literary terms

Question 1

Chorus (orgin, role in shakespeare, example in Hamlet)

Answer 1

typical of greek tragedies (Aeschylus and Sophocles) the chorus is a group of characters who represent ordinary people in their attitudes to the action, which they witness as bystanders, and oin which thye comment. In shakespeares plays the chorus acvts as a narrator, giving the audience information there is not stage time to dramatize (e.g. in Hamlet

Question 2

pastiche

Answer 2

a composition made up of bits and pieces of an original work, or a piece written in a manner pointedly resembling another’s style

Question 3

an example of pastiche in Hamlet

Answer 3

Pyrrhus’ speech recited by the First Player deliberately recalls the overblown rhetoric of Christopher Marlowe

Question 4

set piece

Answer 4

an episode, such as Gertrude’s account of Ophelia’s drowning, which could almost stand alone as dramatically satisfying in its own right.

Question 5

hendiadys

Answer 5

a rhetorical figure in which two substantives are joined by a conjuction to express a single, complex idea. There is an unusually large numebr in Hamlet sucvh as ‘law and heraldry’ ‘amazement and admiration’ and ‘youth and observation’

Question 6

tableau

Answer 6

a dramatic, often symbolic arrangement of characters on stage. Some examples in Hamlet include; our first sight of Claudius’s brightly lit court with Hamlet alone in mourning, the quarry of dead bodies which Fortinbras encounters when he enters at the end of the play