Vocabulary List Three

Tartuffe

1. Farce: A type of comedy in which ridiculous and often stereotyped characters

are involved in farfetched, silly situations.

2. Dramatic irony: An incongruity or discrepancy between what a character says or

thinks and what the reader knows to be true.

3. Dramatization: The presentation of character or of emotion through the speech

or action of characters rather than through exposition, analyses, or description by
the author.

4. Playwright: A maker of plays.

5. Deus Ex Machina: Meaning “god from the machine,” it refers to any improbable,
contrived device that provides a too-easy resolution from the tangled
complications.

6. In Medias Res: A Latin expression meaning "in the middle of things" used to
describe the technique of starting a story in the middle and then using flashback
to tell what happened earlier.

7. Hyperbole: The use of exaggeration to express strong emotion or comic effect.

It is also known as overstatement.

8. Overstatement: Exaggeration in the service of truth for an effect.

9. Irony: A contrast or discrepancy between expectation and reality.

10. Archetypal character: Those characters that embody a certain kind of universal
human experience, such as the damsel in distress, the mentor, and the old hag.

11. Motivation: The reason – incentive or goals – for a character’s actions that work
in combination with the inherent nature of the character.

12. Comedy: Generally, literature that ends happily because the chief character
overcomes a series of obstacles, by making self-adjustments, that block what he
or she wants.

13. Dramatis personae: The characters of a drama, used to make a distinction

between the characters of the play and real people.

14. Dramatic license: Not specifically unique to drama itself, this term refers to a
writer’s privilege, when writing a narrative, to alter facts or details to strengthen
the support of the thesis or narrative point.

15. Dramatic convention: Any dramatic device which, though it departs from reality,
is implicitly accepted by author and audience as a means of representing reality.
16. Unities: In drama, the three principles that require a play to have a specific
conflict occurring in a single place and within the course of a day. Referred to as
the unity of action, unity of place, and unity of time.