Basic Glossary of Literary Terms

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caricature: a character whose personality is described in terms of a very small number of features, often grossly exaggerated.

Catharsis: (GK. 'purgation) Aristotle uses the word in his definition of tragedy in Chaper VI of Poetics, and there has been much debate (still inconclusive) on exactly what he meant. The key sentence is: 'Tragedy through pity and fear effects a purgation of such emotions'. So, in a sense, the tragedy, having aroused powerful feelings in the spectator, has also a therapeutic effect; after the storm and climax there comes a sense of release from tension, of calm. It is the effect of tragedy upon the audience: a purging of the emotions of pity and fear by their presentation on stage. The word describes the purging of emotions (usually defined as pity or fear) that takes place at the end of tragedy.

characterisation: the technique by which a writer clothes the personae of his story (play, novel, etc) to make them credible. The way in which a writer creates characters so as to attract or repel our sympathy. Different kinds of literature have certain conventions of characterisation. In Jacobean drama there were many stock dramatic 'types' (see Machiavellian, malcontent) whose characteristics were familiar to the audience.

chiasmus: (GK 'a placing crosswise') A reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses. It is an inversion of the word order in two parallel phrases: 'Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full'.

As in this example from Dr. Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes:

'By the day the frolic, and the dance by night'

And this from Pope's Essay on Man (Epistle I):

'His time a moment, and a point his space'.

The device is related to antithesis. See also antimetabole and zeugma

children's company: also called Boys' company, any of a number of troupes of boy actors whose performances enjoyed great popularity in Elizabethan England. The young actors were drawn primarily from choir schools attached to the great chapels and cathedrals, where they received musical training and were taught to perform in religious dramas and classical Latin plays. By the time of Henry VIII, groups such as the Children of the Chapel and the Children of Paul's were often called upon to present plays and to take part in ceremonies and pageants at court. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, these groups were formed into highly professional companies, usually consisting of from 8 to 12 boys, who gave public performances outside the court. The choirmasters of the companies functioned as managers, directors, writers of music and plays, and designers of masques and pageants, in addition to their regular duties of training the boys to sing and act.


In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the boys' companies were so popular that they posed a serious threat to the professional men's companies. William Shakespeare has Hamlet refer scornfully to the child actors as "little eyases," or nestling birds, that "are now the fashion." Children acted in the first Blackfriars Theatre (c. 1576-80), and in 1600 a syndicate representing the Children of the Chapel acquired a lease on the second Blackfriars Theatre, where the boys performed many important plays, including those of John Marston and Ben Jonson. By about 1610 the children's companies had seriously declined in popularity, aided perhaps by the companies' indulgence in political criticism.

Chorus: (GK. 'band of dancers, dance') Originally the Chorus was a group of performers at a religious festival, especially fertility rites. By some process of grafting or symbiosis Greek tragedy acquired (or grew out of) these choral rites. At any rate, the Chorus became an essential and integral part of Greek tragic drama. In the works of Aeschylus the Chorus often took part in the action; in Sophocles it served as a commentator on the action; and in Euripides it provided a lyric element. The Romans copied the idea of a Chorus from the Greeks, and Elizabethan dramatists took it over from the Romans. However, a full scale Chorus has seldom been used in English drama, or indeed European drama.
    In the tragedies of the ancient Greek playwrights the 'chorus' is a group of characters who represent the ordinary people in their attitudes to the action which they witness as bystanders, and on which they comment. The Fool is in some ways a choral character, who comments as an observer on the action of the play. The choral character is not a major participant in the events witnessed, but his comments are full of ironic insight. This word can have two meanings in Shakespeare. The first derives from Classical times, where the Chorus were a group of actors on stage throughout the play who provided a running commentary on it. Shakespeare adapts this technique in Henry V, producing a single figure who appears on stage at irregulars intervals to fill out details of plot and setting in the mind of the audience. In a less formal sense critics often refer to individual characters as having a choruslike function. One example is Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra, whose presence and remarks act like a commentary on the actions of the main characters.
    Usually the Chorus has been reduced to one person, as in Henry V (1599), Pericles (c. 1608) and The Winter's Tale (c. 1609-10). Milton used a full Chorus in his closet drama Samson Agonistes (1671), but thereafter there are few instances until T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (1935) in which the remarkable Chorus of the women of Canterbury takes part in the action, comments on it and provides mood and atmosphere. Eliot also used a Chorus of the Eumenides in The Family Reunion (1939). There have also been occasional uses of a single Chorus as commentator on the action (moving in and out of the play). Notable instances are the scurrilous Thersites, in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), the Fool in King Lear (1606), and Antony's henchman Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1606-7). Other important instances in drama are to be found in Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1943-5), Anouilh's Antigone (1944), Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie (1945) and Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge (1955). The use of a kind of group Chorus is also to be found occasionally in novels.

    Originally a body of performers in Greek drama who recited or chanted lines commenting on the action of the play before them. Nowadays the term is used of any character who acts as commentator in a play. A famous example is Chorus in Shakespeare's Henry V.

chronicle plays: chronicle plays were primitive plays dealing with English history, popular in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and a significant influence on Elizabethan dramatists.

chronicle plays also called chronicle history, or history play, drama with a theme from history consisting usually of loosely connected episodes chronologically arranged. Plays of this type lay emphasis on the public welfare by pointing to the past as a lesson for the present. The genre is characterized by its assumption of a national consciousness in its audience. It has flourished in times of intensely nationalistic feeling, notably in England from the 1580s until the 1630s, by which time it was "out of fashion," according to the prologue of John Ford's play Perkin Warbeck. Early examples of the chronicle play include The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, The Life and Death of Jacke Straw, The Troublesome Raigne of John King of England, and The True Tragedie of Richard III. The genre came to maturity with the work of Christopher Marlowe (Edward II) and William Shakespeare (Henry VI, parts 2 and 3).


In An Apology for Actors (1612) the dramatist Thomas Heywood wrote that chronicle plays are writ with this ayme, and carryed with this methode, to teach their subjects obedience to their king, to shew the people the untimely ends of such as have moved tumults, commotions, and insurrections, to present them with the flourishing estate of such as live in obedience, exhorting them to allegeance, dehorting them from all trayterous and fellonious stratagems. At the same time, it was argued that the overthrow of a tyrant (such as Richard III, according to the Tudor reading of events) was right and proper.

Elizabethan dramatists drew their material from the wealth of chronicle writing for which the age is renowned, notably Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke, and the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande of Raphael Holinshed. The genre was a natural development from the morality plays of the Middle Ages. In a forerunner of the chronicle play, John Bale's Kynge Johan, all the characters except the king himself are allegorical and have names such as Widow England, Sedition, and Private Wealth.

No age has matched the Elizabethan, either in England or elsewhere, in this kind of play. But chronicle plays are still sometimes written--for example, by the 20th-century English playwright John Arden (Left-Handed Liberty, Armstrong's Last Goodnight)--and the genre corresponds in many respects, especially in its didactic purpose and episodic structure, with the influential epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht in 20th-century Germany.

citizen comedy: A type of play which had some vogue early in the 17th century. It was usually about life in contemporary London and the characters were based on those likely to be found among the middle or lower-middle classes. Well-known examples of the genre are Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (1600), Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheap (c. 1613) and Ben Johnson's Bartholomew Fair (1614).

clench: A quibbling form of pun. Also a statement that settles an argument; one that clinches it.

cliché: a phrase or idea that has been used so often, and is so well-worn, that it has lost its original inventiveness, freshness, and appeal.

climax: That part of a story or play (for that matter, many forms of narrative) at which a crisis is reached and resolution achieved.

closure: how authors achieve a feeling of finality in their work. Closure is a given requirement of Renaissance drama, whether in comedy or tragedy. Modern writers and critics have abandoned this figure to leave texts and their interpretations open to the reader's questioning. The impression of completeness and finality achieved by the ending of some literary works.

comedy: a drama which ends in happiness for its characters after a period of trouble. Comedy has its origins in the Greece of the fifth century BC. In modern usage the term now means something that makes an audience or reader laugh; in its original form, it simply meant a play or other work with a happy ending. It is tempting and veery wrong, to see comedy as very lightweight. A comic work, with either or both of the above meanings, can make extremely serious points.

comic relief: Comic episodes or interludes, usually in tragedy, aimed to relieve the tension and heighten the tragic element by contrast. They are or should be an essential and integral part of the whole work. If not actually extended into an episode or interlude, the relief may take the form of a few remarks or observations (or some form of action) which help to lower the emotional temperature. The humour involved tends to be wry or sardonic. Good representative examples are Iago's gulling of Roderigo in Othello, the drunken porter scene in Macbeth (regarded as a locus classicus), Hamlet's laconic and witty treatment of Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Osric in Hamlet (and the Gravediggers 'scene' in Hamlet) and the Fool's mockery in King Lear. Other outstanding examples are to be found in Marlowe's Dr Faustus, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, and Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragedy.

There was good precedent for such relief in some Mystery Plays. A remarkable example is the York Mystery Cycle version of the Crucifixion in which the four soldiers talk in the colloquial, matter-of-fact style of everyday life as they go about their business of nailing Christ to the Cross. In a different vein is the almost slapstick and buffoonish comedy that occurs in Marlowe's Dr Faustus, which itself is a counterpoint and contrast to the wry ironies of Mephistopheles.

Since the 16th c. hardly a tragedian of any note has failed to make use of the possibilities of comic relief.

commonplace book: A notebook in which ideas, themes, quotations, words and phrases are jotted down. Almost every writer keeps some kind of commonplace book where he can put things into storage. In a properly organized one the matter would be grouped under subject headings. A famous example is Ben Jonson's Timber: Or Discoveries (1640), which comprises a draft for a treatise on the art of writing and on types of literature, miniature essays, sententiae, pensées and so forth. Two very agreeable modern examples are Maurice Baring's Have You Anything to Declare? (1936), the work of an exceptionally civilized and well-read man, and John Julius Norwich's Christmas Crackers (1980).

conceit: (L conceptus 'concept influenced by It concetto) By c. 1600 the term was still being used as a synonym for 'thought', and as roughly equivalent to 'concept', 'idea' and 'conception'. It might also then denote a fanciful supposition, an ingenious act of deception or a witty or clever remark or idea. As a literary term this word has come to denote a fairly elaborate figurative device of a fanciful kind which often incorporates metaphor, simile, hyperbole or oxymoron and which is intended to surprise and delight by its wit and ingenuity. The pleasure we get from many conceits is intellectual rather than sesuous. They are particularly associated with the MNetaphysic poets, but are to be found in abundance in the work of Italian Renaissance poets, in the love poetry of the Tudor, Jacobean and Caroline poets, and in the work of Corneille, Molière and Racine.

    An elaborated, extended, and startling comparison between apparently dissimilar objects, associated in particular with Mataphysical Poetry. When in his poem 'The Flea' John Donne (?1571-1631) compares his lover and himself to a flea (the flea has sucked the blood of both, and by carrying their mixed blood in his body becomes a symbol of unity) he is composing a textbook conceit: unexpected, lengthy, and ultimately both convincing and intriguing.

concordance: An alphabetical index of words in a single text, or in the works of a major author. It shows, therefore, the number of times a particular word is used and where it may be found. There are concordances for the Bible and for Shakespeare's works.

conflict: The tension in a situation between characters, or the actual opposition of characters (usually in drama and fiction but also in narrative poetry). In Othello, for instance, the conflicts between Iago, Roderigo, Othello and Desdemona. In The Duchess of Malfi the conflicts between the Duchess, her brothers and Bosola. There may also be internal conflict, as in Hamlet's predicament of wishing to avenge his father and yet not knowing when and how to do it. There may be also occur conflict between a character and society or enviranment. An example is Jude's efforts in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure to overcome the social obstacles which keep him from university.

contrast: The juxtaposition of disparate or opposed images, ideas, or bith, to heighten or clarify a scene, theme or episode.

conundrum: A word of very obscure origin, it denotes a form of riddle whose answer involves a pun.

convention: In literature, a device, principle, procedure or form which is generally accepted and through which there is an agreement between the writer and his readers (or audience) which allows him various freedoms and restrictions. The term is especially relevant to drama. The stage itself, as a physical object and area, establishes a convention by creating boundaries and limitations. The audience is prepared to suspend disbelief and to experience a representation of scenary and action, of lighting and words. The use of verse, blank or rhymed, dance, song, a Chorus, the unities, the aside, the soliloquy, are all examples of dramatic convention. Working withing the conventions and using them to the best possible advantage is essential to the art of the dramatist. The people in the audience are party to the agreement and their acceptance makes possible dramatic illusion.

    Dr Johnson summarizes the matter in a famous passage in his Preface to Shakespeare:

    In fact every writer accepts conventions as soon as he begins. It can be argued that conventions are essential to all literature as necessary and convenient ways of working within the limitations of the medium of words. And we may not, as Maritain puts it, abuse the limitations of our medium. Thus, in literature, as in the other arts, there are recurring elements.

    By convention the sonnet has fourteen lines (though there are exceptions), the Cavalier lyric presents certain attitudes towards love. The stock character is also a convention. So is tragic love in grand opera, and the flash-back in the novel.

    A convention may be established as an invention: for instance, Gerald Manley Hopkins's sprung rhythm and Chaucer's rhyme royal. One may be revived - as alliterative verse was revived in the 14th century by Langland and other poets, and again in this century by W.H. Auden and C. Day Lewis. Or one may be abandoned - as the heroic couplet was towards the end of the 18th century.

    Periodically conventions are broken or replaced. Wordsworth's rejection of 18th century poetic diction is an obvious instance; so is the substitution, in drama, of natiralistic conventions for the traditional dramatic ones.

    Ignorance of convention may lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation. To criticize a work for not being what it was never intended to be is a fault. A classic example is Johnson's misunderstanding of Milton's Lycidas. He condemned it for its 'inherent improbability', mainly because (apart from disliking pastoralism) he was not aware of the pastoral conventions.

couplet: a two-line section of a poem which rhymes, and which has a meaning complete within itself. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) is probably the most famous user of 'heroic couplets'; Elizabethan dramatists frequently rounded off a scene with a pair of rhymed verse lines.

A pair of end-rhymed lines of verse that are self-contained in grammatical structure and meaning. A couplet may be formal (or closed), in which case each of the two lines is end-stopped, or it may be run-on, with the meaning of the first line continuing to the second (this is called enjambment). Couplets are most frequently used as units of composition in long poems; but, since they lend themselves to pithy, epigrammatic statements, they are often composed as independent poems or function as parts of other verse forms, such as the Shakespearean sonnet, which is concluded with a couplet.

In French narrative and dramatic poetry, the rhyming alexandrine (12-syllable line) is the dominant couplet form, and German and Dutch verse of the 17th and 18th centuries reflects the influence of the alexandrine couplet. The term couplet is also commonly substituted for stanza in French versification. A "square" couplet, for example, is a stanza of eight lines, with each line composed of eight syllables.

The preeminent English couplet is the heroic couplet, two rhyming lines of iambic pentameter with a caesura (pause), usually medial, in each line. Introduced by Chaucer in the 14th century, the heroic couplet was perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. An example is:

Then share thy pain, allow that sad relief;
Ah, more than share it, give me all thy grief.

(Alexander Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard")

Couplets were also frequently introduced into the blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama for heightened dramatic emphasis at the conclusion of a long speech or in running dialogue, as in the following example:


Think what you will, we seize into our hands
His plate, his goods, his money, and his lands.

(Shakespeare, Richard II)

cradle books : Books printed before 1501 are known by this name, or Latin incunabula 'swaddling clothes'.

crisis: That point in a story or play at which the tension reaches a maximum and a resolution is imminent. There may, of course, be several crises, each preceding a climax. In Othello, for instance, there is a crisis when Iago provokes Cassio to fight Roderigo, another when Othello is led to suspect his wife, a third when Othello accuses Desdemona of infidelity. Several other minor crises precede the murder of Desdemona.

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