Dramatic Terms Flashcards
What is an Act in a play?
A major division in a play. An act can be subdivided into scenes.
What is an Antagonist?
A character or force against which another character struggles.
What defines an Antihero?
A protagonist or central character who lacks the qualities typically associated with heroism.
What is an Aside?
Words spoken by an actor directly to the audience, but not ‘heard’ by the other characters on stage.
What is Blocking in drama?
Movement patterns of actors on the stage, usually planned by the director to create meaningful stage pictures.
What is a Catastrophe in a play?
The action at the end of a tragedy that initiates the denouement or falling action of a play.
What is Catharsis?
The purging of the feelings of pity and fear. According to Aristotle, the audience should experience catharsis at the end of a tragedy.
What is a Character in drama?
An imaginary person that inhabits a literary work. Dramatic characters may be major or minor, static (unchanging) or dynamic (capable of change).
What is a Chorus in Greek tragedy?
A group of characters who comment on the action of a play without participating in it.
What is the Climax of a play?
The turning point of the action in the plot of a play and the point of greatest tension.
What is Comedy in drama?
A dramatic work in which the central motif is the triumph over adverse circumstance, resulting in a successful or happy conclusion.
What is Comic Relief?
Comic relief serves a specific purpose: it gives the spectator a moment of ‘relief’ with a light-hearted scene after a succession of intensely tragic dramatic moments.
What is Conflict in drama?
The conflict between opposing forces in a play can be external (between characters) or internal (within a character) and is usually resolved by the end of the play.
What is a Complication in a play?
An intensification of the conflict in a play.
What are Literary Conventions?
Defining features or common agreement upon strategies and/or attributes of a particular literary genre.
What is a Cyclic Plot?
A plot in which the play ends in much the same way it began, rendering the action of the play futile for the characters involved.
What does ‘intervention’ mean in the context of drama?
The Latin phrase means, literally, ‘a god from the machine.’ It refers to the use of artificial means to resolve the plot of a play.
What is ‘diction’?
The manner in which words are pronounced, a style of speaking.
What is ‘dramatic irony’?
A device in which a character holds a position or has an expectation reversed or fulfilled in a way that the character did not expect but that the audience or readers have anticipated.
What defines a ‘dynamic character’?
A character that undergoes an important change in the course of the play, such as changes in insight, understanding, commitment, or values.
What is a ‘flashback’?
An interruption of a play’s chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred prior to the main time-frame of the play’s action.
What are ‘flat characters’?
Relatively simple minor characters in a play.
What is a ‘foil’ in literature?
A character whose situation parallels that of the main character while contrasting in behavior, response, or character.
What is ‘foreshadowing’?
A literary technique that introduces an apparently irrelevant element early in the story, with its significance becoming clear later.
