| adversary | an enemy, opponent |
| banishment | exile; the state of being banished or ostracized (excluded from society by general consent) |
| boisterous | noisy and lacking in restraint or discipline |
| dexterity | mental skill or quickness |
| idolatry | excessive or blind adoration; worship of an object |
| lament | a cry of sorrow and grief |
| nuptial | related to marriage |
| peruse | To read thoroughly and carefully |
| reconcile | make compatible with; make up |
| shroud | burial garment in which a corpse is wrapped |
| allusion | a reference to another work of literature, person, or event |
| analogy | drawing a comparison in order to show a similarity in some respect |
| antagonist | the character who works against the protagonist in the story |
| aside | a line spoken by an actor to the audience but not intended for others on the stage |
| blank verse | poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter |
| characterization | the personality a character displays; also, the means by which the author reveals that personality |
| climax | the decisive moment in a novel or play |
| conflict | opposition in a work of drama or fiction between characters or forces (especially an opposition that motivates the development of the plot) |
| couplet | two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme |
| diction | word choice |
| dramatic irony | when a reader is aware of something that a character isn’t |
| dramatic structure | the structure of a play |
| epithet | descriptive name |
| figurative language | writing or speech that is not meant to be taken literally |
| foil | a character who sets off another character by contrast |
| foreshadowing | the use of hints and clues to suggest what will happen later in a plot |
| iambic meter | unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable |
| iambic pentameter | a poetic meter that is made up of 5 stressed syllables each followed by an unstressed syllable |
| imagery | language that appeals to the senses |
| irony | incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs |
| metaphor | a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity |
| motivation | the psychological feature that arouses an organism to action toward a desired goal |
| protagonist | main character |
| pun | a humorous play on words |
| repetition | repeated use of sounds, words, or ideas for effect and emphasis |
| monologue | a speech by one actor; a long talk by one person |
| oxymoron | conjoining contradictory terms (as in ‘deafening silence’) |
| personifiction | giving human like characteristics to non-human things |
| simile | comparison using like or as |
| situational irony | an outcome that turns out to be very different from what was expected |
| soliloquy | a speech given by a character alone on stage |
| sonnet | a short poem with fourteen lines, usually ten-syllable rhyming lines, divided into two, three, or four sections |
| symbol | something that stands for something else |
| suspense | Uncertainty or anxiety the reader feels about what is going to happen next in a story |
| theme | the central idea of a literary work |
| verbal irony | A figure of speech in which what is said is the opposite of what is meant |
Romeo and Juliet Vocabulary and Literary Terms
November 25, 2019