Othello literary terms

• "I am bound to please the Moor" - Emilia
• Shakespeare's tragedies

  • Five act structure
  • Featuring heroes whom audiences can identify with and feel sorry for
  • Beginning in an ordered society and moves toward chaos, as the hero allows his flaws to rule him
  • Often, this chaotic change is reflected in the natural world, with storms and strange mists being characteristic
  • Train of bad decisions by the protagonist that culminates in an eventual 'stoic calm'
  • Character virtuously accepts the consequences of their error(s) at the end of play
  • The protagonist of Shakespeare's tragedies are not villains or saints but generally good people destroyed by their own ego or ill fate
• Othello

  A domestic tragedy containing a less socially impressive protagonist, one of middle or lower class status, and one who might possibly be more easy for the audience to identify with
• Rebukes

  To reprimand / disapprove
• Traverses


  Exceed over
• Anagnorisis


  The point in which a principal character recognizes another character's true identity
• Anaphora


  Repeating a sequence of words at the beginning
• Antithesis


  Opposite / contrasts something
• Aside


  A dramatic device in which a character speaks to the audience, an aside is usually a brief comment, rather than a speech, such as a monologue or soliloquy
• Anadiplosis


  Repetition in which the last word of one clause or sentence
• Blank verse


  Regularly metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always in iambic pentameter
• Catharsis


  Purgation or purification of the emotions of pity and fear from the viewing of a tragic drama
• Cuckold


  A man becomes a "cuckold" when his wife cheats on him
• Dramatic irony


  Reader knows something that the actors don't
• Dramatis Personae


  A list of character functions given at the start of the play
• Epithet

  An adjective or adjective phrase that characterizes a person or thing
• Hamartia

  Fatal flaw
• Iambic pentameter


  One line of iambic pentameter has 10 syllables
• Idiom


  Presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase
• Interrogatives


  Demanding phrases
• Lexis

  Vocabulary of language
• Motiveless malignity

  Motivelessly evil
• Pathos


  Sympathy audience feels for hero
• Prose


  Conversational way of speaking with no rhythm or structure
• Poetic inversion


  The normal order of words is reversed, in order to achieve a particular effect of emphasis or meter
• Peripeteia


  The reversal of a heroes fortune
• Rhyming couplets


  Rhyming pair of successive lines of verse
• Semiotic indications


  Signs and symbols that create meaning
• Soliloquy


  An act of speaking one's thoughts aloud when by oneself or regardless of any hearers
• Stichomythia


  Dialogue in which two characters speak alternate lines of verse
• Superlatives


  An exaggerated or hyperbolical expression of praise
• Syntax


  How words are combined to form sentences
• Tragic Hero


  A noble hero who encounters limits - must undergo a change of fortune
• Tragic flaw


  The flaw in character that brings about the hero's downfall
• Socratic irony


  When you pretend to be ignorant to expose the ignorance or inconsistency of someone else
• Usurpation


  Take a role/job/lead from someone
• Verse


  Verse always has a set rhythm and structure
• Farce


  A comic dramatic piece that uses highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, extravagant exaggeration, and violent horseplay
• Shakespeare's tragedies


  • Five act structure
  • Featuring heroes whom audiences can identify with and feel sorry for
  • Beginning in an ordered society and moves toward chaos, as the hero allows his flaws to rule him
  • Often, this chaotic change is reflected in the natural world, with storms and strange mists being characteristic
  • Train of bad decisions by the protagonist that culminates in an eventual 'stoic calm'
  • Character virtuously accepts the consequences of their error(s) at the end of play
  • The protagonist of Shakespeare's tragedies are not villains or saints but generally good people destroyed by their own ego or ill fate
• Othello


  A domestic tragedy - a tragedy with a less socially impressive protagonist, one of middle or lower class status, and one who might possibly be more easy for the audience to identify with