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Basic Glossary of Literary Terms
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dénouement: (Fr. 'unknotting) the final unfolding of a plot: the point at which the reader's expectations, be they hopes or fears, about what will happen to the characters are finally satisfied or denied.. How the plot of a narrative (of whatever genre) finally resolves itself. It may be the event or events following the major climax of a plot, or the unravelling of a plot's complications at the end of a story or play.
desenlace: (Sp. 'untying, unlacing') Directly comparable both in original meaning and in usage with its virtual synonym in French, dénouement.
dirge: A song of lament, usually of a lyrical mood. The name derives from the beginning of the antiphon of the Office of the Dead: Dirige, Domine... 'Direct, O Lord...' As a literary genre it comes from the Greek epicedium which was a mourning song sung over the dead and a threnody sung in memory of the dead. In Roman funeral processions the nenia, a song of praise for the departed, was chanted; and the ptofessional wailing women (praeficae) were hired for the task on some occasions. Later the dirge developed into a lyric poem, as in Sir Philip Sidney's poem included in Arcadia (1590), which begins, 'Ring out your bells, let mourning shews be spread', and Henry King's Exequy on his young wife, 'Tell me no more how fair she is.' Both are very fine poems. Occasionally dirges occur in plays. There are two particularly famous ones by Shakespeare: Ariel's song for Ferdinand's dead father in The Tempest (I, ii), and Fidele's dirge in Cymbeline (IV, ii). Very nearly as famous as these is Cornelia's song over Marcello in Webster's The White Devil (V, iv).
double entendre: an ambiguous remark; often a pun with sexual connotations.
dramatic irony: a commonly used dramatic device which places the audience in possession of information the characters do not have. A feature of many plays: it occurs when the development of the plot allows the audience to possess more information about what is happening than some of the characters themselves have.
dramatic monologue: A speech written as if spoken by an imagined character, in his or her voice and tone. It is 'dramatic' because it comes from a character created by the author in the manner of that character speaking or thinking out loud. It is a 'monologue' because it comes fron one character only. It should not be confused with soliloquy, which takes place within a play. Dramatic monologues are usually complete within themselves and written as prose or poetry, not within the confines of a play or dramatic event.
dramatis personae : The characters in a play. Usually the names of these characters are printed at the beginning of the text.
dumb show: a mimed dramatic performance whose purpose was to prepare the audience for the main action of the play to follow. The dumb show was popular in Tudor England and at first tended to be allegorical, using symbolic characters rather than those from the play. Elizabethan playwrights were quick to see its possibilities. Early and important examples may be found in Gorboduc (1561), where it plays a considerable part throughout, and in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (III, xvi). Peele used it in The Old Wives' Tale (1595), and it also appears in the anonymous A Warning for Fair Women (1599). Perhaps the most famous instance occurs in Hamlet it is strange that the precise action of the dumb show is repeated in words immediately afterwards. Conceivably, Shakespeare was using it in an archaic way since the fashion for introductory dumb shows was by then over (i.e. c. 1602). :
In such plays as Peele's Battle of Alcazar (1594) and Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) the dumb show provided the dramatist with the means of including more action in his play (without using more dialogue) and of varying the action by showing the audience, as well as characters on stage, something that is happening elsewhere. There are good examples in the latter (II, iii; IV, iii): in the one in Act IV, two young men, with the aid of Bacon's magic glass, see how their fathers meet and kill each other. Closely parallel to this is Webster's use of the dumb show in The White Devil (II, ii.). By contrast, in Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling (IV, i.), the dumb show merely represents details necessary to the play's action which it would be tedious or dramatically difficult to present on stage in the normal way. During the Jacobean age the dumb show was increasingly used in the masque.
From the 1630s the dumb show seems to have fallen into desuetude, though it is worth noting that the English diarist Abraham de la Pryme records how, in 1688, a body of Danish soldiers stationed in the north of England 'acted a play in their own language'. He noticed that 'all the postures were shown first... and, when they had run through all, so then they began to act'. It may be that the Danish custom of the dumb show was a device to draw the audience's attention to the play to stop them talking to one another.
In The Duchess of Malfi, Act III, Scene iv, that takes place at the Shrine of our Lady of Loretto begins with two dumb shows, the Duchess and her family are banished from Ancona: (1) the investiture of the Cardinal, (2) the banishment of the Duchess and her family. The first presents the Cardinal replacing his spiritual robes with the weapons of war, followed by a depection of the banishment of the Duchess, Antonio and their children from the state of Ancona. Solemn music and singing accompany the proceedings. Webster introduces a new atyle of presentation with these dumb shows and ceremonial music. Instead of a realistic confrontation which the preceding events have led us to expect, the effect is heightened by these symbolised actions.
