Literary Devices
The terms and definitions listed below will be useful for your Act 4 Romeo and Juliet Test. Make sure to keep track
of our work with additional terms, too, such as paradox, pun, oxymoron, sonnet, and iambic pentameter.
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ALLITERATION:
A literary device that emphasizes the recurrence of
initial consonant sounds, especially at the
beginning of words or stressed syllables.
For example, notice the "s" and "h" sounds in “A
city that is set on a hill cannot be hid” or the “m”
in the phrase "malicious mockery." In The Bourne
Identity, the head of Treadstone says, “I want
Bourne in a body bag by sundown.”
ALLUSION:
An indirect reference to another text with which the
reader is expected to be familiar. (Not a
quotation.) Allusions are usually literary,
historical, Biblical, or mythological, but
contemporary writers also use familiar stories from
television and film.
Such references draw attention to similarities in
the tone or theme of one work with another,
enriching the new text by association and giving it
depth.
HYPERBOLE:
Exaggeration for effect; e.g. "When sorrows come,
they come not single but in battalions" (Hamlet).
JUXTAPOSITION:
The arrangement of two or more ideas, characters,
actions, settings, phrases, or words side-by-side or
in similar narrative moments for the purpose of
comparison, contrast, rhetorical effect, suspense,
or character development.
Shakespeare often juxtaposes light and dark in Romeo
and Juliet. When characters are juxtaposed (set side
by side for comparison) they are called “foils.”
METAPHOR:
A figure of speech in which one thing is equated
with something else, often through a form of the
verb “to be.” For example, Shakespeare writes that
the world is “an unweeded garden" and that “All the
world’s a stage.”
Metaphors and similes are made up of two parts:
—the tenor, or primary subject of the comparison, and
ANALOGY:
A comparison of two things, alike in certain
aspects, to reveal their similarities. Analogy is
widely used in poetry but also in other forms of
writing (exposition, description, argument).
A famous example of this device compares the world
to a finely tuned watch, and argues that this watch
(designed) requires a watchmaker (designer). A
SIMILE is an expressed analogy, a METAPHOR an
implied one.
ANTITHESIS:
A figure of speech in which sharply contrasting
ideas are juxtaposed in a balanced or parallel
phrase or grammatical structure. This technique is
closely related to oxymoron (“deafening silence”)
and paradox (parting is “sweet sorrow”).
—the vehicle, or the image used to communicate a
complex idea about the subject to the reader.
ONOMATOPOEIA:
The use of a word whose pronunciation suggests its
meaning. “Buzz,” “hiss,” “slam,” and “pop” are
commonly used examples.
PERSONIFICATION:
Attributing human qualities to inanimate objects,
animals, things or ideas.
Sylvia Plath writes in “The Moon and the Yew Tree”:
“The moon…is a face in its own right.
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.”
The Friar’s speech (2.3) is filled with antithesis,
as when he contrasts birth and death:
“The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave, that is her womb;”
ASSONANCE:
The repetition of similar vowel sounds, usually
close together, to achieve a particular effect.
“Fake” and “lake” rhyme; “lake” and “fate” show
assonance.
There is also assonance in the nursery rhyme:
"Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what
you are! Up above the world so high, Like a diamond
in the sky."
SIMILE:
A figurative comparison of two things, often
dissimilar, using the connecting words “like” or
“as.”
For example, the simile "Oh, my love is like a red,
red rose" serves as the title and first line to a
poem by Robert Burns.
SOLILOQUY:
An extended speech in which a lone character
expresses his or her thoughts; a dramatic monologue
which allows the audience to “hear” what the
characters is “thinking.” (From Latin, “to speak
alone.”)