Self-study quiz. This quiz is for your own review — answers are not recorded. You’ll get instant feedback on each question.
1 Which list gives Aristotle's six elements of drama?
Correct. These six categories still apply: when you analyze a play, you are identifying how they work together.
Aristotle's six elements concern the parts of a play: what happens, who, how they speak, what ideas, what we see, and what we hear.
2 For Aristotle, plot is
Correct. The arrangement matters because it determines the emotional arc of the audience's experience.
Aristotle does not mean merely what happens. He means how events are arranged to build toward a climax and a resolution.
3 A tragedy follows a protagonist who
Correct. The flaw is called hamartia. Oedipus's is his relentless commitment to knowing the truth.
Tragedy moves downward, from fortune to misfortune, because of a flaw or mistake. Comedy moves the other way.
4 What is catharsis?
Correct. Aristotle thought tragedy produced pity for the character's suffering and fear that we might make the same mistake, followed by a release of those feelings.
Catharsis is a purging. The emotions released are pity and fear.
5 Comedy typically moves
Correct. Comedy moves from confusion to clarity and from isolation to community. The lesson links it to spring, a season of renewal.
Comedy moves in the opposite direction from tragedy: toward order, community, and celebration.
6 What is a soliloquy?
Correct. A play cannot narrate a character's thoughts the way a novel can, so the soliloquy is the main way to hear them.
Solo is the root. A soliloquy is a character speaking alone, so the audience hears what others in the play do not.
7 In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Oedipus's hamartia is
Correct. The hamartia is not a moral failing but a refusal to stop knowing, and that is what makes the play tragic rather than merely unfortunate.
The lesson stresses that the flaw is not evil. It is a virtue taken to its limit: the determination to learn the truth.
8 In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman's hamartia is
Correct. Miller argues that an ordinary person's failure deserves the same attention as a king's fall.
The lesson says Willy's flaw is the opposite of Oedipus's: he will not look at reality.
9 How does Hamilton use diction to shape the content of its story?
Correct. The language is inseparable from the content: the form of Miranda's lyrics is the form of Hamilton's mind.
The point of the lesson is that diction reveals the world of the play. Here the choice of hip-hop is a deliberate expression of character.
10 On a thrust stage, the audience sits
Correct. A proscenium theater has the audience on one side, a thrust stage on three, and a theater in the round on all sides. Shakespeare's Globe was a thrust stage.
Think of the stage pushed out into the audience. A thrust stage has audience on three sides.