COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE: A genre of Italian farce from the sixteenth-century characterized by stock characters, stock situations, and spontaneous dialogue. Typically, the plot is an intrigue plot and it involves a soubrette who aids two young lovers in foiling the rigid constraints of their parents. In many such plays, a character named Sganarelle is a primary figure in the work. Often there is a zani, or foolish-servant, who provides physical comedy in contrast to the anguish of the young lovers. In the end, the couple achieves a happy marriage. Commedia dell'arte may have influenced Shakespeare's comedies, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Moliere's plays, such as L'amour Medecin, commonly translated into English as Love is the Doctor.

COMMON MEASURE: Also called common meter, common measure consists of closed poetic quatrains rhyming ABAB or ABCB, in which the lines of iambic tetrameter (eight syllables) alternate with lines of iambic trimeter (six syllables). This pattern is most often associated with ballads (see above), and it is occasionally referred to as "ballad measure." Many of Emily Dickinson's poems are in loose common measure using slant rhyme, for instance:

Much Madness is divinest Sense--
To a discerning Eye--
Much Sense--the starkest Madness--
'Tis the Majority

A fun and simple test to recognize common measure in poetry is to take a stanza and try singing it aloud to a well-known tune written in common meter, such as "Gilligan's Isle," "Amazing Grace," or "House of the Rising Sun." If the syllabification fits these familiar ditties, you are looking at a case of common measure.

COMMON METER: Another term for common measure (see above).

COMMONIZATION: The linguistic term for an eponym--a common word that is derived from the proper name of a person or place. For instance, the sandwich gained its name from its inventor, the fourth Earl of Sandwich. The word lynch comes from Captain William Lynch, who led bands of vigilantes to hang hoboes and bums residing near Pittsylvania County. The verb shanghai, meaning to kidnap or press into forced labor, comes from the practices of conscription common in the oriental city of Shanghai. The word stentorian comes from the loud-mouthed Stentor in Greek legend, and herculean comes from the muscle-bound Hercules, and so on.

COMPERT (plural: comperta): Specifically, birth-tales in Old Irish literature that detail the conception and birth of a hero. Examples include the Compert Con Culainn (Birth of Cú Chulainn). Usually supernatural or extraordinary events involve themselves in the conception, such as the Druid Cathbad's seduction of Nessa after prophesying what the hour would be lucky for (begetting a king upon a queen!) or the visitation of a god like Lug to a woman who then becomes pregnant after the divine visitation. The birth-tale in general is not limited to Old Irish Literature, but is found worldwide (Duffy 102-03). Examples outside of Irish literature include the birth of Jesus, or the Buddha, or Leda and Hercules in Greek myth, Pryderi's conception in the First Branch of The Mabinogion, or King Arthur's conception in Arthurian legends.

COMPLETENESS: The second aspect of Aristotle's requirements for a tragedy. By completeness, Aristotle emphasizes the logic, wholeness, and closure necessary to satisfy the audience.

COMPLEX METAPHOR: Another term for a telescoped metaphor.

COMPOSITE MONSTER (in architecture, often called a chimera after the Greek monster): The term is one mythologists use to describe the fantastical creatures in Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek, and medieval European legends in which the beast is composed of the body-parts of various animals. For instance, in Greek mythology, the chimera has the body of a lion, tale of a serpent, wings of a bat, and a goat-head, a lion-head, and a serpent's head. Likewise, the sphinx has a lion's body and a woman's head and breasts; the centaur has a horse's body and human torso and a human head where the horse-head should be; the minotaur has a bull's head and a man's body; and the harpy has an avian body and a woman's head, breasts, and arms. Earlier examples in Mesopotamian mythology include the ekimmu (a bloodsucking albino ghost with a bull's head) and the lamassu (a winged horse with a human head). In the medieval period, composite monsters include the formecolion, with an ant's body and a lion's head; the mermaid, with a human top and a fish bottom; and the cockatrice, which mingles parts of a rooster and a serpent. Contrast with additive monster, above.

Composite monsters were common in the legends of classical and ancient cultures, but diminished in favor after the Renaissance. Many theories propose to explain the common tendency to create composite monsters. Theories include mistranslation in traveler's tales, in which an animal is describing as having a head like such-and-such a creature, but the simile is lost in translation; the encounter of fossil remnants of extinct animals, or bones found jumbled together and misassembled; and the heraldic practice of dimidiation, in which a nobleman's son might take two animals found on his father's and mother's coats of arms combine them into a composite creature to illustrate his genealogy.

An example in 20th century films includes The Fly. In this 1950s horror classic, a fly and a human trade bodies and heads.Cf. therianthropic and theriomorphic.

COMPOSITOR: A typesetter in a Renaissance print shop. To speed the printing process, most of Shakespeare's plays appear to have been set by multiple compositors. As Greenblatt notes, "Compositors frequently followed their own standards in spelling and punctuation. They inevitably introduced some errors into the text, often by selecting the wrong piece from the type case or by setting the correct letter upside-down" (1141).

COMPOUNDING: A term from linguistics used to describe the creation of a new word ("neologism") that comes about by taking two existing words and sticking them together to create a brand new concept (Horobin 192). All languages do this to some extent. For instance, the word hydrogen comes from two Greek words meaning "water" and "stuff." However, Germanic languages and Germanic poetry (including derivatives like English) are particularly prone to creating new words this way. Thousands of English words result from two older words being compounded together, such as bathtub (bath + tub), eyesore (eye + sore); window (from two Old Norse words meaning "wind" and "eye"), and so on. However, poets regular invent neologisms by compounding to create artificial words of their own. Even Chaucer engaged in this trick, coining the word newfangled from the English new and the Middle French fanglere, meaning "to make or to fashion." See neologism, blending, and kenning.

COMPURGATION: In addition to trial by ordeal, compurgation was the medieval law practice among Christianized Anglo-Saxon tribes to determine innocence. A man accused of a crime would publicly swear to his innocence. The judge then gave the defendant thirty days to to collect a number of "oath-helpers" who would also swear to his innocence (or at least his good character). If he was unable to find the required number, he was either found guilty or he could appeal to trial by ordeal. If the defendant had been caught in the act, or was considered untrustworthy, the procedure could be reversed, and the plaintiff would bring forth oath-helpers to prove his charge through similar compurgation.

CONCEIT (also called a metaphysical conceit): An elaborate or unusual comparison--especially one using unlikely metaphors, simile, hyperbole, and contradiction. Before the beginning of the seventeenth century, the term conceit was a synonym for "thought" and roughly equivalent to "idea" or "concept." It gradually came to denote a fanciful idea or a particularly clever remark. In literary terms, the word denotes a fairly elaborate figure of speech, especially an extended comparison involving unlikely metaphors, similes, imagery, hyperbole, and oxymora. One of the most famous conceits is John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," a poem in which Donne compares two souls in love to the points on a geometer's compass. Shakespeare also uses conceits regularly in his poetry. In Richard II, Shakespeare compares two kings competing for power to two buckets in a well, for instance. A conceit is usually classified as a subtype of metaphor. Contrast with epic simile and dyfalu.

CONCORD: See discussion under agreement.

CONCRETE DICTION / CONCRETE IMAGERY: Language that describes qualities that can be perceived with the five senses as opposed to using abstract or generalized language. For instance, calling a fruit "pleasant" or "good" is abstract, while calling a fruit "cool" or "sweet" is concrete. The preference for abstract or concrete imagery varies from century to century. Philip Sidney praised concrete imagery in poetry in his 1595 treatise, Apologie for Poetrie. A century later, Neoclassical thought tended to value the generality of abstract thought. In the early 1800s, the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley once again preferred concreteness. In the 20th century, the distinction between concrete and abstract has been a subject of some debate. Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme attempted to create a theory of concrete poetry. T. S. Eliot added to this school of thought with his theory of the "objective correlative." Contrast with abstract diction / abstract imagery.

CONCRETE POETRY: Poetry that draws much of its power from the way the text appears situated on the page. The actual shape of the lines of text may create a swan's neck, an altar, a geometric pattern, or a set of wings, which in some direct way connects to the meaning of the words. Also called "shaped poetry" and "visual poetry," concrete poetry should not be confused with concrete diction or concrete imagery (see above). The object here is to present each poem as a different shape. It may appear on the page, on glass, stone, wood, or other materials. The technique seems simple, but can allow great subtlety. Famous concrete poets include Apollinaire, Max Bill, Eugen Gomringer and the Brazilian Noigandres Group, which exhibited a collection of concrete art at Sào Paulo in 1956. In Germany, this school of poetry is called konkretisten by critics. It includes Ernst Jandl, Achleitner, Heissenbüttel, Mon, and Rühm. Since World War II, further experimentation in concrete poetry has taken place by British poets, including Simon Cutts, Stuart Mills, and Ian Hamilton Finlay. See also diamante.

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