Characters
These three brothers all have the same name, a representation of the attempt by enslavers to strip them of individual identity.
Who are Paul A, Paul D, and Paul F.
This type of short poem has 14 lines and is structured as a question and answer or problem and solution.
What is a sonnet?
The Picture of Dorian Gray takes place in this city in England.
What is London?
Our terms for different meters come from the ancient Greeks, such as this term for the 5-stress line used for most verse dialogue in Shakespeare's plays.
What is iambic pentameter?
Dorian Gray, despite his love for the Catholic Mass and his collection of priest robes, doesn't spend much time reading the Bible. Instead, he loves and lives by this book, a gift from Lord Henry.
What is "the yellow book"? (Dorian eventually collects copies that he has bound in many different colors.
In Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, he takes on the archetypal role of the tempter/Satan figure.
Who is Lord Henry Wotton?
This term refers to a pair of lines of poetry, especially when the two lines rhyme.
What is a couplet?
Antigone was first performed in this city, also famed as the birthplace of democracy.
In ancient Greek belief, the souls of the dead must cross this to reach the Underworld, guided by Charon.
What is the River Acheron or River Styx? (Compare Stamp Paid taking people to freedom across the Ohio River!)
This is Eve's first sin in Genesis and becomes a literary motif seen in much later literary texts such as Goblin Market.
What is eating forbidden fruit?
He is called a "trunk of humours": a reference not only to his size, but that he is unbalanced in the four "humours," the bodily fluids thought to influence a person's emotions and personality.
Who is Sir John Falstaff?
This term refers to a group of lines (like a "paragraph") of poetry.
What is a stanza?
This lovely type of place is where Dorian, like Eve, is first tempted.
What is a garden?
Dorian Gray is compared by Lord Henry to this very beautiful young man of Greek myth whose beauty dooms him to death. He has given his name to both a self-obsessed personality type and a beautiful flower.
Who is Narcissus? (The daffodil's scientific name is narcissus.)
In the book of Exodus, this man was born in Egypt, found as an infant floating in the River Nile, and leads the Israelites out of slavery to freedom.
Who is Moses?
Known only by his profession, rather than a name, this character represents the power held by those who have the power of education, writing, and self-expression.
Who is schoolteacher?
This term refers to the regular rhythm of poetry. In English, we count it in terms of both the number of syllables per line and the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.
What is meter?
This important setting in Beloved is a liminal space between slavery and freedom.
What is the Ohio River?
Antigone begins with a decree from Creon that no one may do this.
What is bury Polyneices (or, bury traitors to the city)?
The words "I am my beloved's and she is mine" come from this book of the Hebrew scriptures, concerned with romantic love.
What is the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon)?
His enemy calls him a "vile politician," deriding him as someone who is all "smiles" but without loyalty or honesty.
Who is King Henry IV?
In Henry IV, Part 1, these characters primarily speak in poetry (verse).
Who are the nobles/people at court/the king and his advisors/the rebels?
In Henry IV Part 1, these two places represent two sides of English society: and two sides of the protagonist's personality.
What are Eastcheap/the taverns/the brothels and Westminster/the court/the palace?
Who is "winged Mercury"?
Denver's drinking her sister's blood can be interpreted as an allusion to this important event in the Bible.
What is Jesus shedding his blood and/or Jesus giving his disciples wine at the Last Supper and saying "this is my blood"?