ENG1300 Chapter 35/36 Flashcards
Romantic Comedy
Comic drama where the plot focuses on young lovers who overcome difficulties and achieve a happy ending (usually marriage).
Skene
Canvas or wooden stage building where actors change.
Satire/Satiric Comedy
Uses derisive humor to ridicule human weakness and folly or attack political injustice.
Deus Ex Machina
Latin for “god out of the machine”.
Burlesque
Travesty of another play or a broadly humorous parody. In the U.S. it has come to represent a genre of ribald low humor combined with striptease.
Masks
Classically, these used to covers entire actor’s head that allowed far-away audience members to distinguish the conventional characters of tragedy and comedy.
Tragedy
Play that portrays serious conflict between humans and some superior overwhelming force. Typically ends sorrowfully, but is an outcome that seems inevitable.
Hamartia
Greek for error.
Orchestra
“The place for dancing” Circular performance space at the base of a horseshoe-shaped amphitheater.
Low Comedy
Style that arouses laughter through jokes, slapstick, sight gags, boisterous clowning and vulgar humor.
Tragic Flaw
A fatal weakness or a moral flaw in protagonist that ultimately brings him/her to a bad end.
Slapstick Comedy
A type of farce. Usually involves things such as pie-throwing, fisticuffs, violent actions.
Hubris
Overweening pride, outrageous behavior, or the insolence that leads to ruin, the antithesis of moderation.
Comedy
Work aimed at amusing an audience.
Cothurni
Thick-soled boots worn by tragic actors to make them appear taller than ordinary men.
