In classical Greek drama, the climax occurred in the middle of the play. Today, most fiction (especially short stories) place the climax nearer to the end.
 * 11) **Comic Relief** - A humorous scene, incident, or speech in the course of a serious fiction or drama introduced to provide relief from emotional intensity, and, by contrast,to heighten the seriousness of the story.
 * 12) **De`nouement** - Literally, “unknotting.” The final unraveling of a plot; the solution of a mystery; an explanation or outcome. denouement implies an ingenious untying of the knot of an intrigue, involving not only a satisfactory outcome of the main situation, but an explanation of all the secrets and misunderstandings connected with the plot complication. Denouement may be applied to both tragedy and comedy, though the common term for a tragic denouement is catastrophe.
 * 13) **Deus Ex Machina** - The employment of some unexpected and improbable incident to make things turn out right. In the ancient Greek theater, when gods appeared, they were however form the “machine” or structure above the stage. Such abrupt but timely appearance of a god, when used to extricate characters from a situation so perplexing that the solution seemed beyond mortal powers, was referred to in Latin as the dues ex machina(“god from the machine”) The term now characterizes any device whereby any author solves a difficult situation fy a forced invention.
 * 14) **Dramatic Irony** - A situation that depends on the audience's knowing something that a character has not realized, or on one character's knowing something other characters do not know
 * 15) **Epilogue** - A concluding statement. Sometimes used in the sense of peroration but more generally applied to the final remarks of an actor addressed to the audience. An epilogue is opposed to a prologue, which introduces a play. Epilogues were a part of major dramatic efforts in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, disappearing from common use about the middle of the nineteenth. They are now rare.
 * 16) **Exposition** - The exposition is the portion of a story or play where major characters, complications, and conflict are introduced, and setting is established. It may constitute a world at equilibrium before some force such as an antagonist or natural phenomenon disrupts the peace.
 * 17) **Falling Action** - . It follows the climax, beginning often with a tragic force, exhibits the failing fortunes of the hero (in tragedy) and the successful efforts of the counter players, and culminates in the catastrophe. During falling action the conflictworks towards a solution..
 * 18) **Foil** - Any character in a play who through contrast underscores the distinctive characteristics of another, particularly the protagonist.
 * 19) **Hamartia** - Aristotle's term for the "tragic flaw" in characters that eventually causes their downfall in Greek tragedy.
 * 20) **Hero** - The central character (masculine or feminine) in a work. the character who is the focus of interest.
 * 21) **Hubris** - Overweening pride or insolence that results in the misfortune of the protagonist of a tragedy. Hubris leads the protagonist to break a moral law, attempt vainly to transcend normal limitations, or ignore a divine warning with calamitous results.
 * 22) **Monologue** - Extended speech by one character
 * 23) **Protagonist** - The chief character in a work
 * 24) **Reversal of Fortune** - The reversal of fortune is equivalent to the protagonist's fall in a tragedy. The protagonist loses power, position, or grace and begins the inevitable fall to the catastrophe.
 * 25) **Rising Action** - The part of a dramatic plot that has to do with the complication of the action. This is the part in the plot where the action continues to grow, despite the protagonist’s attempt to solve the conflict. Rising action is all of the action, after the conflict is introduced, up to climax.
 * 26) **Scene** - A scene is a division within an act. Scholars differ in their opinions of what constitutes a scene. Some argue that a scene changes when the stage is cleared; other argue the entrance or exit of major characters mark the beginning and end of a scene. A change in place or time of day are logical scene change markers.
 * 27) **Soliloquy** - A speech in which a character, alone on the stage, addresses himself or herself; it is a dramatic means of letting the audience know the character's thoughts and feelings.
 * 28) **Villain** - An evil character, potentially or actually guilty of serious crimes.; he or she acts in opposition to the hero. the villain is the chief antagonist in a drama.