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Terms for Discussing Drama

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• Anagnorisis/recognition: point in the play during which the tragic hero experiences a kind of self-understanding; the discovery or recognition that leads to the peripeteia or reversal
• Antagonist: the character who opposes the protagonist
• Catharsis: a purgation of emotions. According to Aristotle, the end of tragedy is the purgation of emotions through pity and terror.
• Dramatic irony: the words or acts of a character may carry a meaning unperceived by the character but understood by the audience. The irony resides in the contrast between the meaning intended by the speaker and the different significance seen by others.
• Foil: any character in a play who through contrast underscores the distinctive characteristics of another, particularly the protagonist.
• Freytag's pyramid:

  		3. Climax of action: the turning point in the action, the crisis at which the rising action turns and becomes the falling action
  	2. Complication: the part of a plot in which the entanglement cause by the conflict of opposing forces is developed.		4. Falling action or resolution: exhibits the failing fortunes of the hero
  1. Exposition: introductory material that gives the background of the play				5. Denouement: the unraveling of the plot of the play

• Hamartia: tragic flaw
• Hubris: overweening pride or insolence that results in the misfortune of the protagonist of a tragedy. Hubris leads the protagonist to break a moral law, attempt vainly to transcend normal limitations, or ignore a divine warning with calamitous results.
• Peripeteia/reversal: reversal of fortune for the protagonist--from failure to success or success to failure.
• Proscenium or proscenium stage: an arch that frames a box set and holds the curtain, thus creating the invisible fourth wall through which the audience sees the action of the play.
• Protagonist: the chief character in a work
• Stock character: conventional character types whom the audience recognizes immediately. Examples: the country bumpkin, the shrewish wife, the braggart soldier
• Thrust  or apron stage: A stage that projects into the auditorium area, thus increasing the space for action; a characteristic feature of Elizabethan theaters and many recent ones. 
• Tragic hero: According to Aristotle, the protagonist or hero of a tragedy must be brought from happiness to misery and should be a person who is better than ordinary people--a king, for example. In "Tragedy and the Common Man," Arthur Miller argues that the ordinary man can also be a tragic hero.