List of terms related to Drama

Glossary of Drama Terms [List of Terms Related to Drama]

Term	Definition
Allegory	A symbolic narrative where surface details imply a secondary meaning.
Alliteration	The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words.
Antagonist	A character or force against which another character struggles.
Aside	Words spoken by an actor directly to the audience, unheard by other characters.
Assonance	The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or line of poetry or prose.
Catastrophe	The action at the end of a tragedy that initiates the falling action.
Catharsis	The purging of feelings of pity and fear in the audience, according to Aristotle.
Character	An imaginary person in a literary work, major or minor, static or dynamic.
Characterization	The means by which writers present and reveal character.
Chorus	A group of characters in Greek tragedy commenting on the action without participating.
Climax	The turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story.
Comedy	A type of drama in which characters experience reversals of fortune, usually for the better.
Comic Relief	The use of a comic scene to interrupt a succession of intensely tragic dramatic moments.
Complication	An intensification of the conflict in a story or play.
Conflict	A struggle between opposing forces in a story or play.
Connotation	The associations called up by a word that go beyond its dictionary meaning.
Convention	A customary feature of a literary work.
Denotation	The dictionary meaning of a word.
Denouement	The resolution of the plot of a literary work.
Deus ex machina	A god who resolves the entanglements of a play by supernatural intervention.
Dialogue	The conversation of characters in a literary work.
Diction	The selection of words in a literary work.
Dramatic Monologue	A type of poem in which a speaker addresses a silent listener.
Dramatis Personae	Characters or persons in a play.
Exposition	The first stage of a fictional or dramatic plot, providing necessary background information.
Fable	A brief story with an explicit moral provided by the author.
Falling Action	In the plot of a story or play, the action following the climax.
Fiction	An imagined story in prose, poetry, or drama.
Figurative Language	A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words.
Flashback	An interruption of a work’s chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred prior to the main time frame of a work’s action.
Foil	A character who contrasts and parallels the main character in a play or story.
Foot	A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Foreshadowing	Hints of what is to come in the action of a play or a story.
Fourth Wall	The imaginary wall of the box theater setting, supposedly removed to allow the audience to see the action.
Gesture	The physical movement of a character during a play.
Hyperbole	A figure of speech involving exaggeration.
Iamb	An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one.
Image	A concrete representation of a sense impression, a feeling, or an idea.
Imagery	The pattern of related comparative aspects of language, particularly of images, in a literary work.
Irony	A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature.
Literal Language	A form of language in which writers and speakers mean exactly what their words denote.
Metaphor	A comparison between essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word such as like or as.
Meter	The measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems.
Metonymy	A figure of speech in which a closely related term is substituted for an object or idea.
Monologue	A speech by a single character without another character’s response.
Narrator	The voice and implied speaker of a fictional work.
Onomatopoeia	The use of words to imitate the sounds they describe.
Parody	A humorous, mocking imitation of a literary work.
Pathos	A quality of a play’s action that stimulates the audience to feel pity for a character.
Personification	The endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities.
Plot	The unified structure of incidents in a literary work.
Point of View	The angle of vision from which a story is narrated.
Props	Articles or objects that appear on stage during a play.
Protagonist	The main character of a literary work.
Quatrain	A four-line stanza in a poem.
Recognition	The point at which a character understands their situation as it really is.
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 unexpectedly for the protagonist.
Rising Action	A set of conflicts and crises leading up to the climax in a play or story.
Satire	A literary work that criticizes human misconduct and ridicules vices, stupidities, and follies.
Setting	The time and place of a literary work.
Simile	A figure of speech involving a comparison using “like,” “as,” or “as though.”
Soliloquy	A speech meant to be heard by the audience but not by other characters.
Stage Direction	Descriptive comments by a playwright providing information about a play’s dialogue, setting, and action.
Staging	The presentation of a play in performance, including actors’ positions, scenery, props, costumes, and lighting.
Stanza	A division or unit of a poem, repeated in the same form.
Style	The way an author chooses words, arranges sentences, and develops ideas using literary techniques.
Subject	What a story or play is about, distinct from plot and theme.
Subplot	A subordinate or parallel plot coexisting with the main plot in a play or story.
Symbol	An object or action in a literary work representing something beyond itself.
Synecdoche	A figure of speech where a part is substituted for