Poetry Terms
Language that appeals to the senses.
What is imagery?
The turning point that determines how the play will end.
What is the crisis?
The most exciting point of the story.
What is the climax?
The way light are used to illuminate the stage.
What is lighting?
Clothing worn during a play by an actor to help show the audience that the actor is playing a role.
What is costume?
Poets construct images out of these.
What are words?
A humorous scene that features minor characters and offers the audience a break from a play's intense emotion.
What is comic relief?
Presents the main character and the problem.
What is the basic situation?
The items used by actors as they act out a scene.
What are props?
Lines spoken by the actors, preceded by the name of the character that is to speak the words.
What is dialogue?
Something that stands for something beyond itself.
What is a symbol?
A long speech delivered by one character and heard by other characters.
What is a monologue?
Indicates the location and the time frame.
What is the setting?
The portion of the theater where the audience sits.
What is the house?
When an audience goes to see a play and they pretend what's happening on the stage is real.
What is suspension of disbelief?
Assigning human traits to nonhuman things.
What is personification?
A fourteen line poem that divides into three quatrains and a couplet.
What is a Shakespearean sonnet?
The writer's philosophy of life.
What is the theme?
The area where a play is acted out.
What is the stage?
Actors need this to consider not only what a character is suppose to do, but why a character behaves in a certain way.
What is motivation?
From the Greek word meaning "the making of names," attempts to capture a sound in a word.
What is onomatopoeia?
The term for thee personality trait that leads to the hero's downfall in Shakespeare's tragedies.
What is tragic flaw?
Often creates new questions.
What is the resolution?
A sunken area between the stage and the audience where an orchestra can set up and play music during the performance without blocking the view of the stage.
What is the orchestra pit?
The idea that a director has that ties the look, feel, and performance of the play.
What is concept?