Characters
a personality in a story
What is a character?
A group of characters who comment on the action of a play without participating in it. It consists of a character/narrator coming on stage and giving a prologue or explicit background information or themes.
What is a chorus?
A type of drama in which the characters experience reversal of fortune, usually for the worse. In this type of play, suffering awaits many of the characters, especially the hero.
What is Tragedy?
conversation between characters
What is dialogue?
The thing that stands in the way of the objective.
What is an Obstacle?
The situation at the beginning of a play.
What is the Opening Balance?
A character that shows one or few characteristics
What is a flat character?
A part or division of a play (like a chapter of a book)
What is an act?
The hidden meaning behind the text.
What is Subtext?
A playwright's descriptive or interpretive comments that provide readers (as well as actors and directors) with information about the dialogue, setting, and action of a play.
What are Stage Directions?
A character who is depicted with such psychological depth and detail that he or she seems like a "real" person.
What is Round Character?
something that happens to upset the balance of the play and forces the characters to deal with an unexpected problem.
What is the disturbance?
A character used to set off another character by contrast
What is a foil character?
An episode within a play
What is a scene?
This negative term implies both arrogant, excessive self-pride or self-confidence, and a lack of some important perception or insight due to pride in one's abilities. This overwhelming pride inevitably leads to a downfall. (Taken from http://web.cn.edu)
What is Hubris?
The first incident leading to the rising action of the play. Sometimes is an event that occurred somewhere in the character’s past and is revealed to the audience through exposition.
What is Inciting Incident?
ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, one of the greatest intellectual figures of Western history.
Who is Aristotle?
States that the action only has one plot.
What is unity of action?
a character who opposes the main character
What is an antagonist?
Movement patterns of actors on the stage. Planned by the director to create meaningful stage pictures.
What is blocking?
A speech meant to be heard by the audience but not by other characters on the stage. Only the audience can hear the private thoughts of the characters.
What is a Soliloquy?
Words spoken by an actor directly to the audience, but not "heard" by the other characters on stage during a play.
What is an aside?
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. Typically these scenes parallel the tragic action that they interrupt.
What is comic relief?
What is Dramatic time?
The main character in a work of fiction
What is a protagonist?
a lengthy uninterrupted speech by one character to another
What is a monologue?
defining features or common agreement upon strategies and/or attributes of a particular literary genre.
What are Conventions?
The imaginary thing that separates the spectator/audience from the action taking place on stage. In a traditional theatre setting (as opposed to a theatre in the round) this imaginary thing has been removed so that the spectator can “peep” into the fictional world and see what is going on. If the audience is addressed directly, this is referred to as “breaking the _______.”
What is The Fourth Wall?
When an external source resolves the entanglements of a play by supernatural intervention. The Latin phrase means, literally, "a god from the machine." The phrase refers to the use of artificial means to resolve the plot of a play.
What is Deus Ex Machina:
States that the play can only take place in 1 place. The stage does not change to become something else.
What is the Unity of Place?
A dramatic character who does not change.
What is Static Character?
the order or arrangement in which events happen in a story
What is structure?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge first used the term in 1817. In its most basic form the term means that we accept something as real or representing the real when it obviously is not. In drama this is a crucial condition, as we must put aside put aside our __________ and accept the premise presented as real for the duration of the performance.
What is Suspension of Disbelief?
"In the midst of things" (Latin); refers to opening a plot in the middle of the action, and then filling in past details by means of exposition or flashback.
What is "In Medias Res"?
Literally the action of untying. is the final outcome of the main complication in a play. Usually occurs AFTER the climax (the turning point or "crisis"). It is sometimes referred to as the explanation or outcome of a drama that reveals all the secrets and misunderstandings connected to the plot.
What is denouement (or resolution)
States that the action should take place no more than 24 hours after it starts. Extremists say no longer than the action on the stage.
What is Unity of time?
Undergoes an important change in the course of the play- not changes in circumstances, but changes in some sense within the character in question -- changes in insight or understanding or changes in commitment, or values.
What is a Dynamic Character?
The first stage of a fictional or dramatic plot, in which necessary background information is provided” (highered.mcgraw-hill.com).
What is Exposition?
The purging of the feelings of pity and fear. According to Aristotle the audience should experiences this at the end of a tragedy.
What is a Catharsis?
reversal of fortune for the protagonist--from failure to success or success to failure.
What is Peripeteia/reversal?
A diagram of dramatic structure, one which shows complication and emotional tension rising like one side of a pyramid toward its apex, which represents the climax of action.
What is the Freytag's pyramid:
A fictional world created by the writer
What is the Fabula?
A recognizable character type found in many plays. Comedies have traditionally relied on such characters as the miserly father, the beautiful but naïve girl, the trickster servant.
What is Stock Character?
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 because their knowledge of events or individuals is more complete than the character’s.
What is Dramatic Irony?
Epic theatre (German: episches Theater) is a theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners who responded to the political climate of the time through the creation of a new political theatre.
What is Brechtian Theatre?
the point in the play during which the tragic hero experiences a kind of self-understanding; the discovery or recognition that leads to the peripeteia or reversa
What is Anagnorisis/recognition?
Limiting the time, place, and action of a play to a single spot and a single action over the period of 24 hours.
What are "The Unities"?
is the part of a plot in which the entanglement caused by the conflict of opposing forces is developed.
What is The Complication?