English year 10 T2 vocab

Question 1

Tragic hero

Answer 1

A character who is neither completely good or evil, but in the middle, who went from a of good fortune to a position of misery, suffering or death as a direct result of his/her own hamartia.

Question 2

harmatia

Answer 2

A word of Greek origin, originally meaning ‘to miss the mark’ now it means a great or fatal flaw of a tragic hero’s character.

Question 3

soliloquy

Answer 3

An extended speech made while a character is alone or unheard on stage, telling the audience out loud the character’s inner thoughts

Question 4

aside

Answer 4

A remark or passage in a play that is intended to be heard by the audience but unheard by the other characters in the play.

Question 5

prose

Answer 5

A form of expression that follows the natural syntax and grammatical rules of spoken language, and which does not consciously follow a metre or rhyme scheme.

Question 6

blank verse

Answer 6

A form of poetic expression that uses unrhymed but metered lines (almost always iambic pentameter).

Question 7

rhyming couplet

Answer 7

A pair of successive lines that rhyme, often used in Shakespeare’s plays to signal the end of a scene or act, to indicate high emotion, or in speeches of magic.

Question 8

dramati irony

Answer 8

This is a literary or stage situation that the audience knows something that the characters do not know, often used to increase tension or for comedic effect.

Question 9

the great chain of being

Answer 9

The belief in a set hierarchical structure of all matter and life, beginning from the top with God and the angels, and then moving to the monarch, nobles, and other humans, then to animals, plants, and finally rocks and minerals at the bottom.