Act of Supremacy - England [1534]

Act of Supremacy, (1534) English act of Parliament that recognized Henry VIII as the “Supreme Head of the
Church of England.” The act also required an oath of loyalty from English subjects that recognized his marriage
to Anne Boleyn. It was repealed in 1555 under Mary I, but in 1559 Parliament adopted a new Act of Supremacy
during the reign of Elizabeth I.
son·net- a poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, in English typically
having ten syllables per line.
A Sonnet is a poem of an expressive thought or idea made up of 14 lines, each being 10 syllables long. Its rhymes
are arranged according to one of the schemes – Italian, where eight lines called an octave consisting of two
quatrains which normally open the poem as the question are followed by six lines called a sestet that are the
answer, or the more common English which is three quatrains followed by a rhyming couplet.
blank verse- verse without rhyme, especially that which uses iambic pentameter.
Blank Verse Poem - A blank verse is a poem with no rhyme but does have iambic pentameter. This means it
consists of lines of five feet, each foot being iambic, meaning two syllables long, one unstressed followed by a
stressed syllable.
The Structure of a Blank Verse Poem
Five feet of iambic syllables -
Sounding du DUM du DUM du DUM du DUM du DUM
so·lil·o·quy- an act of speaking one's thoughts aloud when by oneself or regardless of any hearers, especially by a
character in a play.
Soliloquies and monologues have one thing in common: they each involve a solitary speaker. The difference
between the two doesn't have to do with who's talking but with who's listening.

A monologue — from the Greek monos ("single") and legein ("to speak") — is a speech given by a single person to
an audience. Marc Antony delivers a well-known monologue to the people of Rome in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
You probably know how it starts:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones:
So let it be with Caesar. (etc.)
A monologue might be delivered to an audience within a play, as it is with Antony's speech, or it might be delivered
directly to the audience sitting in the theater and watching the play.

But a soliloquy — from the Latin solus ("alone") and loqui ("to speak") — is a speech that one gives to oneself. In a
play, a character delivering a soliloquy talks to herself — thinking out loud, as it were — so that the audience better
understands what is happening to the character internally.

The most well-known soliloquy in the English language appears in Act III, Scene 1 of Hamlet:

To be, or not to be, — that is the question: —

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? (etc.)
Morality play, also called morality , an allegorical drama popular in Europe especially during
the 15th and 16thcenturies, in which the characters personify moral qualities (such as charity or vice) or
abstractions (as death or youth) and in which moral lessons are taught. Together with the mystery play and
the miracle play, the morality play is one of the three main types ofvernacular drama produced during the Middle
Ages. The action of the morality play centres on a hero, such as Mankind, whose inherent weaknesses are
assaulted by such personified diabolic forces as the Seven Deadly Sins but who may choose redemption and enlist
the aid of such figures as the Four Daughters of God (Mercy, Justice, Temperance, and Truth).