Epilogue
The opposite is a prologue—a piece of writing at the beginning of a work of literature or drama, usually used to open the story and capture interest.
[2] Some genres, for example television programs and video games, call the epilogue an "outro" patterned on the use of "intro" for "introduction".
The word epilogue could be adopted to describe the end of speeches within medieval plays, but at the time this was primarily used to hint at the connection to later works.
[8] American Author Henry James has said the epilogue is a place that distributes last "prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs and cheerful remarks.
He said it has the potential to be excessive for some readers as it has a "shift in tense, and a jump in tempo-an accelerando" which quickly changes to a "loosening of the temporal screw, enabling us to move rapidly ahead over a period of years".
[10] Epilogues also consisted of traditional "topoi" which was a metaphor introduced by Aristotle, to symbolise writers creating arguments in their story.
For example, in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale the epilogue is a transcript of a symposium at a university in the Arctic, held in 2195.
The majority of the epilogue is a speech given by a professor named Pieixoto who is an expert on the area of Gilead where The Handmaid's Tale takes place.
[15] For example, in Shakespeare's epilogue in Romeo and Juliet, the speaker is providing the moral lesson and the consequences for the audience to take away.
Go hence to have more talk of these sad things, Some shall be pardoned, and some punished, For never was a story of more woe In As You Like It, the epilogue is said by Rosalind which shows her content.
The female character was adorned in the same costumes that she wore in Act 5 and the speaker would combine her two entities, the tragic role within the main play and her humourized public persona, when speaking in the epilogue.
In Plautus’s plays Trinummus, Poenulus, Persa, Milus Gloriosus and Curculio all end with pleas for applause.
Both prologues and epilogues would typically give women agency by allowing them to perform comedies and receive audience applause.
English playwrights Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix and Catherine Trotter’s work are examined to understand the Restoration theatre's relationship between women.
[24] Gayle Rubin's "The Traffic in Women" and Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" have sparked critical interest in cross-cultural feminism and has increased female audiences in attending theatre.
This woman-to-woman paratext allows females speakers and audiences to be perpetuating sexuality which would not often be spoken of within the main structure of the play.
One epilogue written by R.Boyle to Mr Anthony claim that poets try but fail to craft male characters that women find attractive.
The epilogue to Thomas Wright's 1693 comedy, The Female Vertuoso, Susannah Mountfort sneers that older ladies "boast of Virtue ‘cause unfit for Vice".
Other operas whose final scenes could be described as epilogues are Mozart's Don Giovanni, Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, and Delius's Fennimore and Gerda.
A few examples of such films are 9 to 5, American Graffiti, Changeling, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, National Lampoon's Animal House, Babe: Pig in the City, Happy Feet Two, Remember the Titans and Zack Snyder's Justice League.
A visual novel can also feature a type of epilogue, which will wrap up all of the scenarios encountered by a player, most often after the game has been fully completed by reaching all of the multiple endings; as is the case with Tsukihime, featuring an epilogue that expands on the endings of all completable routes, as well as providing context for the rest of the game by explaining events in the prologue.
