← HE1 Drama Terms Test
5 Written Questions
5 Matching Questions
- Dramatic irony
- a creates a discrepancy between what a character believes or says and what the reader or audience member knows to be true.
- b Derived from the Greek word dram, meaning "to do" or "to perform," the term drama may refer to a single play, a group of plays ("Jacobean drama"), or to all plays ("world drama"). Drama is designed for performance in a theater; actors take on the roles of characters, perform indicated actions, and speak the dialogue written in the script. Play is a general term for a work of dramatic literature, and a playwright is a writer who makes plays.
- c is the process by which a writer makes that character seem real to the reader.
- d A brief reference to a person, place, thing, event, or idea in history or literature. Allusions conjure up biblical authority, scenes from Shakespeare's plays, historic figures, wars, great love stories, and anything else that might enrich an author's work. Allusions imply reading and cultural experiences shared by the writer and reader, functioning as a kind of shorthand whereby the recalling of something outside the work supplies an emotional or intellectual context.
- e In drama, a speech directed to the audience that supposedly is not audible to the other characters onstage at the time.
5 Multiple Choice Questions
- The written text of a play, which includes the dialogue between characters, stage directions, and often other expository information.
- The introduction early in a story of verbal and dramatic hints that suggest what is to come later.
- A sequence of words printed as a separate entity on the page.
- A dramatic convention by means of which a character, alone onstage, utters his or her thoughts aloud. Playwrights use soliloquies as a convenient way to inform the audience about a character's motivations and state of mind.
- A character in a work whose behavior and values contrast with those of another character in order to highlight the distinctive temperament of that character (usually the protagonist).
5 True/False Questions
Antagonist → The character, force, or collection of forces in fiction or drama that opposes the protagonist and gives rise to the conflict of the story.
Comic relief → A humorous scene or incident that alleviates tension in an otherwise serious work.
Act → A major division in the action of a play. The ends of acts are typically indicated by lowering the curtain or turning up the houselights. Playwrights frequently employ acts to accommodate changes in time, setting, characters onstage, or mood. In many full-length plays, acts are further divided into scenes, which often mark a point in the action when the location changes or when a new character enters.
Convention → A characteristic of a literary genre (often unrealistic) that is understood and accepted by audiences because it has come, through usage and time, to be recognized as a familiar technique. For example, the division of a play into acts and scenes is a dramatic convention, as are soliloquies and asides. flashbacks and foreshadowing are examples of literary conventions.
Comedy → A work intended to interest, involve, and amuse the reader or audience, in which no terrible disaster occurs and that ends happily for the main characters.