Shakespeare Literary Terms

1. A group who says things at the same time.
5. A story written to be acted for an audience.
7. Humor added that lessens the seriousness of a plot.
8. Poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter (“pent”=5; “meter”=measure); each line of poetry contains 5 iambs, or metrical feet, that consist of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
10. A short introduction at the beginning of a play that gives a brief overview of the plot.
13. Character who changes as a result of the story’s events.
14. The audience or reader knows something important that a character in a play or story does not know.
17. A combination of contradictory terms (EX: jumbo shrimp).
18. Direct, unadorned form of language, written or spoken, in ordinary use.
19. An unusually long speech in which a character who is on stage alone expresses his or her thoughts aloud.
20. Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme; couplets often signal the EXIT of a character or end of a scene.

2. Character who does not change much in the course of a story.
3. Words that are spoken by a character in a play to the audience or to another character but that are not supposed to be overheard by the others onstage.
4. A play, novel, or other narrative that depicts serious and important events in which the main character comes to an unhappy end.
6. A fourteen-line lyric poem that is usually written in iambic pentameter and that has one of several rhyme schemes (Shakespearean-3 four-line units or quatrains, followed by a concluding two-line unit, or couplet; abab cdcd efef gg).
9. A writer or speaker says one thing, but really means something completely different.
11. Event or detail that is inappropriate for the time period.
12. A play on the multiple meanings of a word, or on two words that sound alike but have different meanings.
15. A speech by one character in a play.
16. A character who is used as a contrast to another character; writer sets off/intensifies the qualities of 2 characters this way.