1. act - a major division of a play.

2. anagnorisis - a recognition or discovery, especially in tragedy - for example, when the hero understands the reason for his or her fall.

3. catharsis - Aristotle’s term for the purgation or purification of the pity and terror supposedly experienced while witnessing a tragedy.

4. climax - the culmination of a conflict; a turning point, often the point of greatest tension in a plot.

5. comedy - a literary work, especially a play, characterized by humor and by a happy ending.

6. conflict - a struggle between a character and some obstacle or between internal forces, such as divided loyalties.

7. crisis - a high point in the conflict that leads to the turning point.

8. dénouement - the resolution or the outcome (literally, the "unknotting") of a plot.

9. exposition - a setting-forth of information. In fiction and drama, introductory material introducing characters and the situation.

10. farce - comedy based not on clever language or on subtleties of characters but on broadly humorous situations.

11. gesture - a physical movement, especially in a play.

12. hamartia - a flaw in the tragic hero, or an error made by the tragic hero.

13. hubris (hybris) - a Greek word, usually translated as "overweening pride," "arrogance," "excessive ambition," and often said to be characteristic of tragic figures.

14. peripeteia - a reversal in the action.

15. plot - the episodes in a narrative or dramatic work - that is, what happens - or the particular arrangement (sequence) of these episodes.

16. protagonist - the chief actor in any literary work. The term is usually preferable to hero and heroine because it can include characters - for example, villainous or weak ones - who are not aptly called heroes or heroines.

17. scene - a unit of a play, in which the setting is unchanged and the time continuous.

18. soliloquy - a speech in a play, in which a character alone on the stage speaks his or her thoughts aloud.

19. tragedy - a serious play showing the protagonist moving from good fortune to bad and ending in death or a deathlike state.

20. tragicomedy - a mixture of tragedy and comedy, usually a play with serious happenings that expose the characters to the threat of death but that ends happily.