Glossary of Literary TermsThe Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet

by William Shakespeare

Tragedy

Tragedy is a drama, often in verse, in which the main character, or hero, deals with a serious or somber theme – most of the time ending in death. The hero typically is born into power (royalty or nobility) and that character is destined to be destroyed or suffer some form of downfall, usually because the character (1) has a flaw and (2) makes a serious error in judgment. It is typical that fate is an overpowering force that leads to the hero’s destruction.

Comic Relief

Comic Relief is an amusing scene, incident, or speech that gives temporary relief from tension in a play. It provides contrast in a play, helping to break up serious matters with something that is funny.

Comic Relief

Examples:• In all of the Star Wars movies, the character of C-3PO is used as

comic relief. He is often found criticizing the desperate situation the other characters find themselves in, or being rescued from predicaments by his counterpart R2-D2.

Puns are also examples of comic relief. Puns are plays on language that are used intentionally for laughs, like the following: – “I bet the butcher the other day that he couldn’t reach the meat that

was on the top shelf. He refused to take the bet, saying that the steaks were too high.”

– “Jason, why did you buy that donkey?” Claire said. “Well,” Jason said, “I thought I would get a real kick out of it.”

Allusion

Allusion is a brief reference, within a work, to something outside of the work. It’s typically made as a casual reference to a famous historical or literary figure or event and can be drawn from history, geography, literature, or religion, most often the Bible.

Allusion

Example:• The team lost every game in the first half of the

season but rose like a phoenix to finish third in the second half of the season. (This is a reference to the phoenix, a bird in Arabian myth that consumes itself by fire every five hundred years and rises renewed from the ashes.)

• He spoke with authority, a burning bush, to command attention. (This is a reference to the form taken by the Angel of the Lord to speak to Moses in Exodus 3:2-3.)

Foil

Foil is a character that makes another character stand out by sharply contrasting one another. Foil characters highlight their foil character’s traits or attitude.

Example:• The cop is an able foil to the crook. (A cop follows the

law, while a crook does not.)• The professor calculated the formula in his head while

his young assistant stared ahead, chewing bubble gum loudly. (The professor is highly intelligent, while the young assistant is an air head.)

Dramatic Conventions

Dramatic Conventions are devices that theater audiences accept as realistic even though they do not necessarily reflect the way real-life people behave and quickly signifying the nature of the action or of a character. (A soliloquy and an aside are dramatic conventions.)

Dramatic Conventions

Examples:• If a character walks out onto stage wearing a black cloak while

twirling his moustache, the audience quickly realizes that character is a villain.

• It can also include an unrealistic part of the performance that the audience understands and accepts, like when a character moves downstage to deliver a soliloquy that cannot be heard by the other characters on stage or when characters in a musical are not surprised by another character that bursts into song.

• A dramatic convention is also when the audience accepts the passage of time during a play or how music will play during a romantic scene.

Soliloquy

Soliloquy is a speech a character gives when he or she is alone on stage that lets the audience know what the character is thinking. In short, the audience gets to hear the character’s thoughts.

Aside

Aside is a character’s dialogue on stage, either to the audience or to another character, that others on stage are not to hear. This allows the audience or a specific character to know the character’s private thoughts.

Blank Verse

Blank Verse is a form of poetry that uses unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, which are lines that have five unstressed syllables, each followed by a stressed syllable. Blank verse is used to produce a formal rhythmical pattern that creates musical effects, capturing the attention of the readers and the listeners. Many times, though, the pattern gets broken in a work.

Blank Verse

Example:• If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,The appetite may sicken, and so die.That strain again! it had a dying fall:O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,

(Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare)• This extract has iambic pentameter style

(unstressed/stressed pattern). The stressed syllables are marked in bold. Each line has five beats and stress is placed on the second syllable.

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is hints or clues that prepare the audience for an event or action that is to happen later in the story.

Example:A character, alone on stage, pulls a knife out of his pocket and with a mischievous smile admires it. He puts the knife back in his pocket so no one can see, and then he runs off stage. (In this example, this scene foreshadows that some event will occur later that involves that knife. Since the audience has seen the knife, it prepares the audience for something to happen later with that knife.)

Setting

Setting is the time and place of action of a story.

Conflict

Conflict is the struggle between opposing forces in a story. There are two types of conflict. External conflict is a character in conflict with an outside force, like nature, a physical obstacle, or another character. Internal conflict is a character that has conflict with himself or herself, an inner struggle emotionally and/or psychologically.

Irony

Irony is using words to say one thing but mean the opposite of its literal meaning.

Example:Joann said, “Oh, how wonderful. You squirted mustard all over my new shirt.”

Situational Irony

Situational Irony is when both the characters and the audience do not know what is really going on so they expect one thing to happen but something else ironically occurs.

Example:At a party, a girl runs away from a boy throwing a water balloon at her. The balloon misses her, but, while running, she turns to laugh at the boy and then falls into the pool.

Dramatic Irony

Dramatic Irony is when only the characters do not know what is really going on but the audience does.

Example:If a character broke into a house, stole something, and ran away unseen, then the audience would know who the burglar was. However, in the next scene when other characters are all talking about the burglary and the robber is standing among the group, none of the characters know who committed the crime, but the audience does.

Theme

Theme is a main idea or an underlying meaning of a story. It may be stated directly or indirectly.

Example:• In the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer, the theme of

war is explored.• In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan

Poe and in Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, crime and mystery make way to themes like, “crimes cannot be hidden” and “evil is always punished.”