SHAKESPEARE VOCABULARY

• Verse: poetic language that includes meter and sometimes rhyme; organized in lines with a consistent number of syllables
• Prose: ordinary written language with no meter or rhyme; organized in sentences

• Meter: the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables; meter is responsible for creating the rhythm of a line.

• Foot: a group of syllables that forms one complete unit of a metrical pattern
• Iambic Pentameter: lines of five iambic feet, 10 syllables, unstressed syllable followed by stressed syllable  ˘  /

• Blank Verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter

• Free Verse: no regular meter
• Sonnet: 14 line poem, usually written in iambic pentameter organized in three quatrains and a couplet; typical rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg; four-part organization has greater flexibility about where thematic breaks occur

• Quatrain: four-line verse stanza, usually rhymed
• Couplet: a pair of rhyming verse lines
• Aside: a character’s remark, either to the audience or another character, that other characters on stage are not supposed to hear
• Monologue: an extended speech by a single character that is uninterrupted by others
• Soliloquy: a speech a character gives when s/he is alone on stage
• Allusion: reference to an event, person, place, or another work of literature
• Foil: a character whose personality or attitudes are in sharp contrast to those of another character in the same work
• Tragedy: a serious play representing the disastrous downfall of the hero. It achieves a catharsis by arousing pity and terror in the audience. Hero is led into fatal calamity by hamartia (tragic flaw or error) which often takes the form of hubris (excessive pride leading to divine retribution.

• Tragic Hero: the tragic hero is a good man, important to society. The hero suffers a fall brought about by something in his nature. The fall provokes the emotions of pity and fear in the reader. The tragic character comes to some kind of understanding or new recognition of what has happened

• Tragic Flaw:defect of character that leads to the hero’s disastrous downfall