List of terms related to Drama

By Girdhari Lal Suthar

Updated On: 28/01/2024

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

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Table of Contents

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

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Girdhari Lal Suthar

Girdhari Lal Suthar is a dedicated Senior Teacher in English and the founder of Gyankundli.com. With 1.9 years of blogging experience, he shares valuable content on English Grammar, Literature, Language, and Educational updates, helping aspirants, students and teachers stay informed and prepared.

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