Intrinsic and Extrinsic Unsure of Dramatic Structure

A foil is a person that contrasts with another character (usually the protagonist) in order to highlight various features of the main character's personality: to throw the character of the protagonist into sharper relief. A foil usually has some important characteristics in common with the other character, such as, frequently, superficial traits or personal history.

Chorus : group or performer in a modern drama serving a purpose similar to the Greek chorus.

An antagonist is a character, group of characters, or an institution, who represents the opposition against which the protagonist(s) must contend. In other words, 'A person, or a group of people who oppose the main character, or the main characters.'^[2] In the classic style of story wherein the action consists of a hero fighting a villain, the two can be regarded as protagonist and antagonist, respectively.^[3]

A protagonist  one who plays the first part, chief actor"^[1]) is the main character (the central or primary personal figure) of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, video game, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to share the most empathy. In the theatre of Ancient Greece, three actors played all of the main dramatic roles in a tragedy; the leading role was played by the protagonist, while the other roles were played by deuteragonist and the tritagonist.

hubris: an act of transgression or overbearing pride. in ancient greek tragedy, hubris was believed to offend the gods, and to lead to retribution.

Hamartia (Ancient Greek: ἁμαρτία) is a term developed by Aristotle in his work Poetics. The term can simply be seen as a character’s flaw or error. The word hamartia is rooted in the notion of missing the mark (hamartanein) and covers a broad spectrum that includes accident and mistake^[1], as well as wrongdoing, error, or sin.^[2]. In Nicomachean Ethics, hamartia is described by Aristotle as one of the three kinds of injuries that a person can commit against another person. Hamartia is an injury committed in ignorance (when the person affected or the results are not what the agent supposed they were).^[3]

Dramatic structure is the structure of a dramatic work such as a play or film. Many scholars have analyzed dramatic structure, beginning with Aristotle in his Poetics (c. 335 BCE). This article focuses primarily on Gustav Freytag's analysis of ancient Greek and Shakespearean drama.

Dramatic irony is when the words and actions of the characters of a work of literature have a different meaning for the reader than they do for the characters. This is the result of the reader having a greater knowledge than the characters themselves.

Examples:

In Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," when Hester is in the governor's garden to see to it that Pearl is not taken away from her, she asks the Reverend Dimmesdale to support her position. This is an example of dramatic irony as the reader knows that Dimmesdale and Hester are partners in sin, but the characters do not.

A tragic flaw is a literary term that refers to a personality trait of a main character that leads to his or her downfall. In other words, a character with a tragic flaw is in need of some kind of attitude adjustment. The term usually comes up when you're studying a tragedy — that is, a piece of literature in which the main character ends up dead or otherwise defeated.

Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that, paradoxically, offers its audience pleasure.^[2] While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization.^[3] That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it.^[4] From its obscure origins in the theatres of Athens 2500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Racine, or Schiller, to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of Strindberg, Beckett's modernist meditations on death, loss and suffering, or Müller's postmodernist reworkings of the tragic canon, tragedy has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change.^[5] A long line of philosophers—which includes Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Camus, Lacan, and Deleuze—have analysed, speculated upon and criticised the tragic form.^[6] In the wake of Aristotle's Poetics (335 BCE), tragedy has been used to make genre distinctions, whether at the scale of poetry in general, where the tragic divides against epic and lyric, or at the scale of the drama, where tragedy is opposed to comedy. In the modern era, tragedy has also been defined against drama, melodrama, the tragicomic and epic theatre.^[7]

Comedy : (from the Greek κωμωδία, komodia) as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse generally intended to amuse, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was remarkably influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters.^[1]

The theatrical genre can be simply described as a dramatic performance which pits two societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye famously depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old,"^[2] but this dichotomy is seldom described as an entirely satisfactory explanation.

A later view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes; in this sense, the youth is understood to be constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse to ruses which engender very dramatic irony which provokes laughter.^[3]

Much comedy contains variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, repetitiveness, and the effect of opposite expectations, but there are many recognized genres of comedy. Satire and political satire use ironic comedy to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, thus alienating their audience from the object of humor. Satire is a type of comedy.

Parody borrows the form of some popular genre, artwork, or text but uses certain ironic changes to critique that form from within (though not necessarily in a condemning way). Screwball comedy derives its humor largely from bizarre, surprising (and improbable) situations or characters. Black comedy is defined by dark humor that makes light of so called dark or evil elements in human nature. Similarly scatological humor, sexual humor, and race humor create comedy by violating social conventions or taboos in comic ways.

A comedy of manners typically takes as its subject a particular part of society (usually upper class society) and uses humor to parody or satirize the behavior and mannerisms of its members. Romantic comedy is a popular genre that depicts burgeoning romance in humorous terms, and focuses on the foibles of those who are falling in love.

An aside is a dramatic device in which a character speaks to the audience. By convention the audience is to realize that the character's speech is unheard by the other characters on stage. It may be addressed to the audience expressly (in character or out) or represent an unspoken thought. An aside is usually a brief comment, rather than a speech, such as a monologue or soliloquy. Unlike a public announcement, it occurs within the context of the play.

soliloquy : 1.

a. A dramatic or literary form of discourse in which a character talks to himself or herself or reveals his or her thoughts without addressing a listener.

b. A specific speech or piece of writing in this form of discourse.

2. The act of speaking to oneself.

Concealment (also called abscondence or hiding) is obscuring something from view or rendering it inconspicuous, the opposite of exposure. A military term is CCD: camouflage, concealment and deception (looks the same as the surroundings, cannot be seen, looks like something else, respectively); in a wider sense the other two are also forms of hiding.

Dramatic Conventions are the specific actions or techniques the actor, writer or director has employed to create a desired dramatic effect/style.

A dramatic convention is a set of rules which both the audience and actors are familiar with and which act as a useful way of quickly signifying the nature of the action or of a character.

A closet drama is a play that is not intended to be performed onstage, but read by a solitary reader or, sometimes, out loud in a small group. A related form, the "closet screenplay", developed during the twentieth century.