A posteriori

partible succession.

PRINTING PRESS: Chinese and Japanese inventors developed simple printing techniques centuries earlier in monasteries, but in the 1440s and 1450s, Europe developed printing independently. Even though forerunners of the printed book might have existed in Holland, the most important developments were in Mainz, Germany, where "Indulgence" was printed in 1454, and the Gutenberg Bible in 1456. John of Gutenberg is credited with the invention by fifteenth-century writers, and the invention spread rapidly to Italy, France, Holland, and other countries. William Caxton set up a printing press in Europe (Bruges) in 1475, and there printed the first book in English, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. Returning to England in 1476, Caxton set up his second printing press in Westminster. He next printed a number of Latin texts before printing in English the Dicts or Sayings of the Philosophers (1477), Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1483), Malory's Le Morte Darthur (1485), and others for about a hundred titles in total. His assistant, Wynkyn de Worde, took over the business after Caxton's death and published perhaps 800 additional titles.

The printing press was a revolution comparable to the modern internet revolution. It made books for the first time cheap enough for mass production and mass purchasing, ensuring a rise in literacy, blurring dialectal vocabularies, spreading geographic and cultural knowledge, and fueling the flames of religious reformation.

PRIS: See prys.

PRIVATE SYMBOL: In contrast with an archetype (universal symbol), a private symbol is one that an individual artist arbitrarily assigns a personal meaning to. Nearly all members of an ethnic, religious, or linguistic group might share a cultural symbol and agree upon its meaning with little discussion, but private symbols may only be discernable in the context of one specific story or poem. Examples of private symbols include the elaborate mythologies created by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Silmarillion (such as the One Ring as a symbol of power lust) or William Butler Yeats' use of Constantinople as a symbol to represent poetic artifice in "Sailing to Byzantium," or Yeats' use of a gyre to symbolize the cycles of history and the sphinx as an emblem of the Antichrist in "The Second Coming." See also token and emblem.

PROBLEM PLAY: There are two common meanings to this term. (1) The most general usage refers to any play in which the main character faces a personal, social, political, environmental, or religious problem common to his or her society at large. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is representative of a problem play in that Loman must face the challenges of what the author considers false values in a capitalistic society. (2) In a narrower sense, Shakespearean scholars apply the term "problem play" to a group of Shakespeare's plays, also called "bitter comedies," especially Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well. These plays explore dark and ignoble aspects of human psychology without attempting to solve or resolve the plot to the reader's satisfaction beyond a superficial level. Because of the uneasy endings, the plays do not seem to follow the standard conventions of Renaissance comedy.

PROCATALEPSIS (Greek "anticipation"): Procatalepsis is a rhetorical strategy in which the writer raises an objection and then immediately answers it; by doing so, the rhetor seeks to strengthen his argument by dealing with possible objections before his audience can raise counter-arguments.

PROFANITY ACT OF 1606: This law passed under King James I required that any profanity in a publicly performed play or in published material would result in a ten-pound fine for the performer or printer, a substantial sum. Three of Shakespeare's quartos show signs of revision to meet the requirement of the Profanity Act, such as omissions of obscenity, the word "God" changed to "heaven," or "Jove," etc. Contrast with the Censorship Ordinance.

PROLOGUE: (1) In original Greek tragedy, the prologue was either the action or a set of introductory speeches before the first entry (parados) of the chorus. Here, a single actor's monologue or a dialogue between two actors would establish the play's background events. (2) In later literature, a prologue is a section of any introductory material before the first chapter or the main material of a prose work, or any such material before the first stanza of a poetic work.

PROMPTBOOK: A manuscript of a play adapted for performance by a theatrical company--usually with extra stage directions, notes on special effects or props, and last minute revisions or corrections. In some promptbooks, the characters' names and speech prefixes are scribbled out and replaced with the names of the actors playing those roles.

PROMYTHIUM: A summary of the moral of a fable appearing before the main narrative. If the summary is found at the end of the narrative, it is called an epimythium. Contrast with prologue.

PRONUNCIATION SPELLING: A new spelling of an old word that more accurately reflects the current pronunciation than the original spelling does.

PROPAGANDA (Latin, "things that must be sent forth"): In its original use, the term referred to a committee of cardinals the Roman Catholic church founded in 1622 (the Congregatio de propaganda fide). This group established specific educational materials to be sent with priests-in-training for foreign missions . The term is today used to refer to information, rumors, ideas, and artwork spread deliberately to help or harm another specific group, movement, belief, institution, or government. The term's connotations are mostly negative. When literature or journalism is propaganda and when it is not is hotly debated. For instance, the Roman Emperor Augustus commissioned Virgil to write The Aeneid for specific goals. He wanted Virgil to glorify Rome's greatness, instill public pride in Rome's past, and cultivate traditional Roman virtues such as loyalty to the family, the Empire, and the gods. Is this propaganda? Or patriotism?

Typically, readers claim a work is propaganda when it sets forth an argument with which they personally disagree. In other cases, readers will call a work propagandistic if they can perceive that the characters or the author advances particular doctrines or principles. Harry Shaw notes: "Propaganda is attacked by most critics and general readers because it is an attempt to influence opinions and actions deliberately, but by this definition all education and most literature are propagandistic" (220).

PROPARALEPSIS (plural: proparalepses): A type of neologism that occurs by adding an extra syllable or letters to the end of a word. For instance, Shakespeare in Hamlet creates the word climature by adding the end of the word temperature to climate (1.1.12). The wizardly windbag Glyndwr (Glendower) proclaims that he "can call spirits from the vasty deep" in 1 Henry IV (3.1.52). We would expect him to speak of the "vast deep" normally. Proparalepsis is an example of a rhetorical scheme.

PROPS (abbreviation of "stage properties"): Handheld objects, furniture and similar items on stage apart from costumes and the stage scenery itself used to provide verisimilitude, to reinforce the setting, to help characterize the actors holding or wearing them, or to provide visual objects for practical, symbolic, or demonstrative purposes on the stage.

PROSCENIUM: An arch that frames a box set and holds the curtain, thus creating a sort of invisible boundary through which the audience views the on-stage action of a play.

PROSE: Any material that is not written in a regular meter like poetry. Many modern genres such as short stories, novels, letters, essays, and treatises are typically written in prose.

PROSKENION: A raised stage constructed before the skene in classical Greek drama. The proskenion sharply divided the actors from the chorus, and the elevated height made the actors more visible to the audience.

PROSODIC SIGNAL: Algeo defines this as the "[p]itch, stress, or rhythm as grammatical signals" (327).

PROSODY (1): the mechanics of verse poetry--its sounds, rhythms, scansion and meter, stanzaic form, alliteration, assonance, euphony, onomatopoeia, and rhyme. (2) The study or analysis of the previously listed material. This is also called versification.

PROSOPOPOEIA (Grk prosopon, "face"): a form of personification in which an inanimate object gains the ability to speak. For instance, in the Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Dream of the Rood," the wooden cross verbally describes the death of Christ from its own perspective. Ecocritical writers might describe clearcutting from the viewpoint of the tree, and so on. See personification, above.

PROSTHESIS: Adding an extra syllable or letters to the beginning of a word for poetic effect. Shakespeare writes in his sonnets, "All alone, I beweep my outcast state." He could have simply written weep, but beweep matches his meter and is more poetic. Too many students are all afrightened by the use of prosthesis. Prosthesis creates a poetic effect, turning a run-of-the-mill word into something novel. Prosthesis is an example of a rhetorical scheme. It results in a neologism.

PROTAGONIST: The main character in a work, on whom the author focuses most of the narrative attention. See character.

PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN: The reconstructed ancestor of all Indo-European languages. Many scholars use this term interchangeably with Indo-European. Click here for more information.

PROTOZEUGMA: See discussion under zeugma.

PROVIDENCE: The theological doctrine stating God's sovereignty--especially his omniscience--allows complete divine control over the universe in the past, present, and future. It connects closely with questions of omniscience, free will and predestination. In John Milton's Paradise Lost, Milton emphasises providence as one of his themes, depicting a universe in which God allows complete free will, but one in which God will ultimately use providence to turn even evil choices and decisions to a greater good in the long run through his own mysterious means.

PROZEUGMA: See discussion under zeugma.

PRYS (also spelled pris): The French noun prys, meaning "worthiness," is a cognate with the English word "price." Prys was rich in connotations, appearing frequently in French chansons de geste and medieval romances. It embodies knightly worthiness on a number of levels. A knight who has prys is loyal, brave, polite, courtly, proud, refined in taste, and perhaps a bit foolhardy and arrogant, quick to take anger at an insult and fast to accept a challenge or dual. Chaucer uses this term to describe the Knight in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales: