Basic Glossary of Literary Terms

satire: a humorous and usually ironic aggression on human or institutional imperfection or folly, characterised by a ridiculing mockery of the morally degenerate, doubtful or absurd, by a witty comparison with the ideal, or at least the preferred.

scene: A sub-division of an act in a play or an opera or other theatrical entertainment.

scene changes: It is sometimes difficult to realise that in Shakespeare's theatre, with no set to change, scene changes took place with great speed, and there was hardly any time lapse between scenes. The result is that Shakespeare can frequently play one scene off against another, and gain significant effects of contrast by the quick changeover between scenes.

Senecan tragedy: incorporates the Revenge Tragedy at which Webster excelled. The Roman poet Seneca adapted Greek drama for non-theatrical presentation, formalising certain essential characteristics - declamation, dialogue, revenge, disaster, the ghost and the nurse; all in five Acts.

The closet dramas of the Roman Seneca (4 BC-AD 65) had a considerable influence on the Elizabethan tragedians who accepted them as stage plays.

The themes of Seneca's plays Hercules Furens, Medea, Troades, Phaedra, Agamemnon, Oedipus, Hercules Oetaeus, Phoenissae and Thyestes were taken from the whole field of Greek drama and contained little or no action in the true sense of the word. The characters rarely voiced feelings similar to those experienced by most human beings, and Seneca was better fitted to express ideas than put life into his characters. The illusion of action was evoked by words, and the whole burden was thrown on to the language. Rhetorical devices were plentiful: stichomythia was a favourite device.

The plays had a five-act structure with a Chorus marking the end of each act. The subject matter of these choric speeches, often little more than mythological catalogues, was often remote from the action of the play.

Other and important features were: the theme of revenge, usually introduced by the ghost of a wronged person (obvious Shakespearean parallels are Hamlet's father and Banquo's ghost in Macbeth); the messenger figure whose speeches usually report the culminating activity or disaster and fall into a stereotyped pattern, e.g. the bleeding captain in Macbeth; and a striving to extract the utmost effect from the spoken word.

One of the earliest Senecan tragedies was Gorboduc (1561) by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. With its bloody plot, long, static and declamatory speeches, sensational events and high emotions its debt to Seneca was obvious; and nowhere more so than in the purely mechanical juxtaposition of speeches and the constant striving for balance and counterbalance in language. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1586) also owed much to Seneca. But Kyd did not allow Seneca's influence to overcome his own sense of theatrical technique. The Senecan elements were all present: the revenge theme was supplied by the death of Horatio, though other characters also called for revenge; the characters were disproportionate and the emotions were taken too far (Hieronomo kills innocent people as well as those deserving death); the language was heavily rhetorical. Unlike Seneca, Kyd presented his atrocities on stage, and he had a good instinct for ironic juxtaposition. Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1594) was considerably influenced by Kyd's play and has a full complement of blood-curdling deeds.

Tudor and Jacobean dramatists owed many other debts to Seneca, whose influence extended through Marlowe and Shakespeare to Webster, who, like him, was fascinated by states of extreme suffering and by stoic virtues. For example, in The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1613-14) Webster followed Seneca in investigating the role of madness in society; as did Middleton and Rowley in The Changeling (1622).

Senecan tragedy:
Body of nine closet dramas (i.e., plays intended to be read rather than performed), written in blank verse by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca in the 1st century AD. Rediscovered by Italian humanists in the mid-16th century, they became the models for the revival of tragedy on the Renaissance stage. The two great, but very different, dramatic traditions of the age--French Neoclassical tragedy and Elizabethan tragedy--both drew inspiration from Seneca.

Seneca's plays were reworkings chiefly of Euripides' dramas and also of works of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Probably meant to be recited at elite gatherings, they differ from their originals in their long declamatory, narrative accounts of action, their obtrusive moralizing, and their bombastic rhetoric. They dwell on detailed accounts of horrible deeds and contain long reflective soliloquies. Though the gods rarely appear in these plays, ghosts and witches abound. In an age when the Greek originals were scarcely known, Seneca's plays were mistaken for high Classical drama. The Renaissance scholar J.C. Scaliger (1484-1558), who knew both Latin and Greek, preferred Seneca to Euripides.French Neoclassical dramatic tradition, which reached its highest expression in the 17th-century tragedies of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, drew on Seneca for form and grandeur of style. These Neoclassicists adopted Seneca's innovation of the confidant (usually a servant), his substitution of speech for action, and his moral hairsplitting.

The Elizabethan dramatists found Seneca's themes of bloodthirsty revenge more congenial to English taste than they did his form. The first English tragedy, Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, is a chain of slaughter and revenge written in direct imitation of Seneca. Senecan tragedy is also evident in Shakespeare's Hamlet; the revenge theme, the corpse-strewn climax, and such points of stage machinery as the ghost can all be traced back to the Senecan model.

sententia: (L 'feeling, opinion, judgement') Closely related to, if not actually synonymous with, the apophthegm, maxim and aphorism, a sententia is customarily a short, pithy statement which expresses an opinion; hence the term 'sententious', now as a rule used pejoratively. One of the most famous collections of sententiae is that by Peter Lombard, who was known as Magister sententiarum. His Sententiae (12th c.) was an important theological texbook in the later Middle Ages.

setting: The where and when of a story or play; the locale. In drama the term may refer to the scenery or props.

simile: (L neuter of similis 'like') A figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another, in such a way as to clarify and enhance an image. It is an explicit comparison (as opposed to the metaphor, where the comparison is implicit) recognizable by the use of the words 'like' or 'as'. It is equally common in prose and verse and is a figurative device of great antiquity. When one thing is said to be 'like' another, always containing the words 'like' or 'as', and inviting a comparison.

slapstick: Low, knockabout comedy, involving a good deal of physical action and farcical buffoonery like the throwing of custard pies. A slapstick consisted of two pieces of wood which, when applied, for instance, to somebody's buttocks, produced a cracking or slapping sound. It was used by the Harlequin in commedia dell'arte. There may be some connection between this and the tradition of the Vice cudgelling the devil; and, further back, the demons of the medieval Mystery Plays coming on with fire-crackers exploding from their tails.

soliloquy: It is possible that St Augustine of Hippo coined this compound in Latin: soliloquium, from solus 'alone' and loqui 'to speak'.

A soliloquy is a speech, often of some length, in which a character, alone on the stage, expresses his thoughts and feelings. The soliloquy is an accepted dramatic convention of great importance and the various uses it has been put to show the strengths and advantages of such a convention. Its advantages are inestimable because it enables a dramatist to convey direct to an audience important information about a particular character: his state of mind and heart, his most intimate thoughts and feelings, his motives and intentions.

In Classical drama the soliloquy is rare, but the playwrights of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods used it extensively and with great skill. They achieved an excellence in the use of this convention which has not been equalled. Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello all have major soliloquies (those in King Lear are somewhat less important), and so does Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. Also Webster's The Duchess of Malfi or The White Devil.

A particular use of the convention is to be found in the development of the villain at this time. The soliloquies given to the villains are more like prolonged asides and often take the form of a direct address to the audience. The villains are manipulators of the plot and commentators on the action. Often they deliver these self-revelatory statements of invention rather in the manner of the devils in the Morality Plays. Examples are to be found in Othello (from Iago), The Jew of Malta (from Barabas), in Titus Andronicus (from Aaron), Richard III (from Gloucester), The Duchess of Malfi (from Bosola), The White Devil (from Flamineo), The Revenger's Tragedy (from Vendice), Antonio's Revenge (from Piero) and Lust's Dominion (from Eleazar).

The speech to an audience by a character alone on the stage. The convention is that this 'speaking aloud' is a reliable reflection of the persona's true inner thoughts and feelings. In this way the audience is given information in a form of dramatic irony not revealed to the other characters in the play. Critics cite Bosola as a master of the craft. Perhaps craft is an apposite word. We should beware the reliability of what is said in apparent intimate confidence to the audience in soliloquy when the actor is aware of not being alone. A dramatic convention which allows a character in a play to speak diretly to the audience about his motives, feelings and decisions as if he were thinking aloud. Part of the convention is that a soliloquy provides accurate access to the character's innermost thoughts: we learn more about the character than could ever be gathered from the action of the play alone. See aside.

solipsism: a self-centred view of the world which holds that nothing of relevance exists outside oneself.

sonnet: Fixed verse form of Italian origin consisting of 14 lines that are typically five-foot iambics rhyming according to a prescribed scheme. The sonnet is unique among poetic forms in Western literature in that it has retained its appeal for major poets for five centuries. The form seems to have originated in the 13th century among the Sicilian school of court poets, who were influenced by the love poetry of Provençal troubadours. From there it spread to Tuscany, where it reached its highest expression in the 14th century in the poems of Petrarch. His Canzoniere, a sequence of poems including 317 sonnets, addressed to his idealized beloved, Laura, established and perfected the Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet, which remains one of the two principal sonnet forms, as well as the one most widely used. The other major form is the English (or Shakespearean) sonnet.

The Italian sonnet characteristically treats its theme in two parts. The first eight lines, the octave, state a problem, ask a question, or express an emotional tension. The last six lines, the sestet, resolve the problem, answer the question, or relieve the tension. The octave is rhymed abbaabba. The rhyme scheme of the sestet varies; it may be cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce. The Petrarchan sonnet became a major influence on European poetry. It soon became naturalized in Spain, Portugal, and France and was introduced to Poland, whence it spread to other Slavic literatures. In most cases the form was adapted to the staple metre of the language--e.g., the Alexandrine (12-syllable iambic line) in France and iambic pentameter in English.

The sonnet was introduced to England, along with other Italian verse forms, by Sir Thomas Wyat and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, in the 16th century. The new forms precipitated the great Elizabethan flowering of lyric poetry, and the period marks the peak of the sonnet's English popularity. In the course of adapting the Italian form to a language less rich in rhymes, the Elizabethans gradually arrived at the distinctive English, or Shakespearean, sonnet, which is composed of three quatrains, each having an independent rhyme scheme, and is ended with a rhymed couplet.The rhyme scheme of the English sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg. Its greater number of rhymes makes it a less demanding form than the Italian sonnet, but this is offset by the difficulty presented by the couplet, which must summarize the impact of the preceding quatrains with the compressed force of a Greek epigram. An example is Shakespeare's Sonnet CXVI:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

Oh, no! it is an ever-fixéd mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his heightbe taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lipsand cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

The typical Elizabethan use of the sonnet was in a sequence of love poems in the manner of Petrarch. Although each sonnet was an independent poem, partly conventional in content and partly self-revelatory, the sequence had the added interest of providing something of a narrative development. Among the notable Elizabethan sequences are Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1591), Samuel Daniel's Delia (1592), Michael Drayton's Idea's Mirrour (1594), and Edmund Spenser's Amoretti (1591). The last-named work uses a common variant of the sonnet (known as Spenserian), which follows the English quatrain and couplet pattern, but resembles the Italian in using a linked rhyme scheme: abab bcbc cdcd ee. Perhaps the greatest of all sonnet sequences is Shakespeare's, addressed to a young man and a "dark lady." In these sonnets the supposed love story is of less interest than the underlying reflections on time and art, growth and decay, and fame and fortune.

In its subsequent development, the sonnet was to depart even further from themes of love. By the time John Donne wrote his religious sonnets (c. 1610) and Milton wrote sonnets on political and religious subjects or on personal themes such as his blindness (i.e., "When I consider how my light is spent"), the sonnet had been extended to embrace nearly all the subjects of poetry.

It is the virtue of this short form that it can range from "light conceits of lovers" to considerations of life, time, death, and eternity, without doing injustice to any of them. Even during the Romantic era, in spite of the emphasis on freedom and spontaneity, the sonnet forms continued to challenge major poets. Many English writers--including William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning--continued to write Petrarchan sonnets. One of the best-known examples of this in English is Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much With Us":

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay wasteour powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not... Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make meless forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.

In the later 19th century the love sonnet sequence was revived by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in The House of Life (1876). The most distinguished 20th-century work of the kind is Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnette an Orpheus (1922).

sophism: an argument intended to mislead.

speech, divisions of: These divisions were first laid down by the Classical rhetoricians. They did not all agree, but the basic parts are: (a) introduction - (proem or exordium); (b) statement of the case; (c) argument (or agon); (d) conclusion (epilogue or peroration).

Some sub-divided 'statement' into: (i) agreed points; (ii) points in controversy; (iii) points the speaker intends to establish.

'Argument' is sometimes sub-divided into: (i) proof; (ii) refutation.

These divisions are still taught today.

spondee: (Gk 'libation') A metrical foot of two stressed or long syllables, so named because it was used in Greek melodies accompanying libations. Not particularly common in accentual verse (poems written wholly or mostly in spondaics are very rare), but often used sparingly to slow the rhythm of a line, thus making it 'heavier' for a particular effect

spoonerism: Transposing the initial consonants of two words, as in 'half-warmed fish' for 'half-formed wish'.

stage directions: Notes incorporated in or added to the script of a play to indicate the moment of a character's appearance, character and manner; the style of delivery; the actor's movements; details of location, scenery and effects. Printed texts of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists keep them to an absolute minimum (e.g. Enter two servants; Music; Dies; Exit; Sings; Manet; Exeunt omnes; Stabs him). Over the years they became more detailed and complex and by the end of the 19th c. dramatists were providing alaborate directions and instructions.

stanza: (It 'standing, stopping place') A group of lines of verse. It may be of any number but more than twelve is uncommon; four is the commonest. A stanza pattern is determined by the number of lines, the number of feet in each line and the metrical and rhyming schemes. The stanza is the unit of structure in a poem and most poets do not vary the unit within a poem. Exceptions can be found in Spenser's Epithalamion and Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Earlier English terms are batch, fit and stave.

A group of lines in a poem divided off from the others. A stanza is the correct term for what is often referred to as a 'verse' of poetry.

style: The characteristic manner of expression in prose or verse; how a particular writer says things. The analysis and assessment of style involves examination of a writer's choice of words, his figures of speech, the devices (rhetorical and otherwise), the shape of his sentences (whether they be loose or periodic), the shape of his paragraphs - indeed, of every conceivable aspect of his language and the way in which he uses it. Style defies complete analysis or definition because it is the tone and 'voice' of the writer himself; as peculiar to him as his laugh, his walk, his handwriting and the expressions on his face. The style, as Buffon put it, is the man.

sub-plot: A subsidiary action in a play or story which coincides with the main action. Very common in Tudor and Jacobean drama, it is usually a variation of or counterpoint to the main plot. For example, the comic sub-plot involving Stefano and Trinculo in The Tempest; and the serious one involving Gloucester, Edmund and Edgar in King Lear. The sub-plot became increasingly rare after the 17th c.

A secondary plot or story line in a book or play, which often provides either comic relief from the main plot, or a different way of looking at the themes and interests of the main plot.

syllepsis: (Gk 'a taking together, comprehension') A figure of speech in which the same word (verb or preposition) is applied to two others in different senses. For example: 'she looked at the object with suspicion and a magnifying glass'; or 'Miss Bolo went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair' (Charles Dickens); or Evelyn's description of Charles I as 'Circled with his royal diadem and the affections of his people'. (See also Zeugma)

symbol: The word symbol derives from the Greek verb symballein 'to throw together', and its noun symbolon 'mark', 'emblem', 'token' or 'sign'. It is an object, animate or inanimate, which represents or 'stands for' something else. As Coleridge put it, a symbol 'is characterized by a translucence of the special [i.e. the species] in the individual'. A symbol differs from an allegorical sign in that it has a real existence, whereas an allegorical sign is arbitrary.

Scales, for example, symbolize justice; the orb and sceptre, monarchy and rule; a dove, peace; a goat, lust; the lion, strength and courage; the bulldog, tenacity; the rose, beauty; the lily, purity; the Stars and Stripes, America and its States; the Cross, Christianity; the swastika (or crooked Cross) Nazi Germany and Fascism; the gold, red and black hat of the Montenegrin symbolizes glory, blood and mourning. The scales of justice may also be allegorical; as might, for instance, a dove, a goat or a lion.

Actions and gestures are also symbolic. The clenched fist symbolizes aggression. Beating of the breast signifies remorse. Arms raised denote surrender. Hands clasped and raised suggest suppliance. A slow upward movement of the head accompanied by a closing of the eyes means, in Turkish, 'no'. Moreover, most religious and fertility rites are rich with symbolic movements and gestures, especially the Roman Mass.

A symbol may have several different meanings, which typically grow out of its relation to other symbols, as in the tewnty-odd poems of Yeats that allude to the rose. A symbol is similar to an image in that it stands for something else, but unlike an image it is not merely descriptive. A symbol frequently sums up abstract virtues or features. It has been said that a symbol works like a stone thrown into a pond, sending ripples in all directions, it being very difficult to see where the ripples end.