THIRD-PERSON POINT OF VIEW

THIRD WALL: Usually referred to as the "fourth wall," depending upon how a stagebuilder numbers the sides of the stage, the third or fourth wall is an imaginary barrier that separates the events on stage from the audience. The idea is that the stage background is constructed with a cutaway view of the house, so that the people sitting on the audience can look through this invisible "fourth wall" and look directly into the events inside. Such stages preclude theater-in-the-round and they require a modified apron stage with an expensive reproduction of an entire house or building, often complete with stairs, wallpaper, furniture, and other bits to add verisimilitude. This type of stage became increasingly common within the last two centuries, but the money involved in constructing such stages often precludes their use in drama, leaving arena stages most popular for the architectural design of the stage.

THIRTEENER: A stanza rhyming ABABABABCDDDC. The 1994 edition of the E.E.T.S. produced a version of the Wakefield Master's Second Shepherd's Play printed in thirteeners, as opposed to the more traditional printing of nine lines in which the first four lines are extended in length with the first half rhyming with the last half of each line.

THORN: A letter representing a th- sound in the Anglo-Saxon alphabet and in Norse runes. The letter looks like a "P" in which the vertical line extends above the rest of the letter. Below is a visual example of the capital and lower-case thorn:

The letter thorn represented the interdental fricative sound found in words like thin, and it contrasts with the letter eth or edh, which represents the sound found in words like then. In modern English, we use the digraph