Glossary of Key Terms with Pronunciation Key

(tá blō)  An interlude in which the actors freeze in position and then resume action as before or hold their positions until the curtain falls. In the nineteenth century many plays ended their acts with tableaux, and frequently a play ended with a tableau. For the costumed representation of well-known scenes, pictures, or personages, the term tableau vivant (living picture) was used. Such tableaux are often presented in PAGEANTS or on floats. The identification of the figure represented in a tableau vivant was once a social game; an instance is in The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.

(1) PUNCHLINE. (2) Material placed under a document or illustration; a CAPTION. (3) Matter printed under a HEADLINE so as to amplify, illustrate, or elaborate a main point. Used especially for material in two or more COLUMNS. The typical formatting is: Strap-line, upper left; Headline, center; Tag-line, lower right.

Local News

Mayor RE-elected

"I promise reform."

Greek for "craft-play"; a jeu d'esprit: a game or trick that involves a display of wit or cleverness. The Latin poem by Ausonius called "The Technopaegnion" includes a passage in which each line begins and ends with a monosyllable and the word at the end of one line is also at the beginning of the next. The plural technopaegnia (or technopaignia) is used collectively for playful literary practices.

The term may refer to a literary "last will and testament" or to a piece of literature that "bears witness to" or "makes a covenant with" in the biblical sense. The former sort originated with the Romans of the decadent period and was developed by the French in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. It was especially popular in the fifteenth century and was often characterized by humor, ribaldry, and satire, as in the half-serious, half-ribald Grand Testament and Petit Testament of François Villon, perhaps the greatest examples of this type. In the popular literature of the first half of the sixteenth century in England, there were many testaments of the humorous and satiric sort, such as Jyl of Breyntford's Testament, Colin Blowbol's Testament, and Humphrey Powell's popular Wyll of the Devil (around 1550). Some literary testaments, however, were more serious; for example, the Testament of Cresseid by Robert Henryson (1430–1506), a continuation of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, picturing Cressida as thoroughly degraded in character and suffering from leprosy. In her poverty-stricken last days she bequeaths her scant belongings to her fellow sufferers. Another serious testament is the love complaint, "The Testament of the Hawthorne" in Tottel's Miscellany (1557). Thomas Nashe wrote "Summers [or Summer's] Last Will and Testament" (1592), with puns on the names of Will Summers, court jester of King Henry VIII.
  The second type of testament, that which "bears witness to," was also developed in the late medieval period. Its best representative in English is perhaps The Testament of Love by Thomas Usk (?), written about 1384. This is a long prose treatise in which Divine Love appears in a role similar to that of Philosophy in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. A modern representative is Robert Bridges's The Testament of Beauty (1929).

Four works constituting a group. Thus, Shakespeare's CHRONICLE PLAYS Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V constitute a tetralogy. Greek drama was presented in tetralogies, consisting of three tragedies followed by a SATYR PLAY. Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet is a modern tetralogy. In 1990 John Updike published the fourth of his novels about Rabbit Angstrom (Rabbit at Rest) and announced that there would be no more. At about the same time, Philip Roth completed his Zuckerman tetralogy.

The counterpart of German Stoffgeschichte: the systematic comparative study of recurrent thematic elements. Such study is founded on the belief (as stated by Theodore Ziolkowski) "that themes, motifs, and images constitute an important link between the literary work and the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which a post-formalist age now again insists on apprehending the work of art." Thematics can embrace comparisons among different treatments of a figure like Ulysses, Faust, or Don Juan; of types like the feral child or the femme fatale; of images like the tower or the bridge; or of figures like the "fire-rose" in Dante, Lovelace, Crashaw, Novalis, Scott, Ruskin, George MacDonald, Hardy, Yeats, Hedwig Lachmann, T. S. Eliot, Orson Welles, Stephen King, and certain Nintendo games.
  [Reference: Theodore Ziolkowski, Varieties of Literary Thematics (1983).]

The French for "tomb" or "tombstone" was used by seventeenth-century composers for memorial works; the musical term, revived in the twentieth century, has been used rather more specifically for memorial works by one artist for another, as in Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin. It was Mallarmé in the late nineteenth century who first used tombeau for poetry; among his poems are "Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe," "Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire," and "Tombeau" on Paul Verlaine. Notable such works in English include Surrey's memorial poems on Wyatt, Ben Jonson's poems on Drayton and Shakespeare, Wordsworth's "Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg," Hardy's "A Singer Asleep" on Swinburne, and several by Auden, such as "At the Grave of Henry James" and "In Memory of W. B. Yeats." Swift wrote a satirical tombeau on himself: "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D. Occasioned by Reading a Maxim in Rochefoucault"; the first section in Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is titled "E. P. Ode pour L'Election de Son Sepulchre," which suggests that the verses constitute a sort of tombeau for the title character (a poet) or for the author himself (E. P.).
  [Reference: Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (1981).]

A term used metaphorically as a critical standard by Matthew Arnold in "The Study of Poetry." A touchstone is, literally, a hard black stone once used to test the quality of gold or silver by comparing the streak left on the stone by one of these metals with that made by a standard alloy of the metal. Touchstones for Arnold were "lines and expressions of the great masters," which the critic should hold always in mind and apply "as a touchstone to other poetry." They form, he believed, an infallible way of "detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality …in all other poetry which we may place beside them." Arnold adduced three passages from Homer, three from Dante, two from Shakespeare, and three from Milton.
  [Reference: J. S. Eells, The Touchstones of Matthew Arnold (1955).]

An informal organization of leading transcendentalists living in and around Boston. After their first meeting in 1836 at the home of George Ripley, they met occasionally at Ralph Waldo Emerson's home in Concord and elsewhere, calling themselves "The Symposium" and the "HEDGE CLUB." Their chief interests were new developments in theology, philosophy, and literature. The movement was closely associated with the growth of the Unitarian spirit in New England. The leading members were Emerson, Convers Francis, Frederick Henry Hedge, Amos Bronson Alcott, Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry D. Thoreau, and William Ellery Channing.

(éppi thèt)  An adjective used to limit a noun that it really does not logically modify. Examples abound in ordinary discourse ("foreign policy" is domestic policy, and the "foreign minister" and "foreign office" are not at all foreign) and in literature (Carew's "A Rapture" mentions "Petrarch's learned arms"—an obvious transference). Sometimes, when we want to make a buck fast, we say we want to make a fast buck.

A rare species of language-to-language writing that attempts to preserve the sound of the original while using real words in the new language—not necessarily words that translate the sense of the original. Two lines from Plautus's Rudens—"Pol minime miror, navis si fractast tibi, / scelus te et sceleste parta quae vexit"—have been rendered by Paul Nixon as "Gad! I don't wonder at all that your ship was wrecked, with a rascal like you and your rascally goods aboard"—a translation of the sense but with nothing of the sound of the Latin preserved. On the other hand, there is a transvocalization by Louis Zukofsky that preserves some of the sound but with some sacrifice of particulars of sense: "Pole! minimal mirror! the ship / fractured from your ill-begot goods." The first three words sound rather like Plautus's "Pol minime miror" but translate nothing of the words. David Melnick's Men in Aida transvocalizes the Iliad in a syllable-by-syllable way that keeps almost all the sound and even hits on the sense now and again:

Men in Aïda, they appeal, eh? A day, O Achilles!
Allow men in, emery Achaians. All gay ethic, eh?
Paul asked if tea mousse suck, as Aida, pro, yaps in.

Luis d'Antin Van Rooten's Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames contains a number of humorous tranvocalizations, such as verses beginning "Jacques s'apprête," "Lit-elle messe, moffette," "Polis poutre catalane," and "Pousse y gâte, pousse y gâte." A Chinese comedian has transvocalized "gentleman" into jiantouman ("man with a pointed head").

A sort of double limerick devised by Walter de la Mare and displayed in his Stuff and Nonsense (1927). "The Shubble" is an example and, to a degree, a defense of the form:

  There was an old man said, "I fear
  That life, my dear friends, is a bubble,
Still, with all due respect to a Philistine ear,
  A limerick's best when it's double."
  When they said, "But the waste
  Of time, temper, taste!"
He gulped down his ink with cantankerous haste,
  And chopped off his head with a shubble.