A posteriori

DRAMATIC CONVENTION: See convention.

DRAMATIC IRONY: See irony.

DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE: A poem in which a poetic speaker addresses either the reader or an internal listener at length. It is similar to the soliloquy in theater, in that both a dramatic monologue and a soliloquy often involve the revelation of the innermost thoughts and feelings of the speaker. Two famous examples are Browning's "My Last Duchess" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister." Cf. interior monologue and monologue.

DRAMATIC POINT OF VIEW: See point of view.

DRAMATIC UNITIES: See Unities, three.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE (Latin: "people of the play"): A list of the complete cast, i.e., the various characters that will appear in the play. This list usually appears before the text of the main play begins in printed copies of the text. In late periods of drama, the dramatis personae often included a brief description of the character's personality or appearance. In the First Folio, such lists appeared at the end of some Shakespearean plays, but not at the end of all of them.

DRAVIDIAN: Once, the aboriginal tongue of all India, but now spoken primarily in only the southern regions of that subcontinent.

DREAM VISION (Visio): A genre of poetry popular in the Middle Ages. By convention, a fictionalized version of the writer goes to sleep in a pleasant, natural springtime setting (May mornings being particularly popular). He has a dream that he relates to the reader. During the dream, he often encounters a mentor or spirit guide who takes him on a journey in which he encounters various historical or fictional figures engaged in allegorical activities. Through his interactions, the dreamer learns valuable spiritual, political, or intellectual truths and is transformed by the experience. One of the earliest literary works to influence the genre is Macrobius's (c. 400 CE) commentary on the Somnium Scipionis. Medieval examples from the continent include the Roman de la Rose (13th century), and Dante's Divine Comedy. Medieval examples from the British Isles include the Welsh Dream of Rhonabwy and English works such as Piers Plowman, Pearl, and Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, and the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. More recent versions include Bunyan's prose narrative called The Pilgrim's Progress, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, and L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz.

DUAL: In contrast to the singular and plural forms of nouns and pronouns in Modern English, Old English had a third category, the dual inflection for pronouns. This inflection referred to exactly two people or things. A dual form might refer to to the speaker and one other listener in the audience, for example. The Old English dual personal pronouns included these forms:

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