Key Vocab

    Cards (16)

    • Apparition
      A ghost or ghost like image of someone or something
    • Equivocation
      The use of ambiguous and vague language to conceal the truth and avoid getting in trouble
    • Tyrant
      A cruel and oppressive leader who acts like a dictator
    • Hamartia
      A fatal flaw leading to the downfall of a tragic hero
    • Allegory
      When a story,character etc is used to convey a typically moral or political meaning which relates to real world issues
    • Anagnorisis
      A moment in the play when the tragic hero recognises their looming downfall due to their tragic flaw or when a main character recognises someone's true identity
    • Vice
      A behaviour or trait which is immoral
    • Paganism
      Non/pre Christian religion beliefs and ideologies
    • Catharsis
      • The purging or cleansing of previous emotions usually caused by the pity or fear the audience experiences at the end of a tragedy play.
      • In act 5 the audience feels catharsis after Macbeth is stripped of his majesty, loses his wife and then his life evoking pity within the reader
    • Double entendre
      Words or phrases that have a double meaning and is deliberately ambiguous
    • Nihilism
      Believing life is pointless and meaningless
    • Eponymous
      • Used to describe works which have been named after their protagonist (e.g Macbeth)
    • Nihilistic figure

      • someone who belives in nothing and has no loyalties or purpose other than an impulse to destroy
      • radical scepticism which condemns existence
    • Proleptic irony
      when something happens or is said which can be contradicted later on
    • Duplicitous
      someone who purposely lies to people especially by saying different things to different people or acting in different way at different times
    • Predestination
      • the belief that everything that happens has already been determined by God and that he has already set a master plan so there's no deviating from it
      • people have no control over events because everything has already been decided by God
      • God has already chosen those he has intended to save and has determined things in order of who will have salvation and who will not