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More "Comedy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you? Haeckel and he wrote the great musical comedy of the century. And Matisse did ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... lives of Prodigal Sons, To-day is a prodigious coxcomb, but To-morrow is a very poltroon, taking fright at the big words of his predecessor. To-day is the truculent captain of old world comedy, To-morrow the clown ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... my heart grew a little tenderer, and my eyes were moistened by the recall, what need to be ashamed of the emotion? And if in the night I dreamed that I was a boy again, and that a fair-haired child played with me in the changing glow of dreamland in the best and purest scenes of the human comedy, was it a delusion to be dispelled, a memory to be put aside? Did ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... untouched. Finally, if any use or benefit to this department of the republic of letters should accrue from my labours, it will, perhaps, be allowed that I have not lived idly, and as the old man in the comedy says: ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... inch or two of this narrative, and let kind oblivion cover it as cool dusk masks the ravages of burning noon. Anyway, this was part of a hunting outfit, including Fred Stone, bound for the North Rim. To this day I can't see any comedy in Mr. Stone's acting. ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... expresses that dash under cities and through mountain tunnels, and you must instill this spirit into your speech if you would move a popular audience. From a front seat listen to a first-class company present a modern Broadway drama—not a comedy, but a gripping, thrilling drama. Do not become absorbed in the story; reserve all your attention for the technique and the force of the acting. There is a kick and a crash as well as an infinitely subtle intensity in ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... that I was in continual fear of losing. Why not? Wherefore should any rational person shrink from contempt, if it happen to form the tenure by which he holds his repose in life? The cases which are cited from comedy of such a yearning after contempt, stand upon a footing altogether different: there the contempt is wooed as a serviceable ally and tool of religious hypocrisy. But to me, at that era of life, it formed the main guaranty of an unmolested repose; and security there was not, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... disease were not evidence of divine displeasure, but that they were due to natural causes. When therefore this new belief became established, temple-sleep degenerated into a superstitious rite. As early as the fifth century B. C., the celebrated poet, Aristophanes, in his comedy, "Plutus," severely criticized this ceremony, as practised in his time. And, although the more enlightened among the Greeks came to regard it with disfavor, the custom was never entirely ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... Misanie,' the new play by the author of 'Lucretia'? A witty feuilletoniste says of it that, besides all the unities of Aristotle, it comprises, from beginning to end, unity of situation. Not bad, is it? Madame Ancelot has just succeeded with a comedy, called 'Une Annee a Paris.' By the way, shall you ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... rather fast—to awake all sorts of evil passions in other people's minds if we are better-looking or better dressed, or more admired; and have them aroused in our own if we are not? Does a ball amuse? Does a dinner-party? Does even a comedy, after the first quarter of an hour? I can answer for myself in the negative, at ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... children, came near and bowed themselves."—Gen., xxxiii, 7. "The First or Second will, either of them, by themselves coalesce with the Third, but not with each other."—Harris's Hermes, p. 74. "The whole must centre in the query, whether Tragedy or Comedy are hurtful and dangerous representations?"—Formey's Belles-Lettres, p. 215. "Grief as well as joy are infectious: the emotions they raise in the spectator resemble them perfectly."—Kames, El. of Crit., i, 157. "But in all other words the Qu are both ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... him sideways out of his almond-shaped eyes. Domini heard the name "Irena," and guessed that Batouch was asking the Kabyle to send for her and make her dance. She could not help being amused for a moment by the comedy of intrigue, complacently malignant on both sides, that was being played by the two cousins, but the moment passed and left her engrossed, absorbed, and not merely by the novelty of the surroundings, by the strangeness of the ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... here before to-morrow; but my brother will come directly." In fact, the brother did come soon afterwards, and greeted us with a still warmer welcome. "Before leaving the gardens," he said, "I heard of your arrival, and have come in a full gallop the whole way." In order to put an end to this comedy of errors, I declared at once that he was mistaken; nobody in Aleppo could possibly know of our coming, and we were, perhaps, transgressing on his hospitality. But no: he would not be convinced. He was a dragoman ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... peril I was in, I could not resist laughing at my ludicrous situation. I felt as one does when looking at a good comedy. ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... 1838-39 Emerson delivered his usual winter course of Lectures. He names them in a letter to Carlyle as follows: "Ten Lectures: I. The Doctrine of the Soul; II. Home; III. The School; IV. Love; V. Genius; VI. The Protest; VII. Tragedy; VIII. Comedy; IX. Duty; X. Demonology. I designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false with unseasonable inflammation, so I discoursed no more on Human Life." Two or three of these titles only are prefixed to his published Lectures or Essays; Love, in the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... other memorable place in Shrewsbury, and that is the Raven Inn, where Farquhar wrote his comedy of "The Recruiting Officer" in 1701. The window of the room in which he wrote is said to look into the inn yard, and I went through the arched entrance to see if I could distinguish it. The hostlers were currying horses ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "He gives a birthday fete in his garden: to whom, I wonder? I will name no one. To Phormio, perhaps, or Gnatho, or Ballion? Oh, incredible baseness; lust and impudence not to be borne!" These were the vile knaves of the Roman comedy—the Nyms. Pistols, and Bobadils. "Your Consulship no doubt will be salutary; but mine did only evil! You talk of my verses," he says—Antony having twitted him with the "cedant arma togae." "I will only say that you do not understand them or ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... dispositions of the two men, singular, as though a lamb and a flayed bear were to form an alliance. In 1715 our poet returned to England, and obtained a seat at the Board of Trade. Early in the year he brought out, anonymously, on the stage his comedy of the "Drummer," which was coldly received. And towards the close of it, he commenced a very clever periodical called the Freeholder. We only met with this series a few years ago, but can assure our readers that some of the most delectable bits ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... another danger spot of the realm, to which picture there come in, details of the winning of the African natives to the Queen, a comedy of witchcraft and widows, and ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... tremblingly, returned the frank, firm pressure. While she was speaking, he looked into her face and saw that she had already assumed the invisible but impenetrable mask in which the society woman plays her part in the tragic comedy of Vanity Fair. It was the same face and yet not the same, the same voice and yet a different one, and the sight and sound acted upon him like a powerful tonic. This was not the Enid he had loved, after all, at least, so it seemed to him. He had forgotten, ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... one, in our day. Their view of their profession is similar to Mrs. Delamere's, when Max Moncrief wrote that sparkling comedy for her. 'My dear,' she said to him, 'why did you trouble yourself to put all that wit and sense into it? We didn't want that. I shall wear all my diamonds, and I have ordered ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... by his stage name of Moliere, stands without a rival at the head of French comedy. Born at Paris in January, 1622, where his father held a position in the royal household, he was educated at the Jesuit College de Clermont, and for some time studied law, which he soon abandoned for the stage. His life was spent in Paris and in the provinces, acting, directing performances, ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
... Blankbury, on the first night of the performance of the well-known Comedy of "Heads or Tails?" by the "Thespian Perambulators." Time, 7:50 P.M. A "brilliant and fashionable assemblage" is gradually filling the house. In the Stalls are many distinguished Amateurs of both Sexes, including Lady SURBITON, who has brought her husband ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... In 1798, she published, though anonymously at first, "A Series of Plays: in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger Passions of the Mind, each Passion being the subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy." In a lengthened preliminary dissertation, she discoursed regarding the drama in all its relations, maintaining the ascendency of simple nature over every species of adornment and decoration. "Let one simple trait of the human heart, one expression ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... inaugurated this millennium. Except for individual instances the tragic intensities of life were over now and done with; there was no more need for heroes and martyrs; for the generality of humanity the phase of genial comedy had begun. There might be improvements and refinements ahead, but social, political and economic arrangement were now in their main outlines settled for good and all; nothing better was possible and it was the agreeable ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... enter into it. But another reason of their Success proceeds from the little Knowledge most People have of Pastoral; all Poets having gone in exactly the same Track, without one endeavouring to raise the Poem to any greater Perfection than they found it in; whereas Epick Poetry, Tragedy, and Comedy, arriv'd by slow degrees to the Perfection they now bear; and this Writer still went beyond the last ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... smiling, and tearing the paper in small pieces; "it is true, she is a diavolezza, but one of the most amiable and charming sort, and perhaps ere long I shall, notwithstanding her deviltry, consider her an angel, and believe her charming comedy to be entirely true and sincere. But this is no time for thinking of such things. The grave affairs of life require our exclusive attention. Kockeritz, then, has been convinced, and even Kalkreuth has been shaken in his stupid belief in the French! Well, may we ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... to squirm when you think a girl is going to pin you down. You let me get about as serious as a musical comedy with you and then you ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... in the blue sky far overhead, grew with astonishing swiftness, as a great bald eagle, descending with the utmost velocity, and then abruptly checking its flight, alighted on the bough of a tree over Henry's head, where it sat, its eyes upon the comedy passing in the berry patch. At any other time the eagle would have regarded the youth as his natural enemy, but now there was no hostility between them. They were ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... impudence in me to say much of a comedy, which has had but indifferent success in the action. I made the town my judges, and the greater part condemned it: after which, I do not think it my concernment to defend it with the ordinary zeal of a poet for his decried poem. Though Corneille is more resolute in his preface before ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... scenery of our patent theatres, and compare it with the vulgar daubs even of John Kemble's time. Some of the scenes by Stanfield, Roberts, Grieve, and Pugh, are "perfect pictures." Yet the language of the stage is at a stand, and insipid comedy, dull tragedy, and stupid farce are more abundant than ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... her desertion of the roles in which she won great renown. "Our advice, given in the friendliest spirit, is this: go back to the twilight of the past, to the costume play. Get out of the garish light of to-day. The present is suited only for a kind of crass comedy or Bowery melodrama. Only the past, the foreign, affords setting for the large play of human passion which Helen Merival's great ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... instead of fruitlessly railing against him. Literature then becomes full of purpose; becomes aggressive, attacks now the throne, now the church, now the law, now the institution, now the person. Tragedy is followed by comedy, sentiment by satire; schylus is followed by Aristophanes, Horace is followed by Juvenal and Martial; Racine is followed by Voltaire, and Byron by Dickens. This ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... cases that have come within the experience of this great detective. But they give a fair portrayal of Muller's peculiar method of working, his looking on himself as merely an humble member of the Department, and the comedy of his acting under "official orders" when the Department is in ...
— The Case of The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... Spirit, who amid his endless improvisations is imagining himself living for the moment in this particular solar and social system. Death in such a universal monologue would be but a change of scene or of metre, while in the scramble of a real comedy it would be a change of actors. In either case every voice would be silenced sooner or later, and death would end each particular life, in spite of ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... novels have, we might now have a school of American dramatists of which we should be as proud as of our school of American novelists. In dramatic composition, the equivalent of the Short-story is the one-act play, be it drama or comedy or comedietta or farce. As the novelists have learned their trade by the writing of Short-stories, so the dramatists might learn their trade, far more difficult as it is and more complicated, by the writing of one-act plays. But, while ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... bed, he observed that she indeed wore a thin silk mask, of the kind which do such uncommon service in the elder comedy; such as women of rank still wore in travelling, but certainly never in the situation of this poor lady. It would seem she had sustained importunity on the subject, for when she saw the Doctor, she put ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... The Fillum Universe that tells all about you. I'd like to try actin' before the cam'ra myself. But I cal'late I ain't got much 'screen charm,'" the waitress added seriously. "I'm too fat. And I wouldn't do none of them comedy pictures where the fat woman always gets the worst of it. But you ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... a very interesting comedy," he murmured, rubbing his hands, "a very interesting comedy, and apparently played ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... Vauquier's method of testing the medium, had suggested another way, Mlle. Celie could not object, and there she would be neatly and securely packed up beyond the power of offering any resistance, before she could have a suspicion that things were wrong. It would be an easy little comedy to play. And if that were true—why, there were my sofa ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... that if in the progress of our comedy she appear to act with an utter lack of reason or even common-sense—as every woman worth the winning must do once or twice in a lifetime—that I be permitted to record the fact, to set it down in all its ugliness, nay, even to exaggerate it ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... by Senor Asensio y Toledo is one dated 1592, and curiously characteristic of Cervantes. It is an agreement with one Rodrigo Osorio, a manager, who was to accept six comedies at fifty ducats (about 6l.) apiece, not to be paid in any case unless it appeared on representation that the said comedy was one of the best that had ever been represented in Spain. The test does not seem to have been ever applied; perhaps it was sufficiently apparent to Rodrigo Osorio that the comedies were not among the best that had ever been ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... intolerable comedy! Before his daughter and his friends they had to talk to each other, and he, looking away, so that their eyes might not meet, scolded her gently, for not following the advice of the doctors. At ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... will soon be published by J. S. REDFIELD: Men of the Times in 1852, comprising biographical sketches of all the celebrated men of the present day; Characters in the Gospels, by Rev. E. H. Chapin; Tales and Traditions of Hungary, by Theresa Pulzky; The Comedy of Love, and the History of the Eighteenth Century, by Arsene Houssaye; Aytoun's Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers; The Cavaliers of England, and The Knights of the Olden Time, or the Chivalry of England, France and Spain, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... within the smell of sawdust ever quite outgrew all taste for "the profession," and Anne, even when promoted to good society, never missed seeing a performance when her wandering friends came by. If I told you under what name Gerty became a star in the low-comedy line, after her marriage, you would all recognize it; and if you had seen her in "Queen Pippin" or the "Shooting-Star" pantomime, you would wish to see her again. Her first child was named after Madam Delia, and proved to ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... now almost done with the comedy, called the "Beggar's Opera,"[3] for this season, it may be no unpleasant speculation, to reflect a little upon this dramatic piece, so singular in the subject, and the manner, so much an original, and which hath frequently given so very agreeable ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... Rumple, that is my brother, always does take himself and his poetry so seriously; but the worst of it is that everyone who hears him recite his own things fancies it is the latest idea in comedy, ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... eyes. She had a distinct advantage over him. She knew that he was the Prince of Graustark; she had known it for many days. Perhaps if she had known all the things that were in his cunning brain, she would not have ventured so far into the comedy she was constructing. She would have hesitated—aye, she might have changed her methods completely. But she was in the mood to do and say daring things. She considered her position absolutely secure, and so she could afford to enjoy ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... The thought made him steal a longer look. How could such a face have been merged in the Murrett mob? Its fugitive slanting lines, that lent themselves to all manner of tender tilts and foreshortenings, had the freakish grace of some young head of the Italian comedy. The hair stood up from her forehead in a boyish elf-lock, and its colour matched her auburn eyes flecked with black, and the little brown spot on her cheek, between the ear that was meant to have a rose behind it and the chin that should have rested on ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... "Ah, what a fine comedy this world would be, if only one had not to play a part in it; if one existed, for instance, in some point of space, in that interval of the celestial orbs where the gods of Epicurus slumber, far, far away, whence one could see this ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... power wherewith the imagination or the sense called common, is affected by some particular physical object. (2) I say particular, for the imagination is only affected by particular objects. (3) If we read, for instance, a single romantic comedy, we shall remember it very well, so long as we do not read many others of the same kind, for it will reign alone in the memory (4) If, however, we read several others of the same kind, we shall think ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... these are his off hours, his moments of vacation. He appears on the stage as a sectary, and plays his part with resolute energy. This part again is that of a man not pursuing truth, but so occupied with maintaining his own conception of truth that he has no time to test it. It is a comedy of great humor, because Sylvanus, as a sectary, stands against all comers to protect a spring of deep and clear water, and is so engrossed in guarding the sacred wave from the least pollution that he does not find time to remark that it is not a spring ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... contentedly through the green of overhead branches, their peace was broken by a guffaw of derisive laughter. They looked up, to find at their backs a semi-circle of scoffing humanity. Lescott's impulse was to laugh, for only the comedy of the situation at the moment struck him. A stage director, setting a comedy scene with that most ancient of jests, the gawking of boobs at some new sight, could hardly have improved on this tableau. At the front stood Tamarack Spicer, the returned wanderer. His lean wrist was stretched out ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... by those ugly minie-balls during the war. Why that brigade should have been allowed to march into that ambuscade, from which we had so narrowly escaped, I could not understand. It was one of the early faux pas of that unfortunate comedy, rather tragedy of errors,—battle. ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... That astronomy had humble beginnings in Greece as elsewhere is highly probable. The late Mr. Andrew Lang wrote in this connection: "The very oddest example of the survival of the notion that the stars are men and women is found in the Pax of Aristophanes. Trygaeus in that comedy has just made an expedition to heaven. A slave meets him, and asks him: 'Is not the story true, then, that we become stars when we die?' The answer is, 'Certainly'; and Trygaeus points out the star into which Ion of Chios has just been metamorphosed." Mr. Lang added: "Aristophanes is making ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... unruffled features would lead the Western observer to suppose that he was a very simple person with no sort of interest in affairs. I had occasion to know him, however, for a statesman, after the Moorish fashion—a keen if resigned observer of the tragic-comedy of his country's politics, and a pious man withal, who had visited Mecca in the month that is called Shawall, and had cast stones on the hill of Arafat, as the custom is among True Believers. Some years had passed ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... religious and moral interludes, the dramatic colouring, however crude, is real and sincere. The humours of a broad folk-comedy break through the scriptural web continually in the guild plays like those in which Noah the shipbuilder, or the proverbial three shepherds, appear in the pageant. Noah's unwilling wife in the Chester Deluge, and ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... Adams felt as ignorant as the best-informed statesman, and though the sense was familiar, for once he could see that the ignorance was assumed. After nearly fifty years of experience, he could not understand how the comedy could be so well acted. Even as late as November, diplomats were gravely asking every passer-by for his opinion, and avowed none of their own except what was directly authorized at St. Petersburg. He could make nothing of it. He found himself in face of his new problem — ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... sir; I won't to see the new play in which did owed to play and actress which has not appeared on any theatre. How you think her? She has very much grace in the deeds great deal of exactness on the declamation, a constitution very agreable, and a delightful voice. What you say of the comedy? Have her succeded? It was a drama; it was whistted to the third scene of the last act. Because that? It whant the vehicle, and the intrigue it was bad conducted. So that they won't waited even the upshot? ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... one hand placed in the pants pocket, the other resting on the knee, body bent forward, eyes fixed on the keys of the melodeon, countenance expressing astonishment. The gentleman best adapted for this part is one who has a natural talent for performing in comedy. Light should be thrown on the scene from the lower end of the side of the stage, and of medium brightness. Music of a ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... what we merely read. Our eyes as well as our minds are addressed at the same time. The spectator, agreeably deceived by an imitation so nearly approaching life, mistakes the picture for the original, and thinks the object real. This gave birth to dramatic poetry, which includes tragedy and comedy. ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... and Burton, Placide, or the elder Wallack walked there with a kind of professional self-complacency. Thackeray, who had a quick and trained eye for the characteristic in cities, delighted in Broadway, for its cheerful variety, its perpetual "comedy of life"; the significance whereof is only more apparent to the sympathetic observer, because now and then through the eager throng glides the funeral car to the sound of muffled drums, the "Black Maria" with its convict load, or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... stud it might play out this comedy of errors by hunting down Rakhal, and all my troubles would be over. For a while, at least, until Evarin found out what had happened. I didn't deceive myself that I could carry the impersonation through ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... But the king, fearing in them an organized movement against all authority, sacred or secular, soon withdrew his support; Berquin was burned at the stake in the Place de Greve, and the Sorbonne even ventured to pursue, with open prosecution and denunciation, and with hidden satire in a comedy represented at the College de Navarre, the king's sister for having caused her brother to adopt a book of prayers translated into French and for having caused to be printed a work of her own in verse: Le Miroir ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... [Greek: prosopa] from the fact that they are placed over the face and conceal the countenance from the spectator: [Greek: para tou pros tous opas tithesthai]. But since, as we have said, it was by the masks they put on that actors played the different characters represented in a tragedy or comedy—Hecuba or Medea or Simon or Chremes,—so also all other men who could be recognized by their several characteristics were designated by the Latins with the term persona and by the Greeks with [Greek: prosopa]. But the ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... dim eyes were left behind, feeding day by day, hour by hour, on terror and dread, unsupported by the changing scenes, the wild excitement, and the joyous vicissitudes of the soldier's life, it was a cruel comedy acted every day between 1861 and 1865. They laughed who were not gay, and they seemed indifferent who were fainting with despair. The courage of battle is mere brutish insensibility compared with the abnegation of the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... he said after a moment's thought, "there is no doubt that I have witnessed a very clever comedy. An effective one, I grant, because it has ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... applied to a man in this. And these, I believe, are all. Now, the first of these assumptions I answer, by asking, "Does it follow?" Of all Shakspeare's plays which had then appeared, only three had been published before 1598, and not one comedy. Meres, in all probability, had no list to refer to, nor was he making one: he simply adduced, in evidence of his assertion of Shakspeare's excellence, both in tragedy and comedy, such plays of both kinds as he could ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... them love laughter. Sexual dalliance is either too serious a matter to be mocked by satyr-laughter; or it is too sad and deplorable to be laughed at at all. In a few hundred years, surely, the human race will recognize its absolute right to make mock at the grotesque elements in the sex comedy, and such laughter will clear the air of ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... sort—not humour that for its rare and exquisite quality can be placed beside the masterpieces in that kind of Lamb, or Sterne, or Goldsmith, or Washington Irving. Granted freely; not humour of that special character. But very good humour nevertheless, the thoroughly popular humour of broad comedy and obvious farce—the humour that finds its account where absurd characters are placed in ridiculous situations, that delights in the oddities of the whimsical and eccentric, that irradiates stupidity and makes ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... a crack regiment, admired for his easy manners and good looks, respected by meaner men for his good blood, and rich in everything except that vulgar dross without which the life of West-end London is so hollow a delusion, so bitter a comedy of mean ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... fine comedy did not doubt but the object would make an impression on the King's heart; but it was quite otherwise. No sooner had he cast his eyes on the beauty than he whirled round with indignation; and seeing my Brother behind him, he pushed him roughly out of the room, and immediately quitted ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and there, and the rolling of distant carriages, and the new expression that there is of the stir of men, they find to be comfortable. Mr. Guppy, noiselessly tapping on the window-sill, resumes his whispering in quite a light-comedy tone. ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... knaves who had recently enlightened their victim in such a matter-of-fact manner. He admitted that the comedy overbalanced the tragedy, in view of the fact that the job had resolved itself into petty sneak-thievery. Taking into consideration the trick money they had found, there was considerable farce in the affair. However, Vaniman, looking ahead to the threatening ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... fall and winter of '76 that Bret Harte came to Hartford and collaborated with Mark Twain on the play "Ah Sin," a comedy-drama, or melodrama, written for Charles T. Parsloe, the great impersonator of Chinese character. Harte had written a successful play which unfortunately he had sold outright for no great sum, and was eager for another venture. Harte had ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... remained in the House of Peers while his speech was taken into consideration,—a common practice with him; for the debates amused his sated mind, and were sometimes, he used to say, as good as a comedy.—MACAULAY: Review of the Life and Writings ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... not permit its formation. In literature a type is made a high type either by intensity, if it be simple, or by richness of nature, if it be complex. Miserliness, braggadocio, hypocrisy, in their extremes, are the characters of comedy; a rich nature, such as Hamlet, showing variety of faculty and depth of experience, is the hero of more profound drama. This truth, the necessity of high development in the type, underlay the old canon ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... Leigh Hunt's Feast of the Poets and in Edward Fitz-Gerald's Chivalry at a Discount. Other writers of satire in the earlier decades of the present century were Peacock, who in his novels (Crotchet Castle, &c.) evolved an original type of satire based upon the Athenian New Comedy. Miss Austen in her English novels and Miss Edgeworth in her Irish tales employed satire to impeach certain crying social abuses, as also did Dickens in Oliver Twist and others of his books. Douglas Jerrold's comedies and sketches are full of titbits of gay and ...
— English Satires • Various
... city in the world, had served only as a little bosquet of evergreens in a village garden might have done, as the background and scene for it. But it had no end; the time of the action was accomplished, the curtain had fallen, and the lights had been put out, but the comedy had come to no conclusion. Comedy-tragedy; it does not matter much which words you use. The scenes had all died away in incompleteness, and there had been no end. To many a gentle life such as that of Chatty might be, this is all that ever happens beyond the level of the ordinary and common. It ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... to Cesario), bespeaks a generosity of birth and feeling.[2] His dialect on all occasions is that of a gentleman, and a man of education. We must not confound him with the eternal low steward of comedy. He is master of the household to a great Princess, a dignity probably conferred upon him for other respects than age or length of service.[3] Olivia, at the first indication of his supposed madness, declares that she "would not have him miscarry for half of her dowry." Does this ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... diplomat, who also has a talent for pouring oil on troubled waters, were in charge of the financial part of the enterprise, and theirs was the task of seeing that none of the chapter funds were used, so that no possible criticism could arise. A pretty young actress offered to give a premiere of a comedy which she was about to take on the road, for the benefit of the street, and every one was delighted until they saw a rehearsal. It was one of those estranged-husband-one-cocktail-too-many farces, full of innuendo and profanity. J—— and his partner ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... subsequent readers with a notable example of the novel of mingled character and incident, entertaining alike for its lively episodes and its broadly genial delineation of types of the time. And so he soon had the town laughing with him at his broad comedy. ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... perpetually assumed his public character with the private coterie which he loved to rule. On the whole, he was unlike any of the leading men of modern days, and rather reminded one of the fine gentlemen of our old brilliant comedy, the Dorimants, the ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... methods had not been crowned with absolute success. The awkward corner caused by the enforced resignation of President Grevy had indeed been turned, because the Constitution of the Third Republic provides for the election of the President by the Assembly. But it is one thing to play a successful comedy in the Assembly with the help of what in America is called 'the cohesive power of the public plunder,' and quite another thing to get a satisfactory Chamber of Deputies re-elected by the people of France after four years of irritating and exasperating misrule. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... court was entertained with a comedy, acted by his Royal Highnesses servants, who attend here for ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... so remote in Time, but very many Gentlemen may remember these Authors & some familiar in their conversation deliver them upon every pleasant occasion so fluent, to talke a Comedy. He must be a bold man that dares undertake to write their Lives. What I have to say is, we have the precious Remaines, and as the wisest contemporaries acknowledge they Lived a Miracle, I am very confident this volume cannot die ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher
... endurance. Immediately, I was ashamed of my lapse into anthropomorphism. I told myself that my pity ought to be kept for the real men who had been frequenters of the building, who now were waifs. I reviewed the gaping, glassless windows through which they had been wont to watch the human comedy. There they had stood, puffing their smoke and cracking their jests, and tearing women's reputations ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... next fortnight tragedy held grim sway in the little weather-gray house among the firs—a tragedy tempered with grim comedy for Cecily, who, amid all her agony, could not help being amused at Lucy Ellen's ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... curtsied, and took her arm-chair also. The satin bills of their majesties and the princesses were then duly displayed—and the dingy green curtain drew up. The performances were invariably either a comedy and farce, or more frequently three farces, with a plentiful interlarding of comic songs. Quick, Suett, and Mrs. Mattocks were the reigning favourites; and, about 1800, Elliston and Fawcett became occasional stars. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... when the tragi-comedy I have given you an account of was over, the Queen my mother turned round to the Chevalier de Seurre, whom she recommended to my brother to sleep in his bedchamber, and in whose conversation she sometimes took delight because he was a man of some humour, but rather ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... 1736-1796), whose mother was an actress, just as in Shakespeare's time the parts for women were always taken by young men or boys. When once this is settled, it only remains to enrol him as tragedian, comedian, low-comedy actor, walking gentleman or lady, and similar ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... there's been nothing left but this confounded old turkey gobbler we've been hearing about. He swore last week that somebody had stolen the silver teapot. Abominable old liar! He must have sold it." The Major threw out his arms with a wrathful gesture. "All this comedy, if you please, for my benefit. Here I've been there every week, and never suspected, thanks to the infernal stratagems of that black fiend of an Uncle Noah. ...
— Uncle Noah's Christmas Inspiration • Leona Dalrymple
... drawing a breath of relief as the last of the trains vanished in the doorway, "perhaps you would now have the kindness to tell me what this comedy means." ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... so utterly surprised and terrified in the outer world that this infantile parody was curiously welcome, since nothing keeps the mind in balance on the tight-rope of sanity like the counterweight that comedy furnishes to tragedy, farce to frenzy, and ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... so to speak, in England, where we read that Charles II and the Duke of Yorke attended the first performance of Tarugo's Wiles, or the Coffee House, a comedy, in 1667, which Samuel Pepys described as "the most ridiculous and insipid play I ever saw in my life." The author was Thomas St. Serf. The piece opens in a lively manner, with a request on the part of its fashionable hero for a change of clothes. Accordingly, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... "I begin to see the humor in this comedy. Which are we—allies of the Greeks or of the Masai? Are we to help the Greeks get away with Brown's cattle, or help the Masai steal 'em from the Greeks? Are ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... deceived, he also used deception himself to further his projects, as can be shown by the tale of this diplomatic-military comedy, in ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... grew bloodshot, partly with rubbing them, partly with tears. He rubbed them with the sleeve of his rough coat, and the tears were very real, though few in number. Cotsdean's despair was indeed tragical enough, but its outside had in it a dash of comedy, which, though he was in no mirthful mood, caught the quick eye of Mr. May. He was himself very painfully affected, to tell the truth, but yet it cost him an effort ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... manner had helped to generate that impression. It seemed to her more than probable that with a little instruction as to technical stage business she could gain fame and fortune almost at once as an actress of tragedy or melodrama. Comedy she despised as unworthy of her. But the stage appealed to her only on the ground of income. The life of an actress lacked the ethical character which she liked to associate with whatever she did. To be sure, a great actress was an inspiring influence. ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... and we had an excellent Flemish dinner. The proprietress was a very lively creature. She chattered in French and broken English like a magpie, and flew here and there as lively as if she were on the stage. The Canon said the whole affair was like a scene from a French comedy. ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... by Venetians and consisting of breeches and stockings in one. The second sense is preserved, substantially, in our term pantaloons. The first sense led to the use of the word (in the mouths of the Venetians' enemies) for "buffoon" and then (in early Italian comedy) for "a lean and foolish old man." It is this stock figure of the stage that Shakespeare evokes. In line 22 hose means the covering for a man's body from his waist to his nether-stock. (Compare the present meaning: a covering for ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... played an amusing game. He held the reins of power so firmly that he could safely enact a transparent farce. He refused the sceptre. The grandees and the people begged him to accept it, and he took refuge from their solicitations in a monastery. This comedy, which even Caesar had not long played, Boris kept up for over a month. Yet from his cell he ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... been much less useful to the theater, for I should have lived in an everlasting wrangle with authors, actors, and managers on behalf of the mythological bodies supposed to preside over tragedy and comedy, and I should have killed myself (or perhaps been killed), and that quickly, with ineffectual protests against half the performances before the lamps, which are enough to make the angels weep and laugh—in ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Spring Gardens. Some of Reynolds's contributions: Lady Elizabeth Keppel as Bridesmaid, Countess Waldegrave and Child, and Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy. ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... be very witty and comedy, but I have nothing to saynothing at allto people dat will not believe deir own eye-sights. It is vary true dat I ave not any of de things of de art, and it makes de more wonder what I has done dis day. But I would ask of you, mine honoured and goot and generous ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... is the clew to this comedy of errors? No mere waywardness or perversity of character, but some powerful bias and a first-cousinship in principle must account for one of the strangest anomalies in modern history. Perhaps the following ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... case a licence has since been granted. The other two are still unlicensed. I have suffered both in pocket and reputation by the action of the Lord Chamberlain. In other countries I have not come into conflict with the censorship except in Austria, where the production of a comedy of mine was postponed for a year because it alluded to the part taken by Austria in the Servo- Bulgarian war. This comedy was not one of the plays suppressed in England by the Lord Chamberlain. One of the plays so suppressed was prosecuted in America ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... through the new vistas of life that had suddenly been flung open to her. One fellow who was naturally truthful was rapidly becoming a liar through the practice of exaggerating his profits and expenditures. There was an abundance of side-splitting comedy in the things I saw about me, but there was no dearth of pathos, either. One day, as I entered a certain high-class restaurant on Broadway, I saw at one of the tables a man who looked strikingly familiar to me, ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Ballard's own lips the story of Jerry Benham's first appearance in Broadway I was forcibly reminded of the opening cantos of the Divine Comedy where Dante follows the shade of Virgil into the abyss of hell. I had not let Jerry know of my presence in New York, for I believed that he would have wanted me with him and did not care to be placed in a position to refuse him. Indeed I can give no reason for ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... THEATER.—The theatre has always been a vital influence in man's aesthetic and emotional life. Drama, opera, comedy, and burlesque are variant forms, but they are alike in that they influence the audience. In the last decade the moving picture has greatly increased the power and influence of the theatre. The low price of the moving picture brings the theatre to millions ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... of humor delighted in any detail of an event which suggested comedy. His genial awkwardness amused himself quite as much as it amused the world. At his third public reception he wore a pair of white kid gloves that were too small. An old friend approached. The President shook hands so heartily that his glove burst with a popping sound. Holding up his ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... you win, but never when you need the cash. But it is Monte Carlo, if you say so. Two or three days there will cure you of your beautiful dream. After all," with a second thought, "it's a good cause, and it might be just your luck to win. The masquerading lady! I'll stake my word that there is comedy within comedy, and rare good comedy at that. Monte Carlo ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... up so as not to miss the comedy which was about to set its scenes upon the grim visage of the Count. As his eyes met ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... gift of penetrating to the heart of life. No one with the love of the grotesque which is the American portion of the human tastes or passions, can fail of his joy in the play of the obvious traits and motives of her Hebrew comedy, but he will fail of something precious if he does not sound the depths of true and beautiful ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... he is angry he will listen to nobody, and is capable of facing a whole army. We must prevent this duel somehow. And you are actually preparing to go to the theatre when things have come to such a pass? You are actually going to see a comedy!" ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... remorse of conscience, his uneasiness at the behaviour of the prince, and lastly, the clearing up of the misunderstanding between father and son, which make up several most affecting scenes. All this, however, would still be inadequate to fill the stage, if the serious events were not interrupted by a comedy which runs through both parts of the play, which is enriched from time to time with new figures, and which first comes to its catastrophe at the conclusion of the whole, namely, when Henry V., immediately after ascending the throne, banishes to a proper distance the companions of his youthful ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Trent with ponderous gravity. Martin's style was making clamorous appeal to his sense of comedy. He banished with an effort all vivacity of ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... used to this with singers in musical comedy, who make a point of turning the lyrics assigned to them into unintelligible patter. Perhaps in the present case we lost little by that, though there was one song (of which I actually heard the words) that seemed to me to contain the elements of a sound and consoling philosophy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... reticent by fits and starts, now whining and now laughing—who has been to seek out Romeo, and brought back news of him. In As You Like It, Rosalind's bright humor ripples and laughs like a silver brook through the glades of Ardennes, and trickles gently even into the epilogue: in this lively comedy—so much lighter and easier than the heavy tragedy we are discussing too—love and despair never come to overlay and destroy the arch humor. If there be any defect in the performance of the banished princess, it must ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... a complete stock-in-trade for any court or town Adonis; a perfect vocabulary of fashion, detailing the rise and progress of all the fashionable arts since the peace—the gazette appointments and disappointments—and elopements and faux pas, sufficient for all the comedy-writers of the present century—the respective claims of Spanish Refugees and Spitalfields Weavers—charitable concerts and opera benefits—and all the lumber and light artillery of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 368, May 2, 1829 • Various
... fool of me," said Giles grimly. "I told him everything, and you played that nice little comedy in ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... enormously successful, and the poet was hailed as a great dramatic genius. But these comedies are interesting to-day chiefly from the fact that Ariosto was one of the very first of the writers of modern comedy, and was the leader of that movement in Italy and France which prepared the way ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... their comedy so far as to converse a while in Hindustanee; and then says the Hindu, with the same smile, but sighing as if he were tired of the repetition, "The Sahib would be glad to know how ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... versions of the story is a novelle by Giovanni Brevio, published as part of his "Rime" in 1545. Piron's comedy of "Les Fils Ingrats," also known as "L'Ecole des Peres," appeared in 1728. "The story," adds Dunlop, "is also told in the 'Pieuses Recreations d'Angelin Gazee,' and is told in the 'Colloquia Mensalia' of Luther, among other examples to deter fathers from dividing their property during life among ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... claimed that the comedy of life could be made more interesting if everyone would preserve the unities. To keep the proportion of things and give place to others without losing one's own position was the secret of success in the mundane drama. We must know the whole play in order ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... at the theatre was a modern comedy which did not greatly interest him, indeed, he was more concerned in keeping his attention from that newly-discovered temple within than in unravelling the mysteries of the rather thread-bare plot of the play. Being, however, quite unaccustomed to dealing with this dual condition of mind it is to ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... introduction showed him a child of Mystery, moved by Voices and inspired by a Fetish. His face was full of good humour, and his whole figure rippled with sleek animal vivacity. For the moment, life was a comedy and a masquerade teeming with whims, ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... even be painted,—they can only be believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties, positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A parlour or a drawing-room,—a library opening into a garden,—a garden ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... not devoid of romance and imagination. He condemns the old fashion (still, alas! in vogue in many schools) of committing to memory an enormous amount of matter quite unworthy of being retained in the mind. He urges the need of a "Latin novel"—a Latin comedy; one that would set alight the imagination of ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... parishes a man can reach his different missions only by canoe or dog-train, that the missions are forty miles apart, that the canoe must run rapids and the dog-train dare blizzards—an effeminate type of man is more of a tragedy than a comedy. I think of one mission where the circuit is four hundred miles and the distance to railroad, doctor, post-office, fifty-five miles. This little curate had had a hard time, though his mission was an easy one. When his turn came to report, his face ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... dramatic writers, who are supposed to draw a faithful picture of it. So we go to the theatre, and usually derive keen pleasure therefrom. But is pleasure all that we expect to find? What we should look for above everything in a comedy or a drama is a representation, exact as possible, of the manners and characters of the dramatis persona of the play; and perhaps the conditions under which the play was written do not allow such representation. The exact and studied portrayal of a character demands from the author long preparation, ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... proposed by Lady Penelope, was next considered. It was proposed to act what the Italians call a Comedy of Character; that is, not an exact drama, in which the actors deliver what is set down for them by the author; but one, in which the plot having been previously fixed upon, and a few striking scenes adjusted, the actors are expected to supply ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... to me they would be a greater penance than eating maigre: their music resembles a gooseberry tart as much as it does harmony. We have not yet been at the Italian playhouse; scarce any one goes there. Their best amusement, and which, in some parts, beats ours, is the comedy; three or four of the actors excel any we have: but then to this nobody goes, if it is not one of the fashionable nights; and then they go, be the play good or bad—except on Moliere's nights, whose pieces they are quite weary of. Gray and I have been at the Avare to-night: I cannot at all commend ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... has forbidden me to see you again, and I will not play this comedy of coming secretly to your house. You must either lose me ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Josiah Wedgwood was tragically in love—the word was used advisedly. One can play comedy; two are required for melodrama; ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... "let us not play any more. I am too sad. Let us hang up the masks, for the comedy ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... astonishment, and closed it with bewilderment." It would appear from these opinions, which from their intensity, variety, and number (upwards of 50), are curious signs of the times, that Mr. Bailey has not so much improved on, as happily superseded the authors of Job and Ecclesiastes, of the Divine Comedy, of Paradise Lost and Regained, of Dr. Faustus, Hamlet, and Faust, of Don Juan, the Course of Time, St. Leon, the Jolly Beggars, and the Loves ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... she would not be a member of the Tug-of-war. What would have been a delightful society, a pleasure to the best girls at Middleton School, will be nothing whatever but a ridiculous farce, a scene of high comedy, something contemptible, now that Kitty Malone has joined it. But for you she would never have been asked to join. Why did ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... talk, over her further wishes, with the members of her little orchestra, who had approached her with demonstrations of deference enlivened by native humours—things quite in the line of old Venetian comedy. The girl's idea of music had been happy—a real solvent of shyness, yet not drastic; thanks to the intermissions, discretions, a general habit of mercy to gathered barbarians, that reflected the good manners of its interpreters, representatives though these might be but of the order ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... theoretical truth and falsehood. He was fond of telling wild stories to children, engrafted on things about them; wrote letters to people abroad, telling them that a friend of theirs had come out in genteel comedy; and persuaded George Dyer that Lord Castlereagh was the author of Waverley! The same excellent person walking one evening out of his friend's house into the New River, Lamb (who was from home at the time) wrote a paper under his signature of Elia, stating, that common friends would have ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... seek some other meeting-place where they can pitch their never-abiding tents, and sit at their humble feasts to recount to each other, amid appreciative laughter, the tricks and devices and pitiful petty schemes for the gaining of daily bread that make up for them the game and comedy of life. Tell me not that Ishmael does not enjoy the wilderness. The Lord made him for it, and he would not be ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... Feeling" was a serious reflection of the false sentiment of the Revolution, Mackenzie joined afterwards in writing tracts to dissuade the people from faith in the doctrines of the Revolutionists. Mackenzie wrote also a tragedy, "The Prince of Tunis," which was acted with success at Edinburgh, and a comedy, "The White Hypocrite," which was acted once only at Covent garden. He died at the age of eighty-six, on the 13th June, 1831, having for many years been regarded as an elder friend of their own craft by the men of letters who in his days ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... Bently Brown's blood-and-battle stuff, am I?" He grinned, with the corners of his mouth tipped downward so that you never would have suspected it of ever producing Luck's famous smile. "I might turn them into comedy," he suggested. "I expect I could get ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... to make you understand that great poets and prose-writers, after they have lost their power of depicting the passions, turn naturally to the delineation of character. Such, for instance, is the lifelike and characteristic picture of the palace of Odysseus, which may be called a sort of comedy of manners. ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... in the House while his speech was taken into consideration; which (52) was a common practice with him, because the debates amused his sated mind, and indeed he used to say (a) (6 b) that they were sometimes as good as a comedy. His Majesty had certainly never seen a more (17) sudden turn in any comedy of intrigue, either at his own play-house or the Duke's, than that which ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... be? Every one had predilections of their own—some for comedy, others for tragedy; some for extemporary acting, others for Shakespeare. Beatrice, with her eye for drawing, already grouped her dramatis personae, so as to display Henrietta's picturesque face and figure to the greatest advantage, and had designs of making ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... like to be married to me, Tessa?" said Tito, softly, half enjoying the comedy, as he saw the pretty childish seriousness on her face, half prompted by hazy previsions which belonged to the intoxication ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... embodying a familiar type of humanity, but nevertheless not good enough for certain of Shakespeare's successors in the dramatic art. Jaques has more than once been revised and edited, in common with other characters in the sylvan comedy. He did not quite satisfy the fastidious taste of Mr. Charles Johnson, the ingenious author of 'The Country Lasses' and other pieces, who, as was said with more point than truth, was 'famous for writing a play every year and being at Button's coffee-house every ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... easily guess that a comedy (or farce) in which a woman is reduced to advertising in the Press for a husband belongs to the ante-bellum era, before the glad eye of the flapper became a permanent feature of the landscape. Indeed Mr. CYRIL HARCOURT'S play might belong to just any year since the time when women first began ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... his friends in London. Ernest at first wanted not to say, but Towneley soon gave him to understand that he must do as he was bid, and selected myself from the few whom he had named. "Writes for the stage, does he?" said Towneley. "Does he write comedy?" Ernest thought Towneley meant that I ought to write tragedy, and said he was afraid I wrote burlesque. "Oh, come, come," said Towneley, "that will do famously. I will go and see him at once." But on second thoughts he determined to stay with Ernest and go with him to the police court. So ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... writers in Greek and in the opinion of many, in any language, is the only one of the Attic comedians any of whose works has survived in complete form He was born in Athens about the middle of the fifth century B C, and had his first comedy produced when he was so young that his name was withheld on account of his youth. He is credited with over forty plays, eleven of which survive, along with the names and fragments of some twenty-six others. His satire deal with political, religious, and literary topics, and with all its ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... it, and, of course, we refuse to own to it, but there is something of Ann in every woman." I need not recall to you Ann's pursuit of her victim, Tanner, nor his futile efforts to escape. Here, as so often he has done, Mr. Shaw has presented us in comedy with a philosophy of life. You believe, perhaps, the fiction, still brought forward by many who ought to know better, that in love woman is passive and waits for man to woo her. I think no woman in her ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... dress coat of our tyrant,—youth's panoplied armor for fight,— And tie the white neckcloth that rumples, like pleasure, and lasts but a night; And pray the Nine Gods to avert you what time the Three Sisters shall frown, And you'll lose your high-comedy figure, and sit more at ease ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... but one, Boswell describes Thrale as presenting the character of a plain independent English squire, she writes: "No, no! Mr. Thrale's manners presented the character of a gay man of the town: like Millamant, in Congreve's comedy, he abhorred the country ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... man was not overclear in his own mind as to how it had all happened, but there he was, sitting bolt upright in the vacant chair and drinking two glasses of wine in rapid succession to cover his confusion. A comedy, apparently, but to what purpose? Mr. Blake blushed painfully, and made no reply to the polite commonplaces that I ventured; Indiman smiled benevolently upon both of us, and in the most natural possible manner led the conversation to the subject of portrait-painting. ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... "John Woodvil," Godwin's tragedy of "Antonio" had been produced at Drury-Lane Theatre, and that Elia was present at the performance thereof. But perhaps they do not know (at least, not many of them) that Elia's essay on "The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century," as originally published in the "London Magazine," contained a full and circumstantial account of the cold and stately manner in which John Kemble performed the part of Antonio in Godwin's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... bronze of the burden which the war has brought to woman. (See p. 120.) Pietro's modeling is worthy of an older artist. Another human tragedy is well told in "The Outcast," a graphic figure by Attilio Piccirilli. (p. 136.) Charming bits of comedy are the whimsical little fountain pieces by Janet Scudder and Anna Coleman Ladd. The honor-winners in sculpture are ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... notice one other memorable place in Shrewsbury, and that is the Raven Inn, where Farquhar wrote his comedy of "The Recruiting Officer" in 1701. The window of the room in which he wrote is said to look into the inn yard, and I went through the arched entrance to see if I could distinguish it. The hostlers were currying horses in the yard, and so stared at me ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... two or three years ago, that the limit of mystification had been reached—that this comedy of errors could not be carried further; but human ingenuity is inexhaustible, and we now have whole schools, Cubists, Futurists, and the like, who joyously vie with each other in the creation of incredible ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... Fal. No (M[aster]. Broome) but the peaking Curnuto her husband (M[aster]. Broome) dwelling in a continual larum of ielousie, coms me in the instant of our encounter, after we had embrast, kist, protested, & (as it were) spoke the prologue of our Comedy: and at his heeles, a rabble of his companions, thither prouoked and instigated by his distemper, and (forsooth) to serch his ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... that there is very little pleasure in them. They know but half a dozen, and they have danced them over and over these fifty years: I would fain have taught them some new ones, but I found it would be some months labour to make them comprehend them. Last night there was an Italian comedy acted at court. The scenes were pretty, but the comedy itself such intolerable low farce, without either wit or humour, that I was surprised how all the court could sit there attentively for four hours together. ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... one of the most entertaining of the 'International Humour' Series, since it comprises some really exquisite examples of humour, such as Gogol's diverting little comedy, 'Marriage,' and Ostrovsky's delightful sketch, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... quotations, changed his life and the world into a dream absurd, fantastic, dreadful, into an uproarious hunt composed of unnatural expressions, bad verses, groans, tears, and blood; but meanwhile the cloud in the west was increasing and thickening every day. The measure was exceeded; the insane comedy ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... at her, an amused kind of expression playing about the corners of his mouth. It was only with an effort that he controlled the muscles of his face. What a comedy, he thought to himself! Here was this sweet little woman breaking her heart over something which, as far as he knew, didn't exist. But he must continue to play his part, no matter at what cost. Evidently, she ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... that, exactly as in the comedy of Moliere, my uncle asked the precise question in the very words—not of my confidential valet, however, but across great distances of land, in a letter whose mocking but indulgent turn ill concealed his almost paternal anxiety. ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... out in a wild scolding match, a contest of lung and tongue. Meanwhile I rested on a canoe midway betwixt them, in the hope of averting a renewal of hostilities. By and by an old Sacred Man, a Chief, called Sapa, with some touch of savage comedy in his breast, volunteered an episode which restored good humor to the scene. Leaping up, he came dancing and singing towards me, and there, to the amusement of all, reenacted the quarrel, and mimicked rather cleverly my attempt at separating the combatants. Smashing ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... details of the masques. For themselves, few of the plays are worth reading; and, unluckily, the best of them have the least significant music. The others are neither serious plays nor good honest comedy; and a malicious fate willed that the very versions for which Purcell's aid was required were the worst of all—what little sense there was in the bad plays was destroyed when they were made into "operas" or "entertainments"—spectacular shows. Dryden was the ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... cheated out of the last act of a comedy so unique and so rich the whimsical McGillicuddys and their chosen mates fell reluctantly away, with yells and gibes and quips ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... [6805]Origen himself long since delivered in his works, and our late [6806]Socinians defend, Ostorodius, cap. 41. institut. Smaltius, &c. Those terms of all and for ever in Scripture, are not eternal, but only denote a longer time, which by many examples they prove. The world shall end like a comedy, and we shall meet at last in heaven, and live in bliss altogether, or else in conclusion, in nihil evanescere. For how can he be merciful that shall condemn any creature to eternal unspeakable punishment, for one small temporary fault, all posterity, so ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the first regular theatre season began in 1754, and from this time forth the stage seems to have filled an important part in the activities of society. We find that Washington attended such performances at the early South Street Theatre, and was especially pleased with a comedy called The Young Quaker; or the Fair Philadelphian by O'Keefe, a sketch that was followed by a pantomimic ballet, a musical piece called The Children in the Wood, a recitation of Goldsmith's Epilogue in the character of ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... meditating a new experiment in that line in which Farquhar, Steele, Southerne, and others of his countrymen had succeeded before him. A fervent lover of the stage, he detested the vapid and colourless 'genteel' comedy which had gradually gained ground in England; and he determined to follow up 'The Clandestine Marriage', then recently adapted by Colman and Garrick from Hogarth's 'Marriage A-la-Mode', with another effort of the same class, depending ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... Hence we conclude that the play is a tragedy; but one which "cannot be intended for an acting play" (preliminary preface, p.1,)—of course as a tragedy; yet so universal is the author's genius, that an adaptation of the Hungarian Daughter, as a broad comedy, has been produced at the "Dramatic Authors' Theatre," having been received with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... game. They have made millions out of it in Paris. Every time you go to see a musical comedy at home, the second act is laid in Paris, and you see a whole stageful of girls doing the hesitation, and a lot of old sports having the time of their lives. All your life you hear that Paris is something rich and racy, something that makes New York look like Roanoke, Virginia. Well, you fall for ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... Prussia had been at their rear. The fifty-two, in the darkness, in the danger and alarm, answer "Yes."—"Pile arms, then!" Three of the grenadiers stand to see that done; the fourth runs off for force, and happily gets back with it before the comedy had become tragic for his comrades. "I must make acquaintance with these four men," writes Friedrich, on hearing of it; and he did reward them by present, by promotion to sergeantcy (to ensigncy one of them), or what else they were ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... such as are esteemed trifling, to affairs of importance, I will further venture to say, that such are the effects of this sober life, that at my present age of eighty-three, I have been able to write a very entertaining comedy, abounding with innocent mirth and pleasant jests. This species of composition is generally the child and offspring of youth, as tragedy is that of old age; the former being by its facetious and sprightly turn suited to the bloom of life, and the latter by its gravity adapted to riper years. ...
— Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life • Lewis Cornaro
... she had quarrelled with her maid, Alice Deringham had apparently been incapable of putting on her own dresses unassisted, and it seemed that the grim, mysterious destiny which treated men as puppets and traversed all their schemes was the one factor to reckon with in that comedy. Deringham, however, found little solace in such reflections, and could not lie still, and rising, strained his ears to listen. There was nothing but the moaning of the wind, the ranch was very still, and the sound of his watch grew maddening. If Alton was sleeping now, Deringham knew ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... crowned with absolute success. The awkward corner caused by the enforced resignation of President Grevy had indeed been turned, because the Constitution of the Third Republic provides for the election of the President by the Assembly. But it is one thing to play a successful comedy in the Assembly with the help of what in America is called 'the cohesive power of the public plunder,' and quite another thing to get a satisfactory Chamber of Deputies re-elected by the people of France after four years of irritating and exasperating misrule. Much was ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... sincere. He admired Evelyn, he thought he might like to be her lover, and he regarded their present talk as a necessary subterfuge, the habitual comedy in which we live. So, when Evelyn asked him if he still loved Georgina, he answered that he hated her, which was only partly true; and when she asked him if he would go back to her if she were to invite him, ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... with the instrument. Pretty soon you are apt to have another experience that is even more valuable. You stocked up pretty well with the music of the day, the current Broadway comic opera and musical comedy successes. Gradually, however, that pet coon song of yours will begin to pall on you a little. The very jingle to the tune that made it catch your fancy so quickly causes you to tire of it, and so it goes with the other pieces whose rhythm is so marked and continued with such great precision ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... stage-box, bade me take courage: "It is not you, but the play, they hiss," said his Royal Highness. I curtseyed; and that curtsey seemed to electrify the whole house, for a thundering appeal of encouraging applause followed. The comedy was suffered to go on, and is to this hour a stock play ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... you think about that? Is not this a novel undertaking, and one which no philosopher has as yet approached, I mean this attempt to show how a woman may be prevented from deceiving her husband? Is not this the comedy of comedies? Is it not a second speculum vitae humanae. We are not now dealing with the abstract questions which we have done justice to already in this Meditation. At the present day in ethics as in exact science, the world asks for ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... the prince said to me, "Suppose we go to the square of St. Mark, and seek for our mysterious Armenian. I long to see this comedy unravelled." I consented. We walked in the square till eleven. The Armenian was nowhere to be seen. We repeated our walk the four following evenings, and each time with the same ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... on foot seemed a very extraordinary circumstance. I told them how I had lost my horse, saddle, and poncho in the wood, and then related my encounter with the bull. They listened to it all with very grave faces, but I am sure it was as good as a comedy to them. Don Sinforiano Alday—the owner of the place, and my questioner—made me take off my coat to exhibit the bruises the bull's hoofs had inflicted on my arms and shoulders. He was anxious, even after that, to know something more about ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... were bought up. The ill wind has blown over. I advertised, as usual, my winter course of Lectures, and it prospered very well. Ten Lectures: I. Doctrine of the Soul; II. Home; III. The School; IV. Love; V. Genius; VI. The Protest; VII. Tragedy; VIII. Comedy; IX. Duty; X. Demonology. I designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false with unseasonable inflammation, so I discoursed no more on "Human Life." Now I am well again.—But, as I said, as I could not hurt myself, it was foolish to flatter myself that I could mix ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... vessel in which it is placed. She dare not assert herself or be herself, lest, in some way, she should lose her tentative grasp upon the counterfeit which largely takes the place of love. If he prefers it, she will expatiate upon her fondness for vaudeville and musical comedy until she herself begins to believe that she likes it. With tears in her eyes and her throat raw, she will choke upon the assertion that she likes the smell of smoke; she will assume passion when his slightest touch makes her shudder ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... he shrugged his shoulders, and dined again with Lady St. Craye, and began to have leisure to analyse the emotions with which she inspired him. He had not believed that he could be so attracted by a woman with whom he had played the entire comedy, from first glance to last tear—from meeting hands to severed hearts. Yet attracted he was, and strongly. He experienced a sort of resentment, a feeling that she had kept something from him, that she had reserves of which he knew nothing, that he, who in his ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... was in his blood, and after a short retirement, we find him, in 1771, investing a part of his wife's fortune in a share in the Crow Street Theatre, Dublin, where he made his first appearance with great success in his favourite part of Major O'Flaherty, one of the characters in Cumberland's comedy, The West Indian. He remained one of the pillars of this theatre until 1782, when Ryder, the patentee, became a bankrupt. Owenson was then engaged by Richard Daly to perform at the Smock Alley Theatre, and also to fill ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... and he went on his way to Brooklyn, his life tragedy still ahead of him, but relieved by the touch of comedy added by that mysterious ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... marked between the succession of philosophers from Thales to Aristotle, and the Sophists of the age of Socrates, who appeared like meteors for a short time in different parts of Greece. For the purposes of comedy, Socrates may have been identified with the Sophists, and he seems to complain of this in the Apology. But there is no reason to suppose that Socrates, differing by so many outward marks, would really have ...
— Sophist • Plato
... two chief reasons why Mr. Allen seems to me one of the first of our novelists to day. He is most exquisitely alive to the fine spirit of comedy. He has a prose style of wonderful beauty, conscientiousness and simplicity.... He has the inexorable conscience of the artist, he always gives us his best; and that best is a style of great purity and felicity and sweetness, a style without strain ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... as ever. We had a dispute about the word 'heir,' which I contended was pronounced like 'air'; he said that might be in common parlance; or that we might so use it, speaking of the 'Heir at Law,' a comedy; but that in the law courts it was necessary to give it a full aspiration, and to say hayer; he thought it might even vitiate a cause, if a counsel pronounced it otherwise. In conclusion, he 'would consult Serjeant Wilde,' who gave it against him. Sometimes he ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... fell foul of my country. "Spain is a better country than Greece," said one. "You never tasted bread before you came to Spain," cried another. "And little enough since," thought I. "You never before saw such a city as Seville," said the third. But then ensued the best part of the comedy: my visitors chanced to be natives of three different places; one was of Seville, another of Utrera, and the third of Miguel Turra, a miserable village in La Mancha. At the mention of Seville, the other two instantly began to sing the praises of their respective places of birth; ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Moliere during his stay in the provinces, two only which seem genuine have come down to us, and have been published for the last thirty years with his comedies. These are, 'La Jalousie du Barbouille,' and 'Le Medecin Volant.' Moliere has made use of the former in the third act of the comedy called ...
— The Jealousy of le Barbouille - (La Jalousie du Barbouille) • Jean Baptiste Poquelin de Moliere
... delicious," laughed Mrs Clyde—a cold sneering laugh, which made me shiver as if cold water were running down my back—"quite a comedy, I do declare, Mr Lorton. I did not think you were so good an actor. Love! Ha, ha, ha!" and she gave forth a merry peal—to my intense ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... sealed the letter within it. Then, with tears streaming down her cheeks, she read her part for the comedy that evening. When Esther entered with her dressing-gown, she held up her ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... playing the insignificant part of the old family servant of a New York banker, in the most successful comedy of that season, he came to know Bridges better than ever before. Poor Yorick had little more to do in the play than to come on and turn up some light, arrange some papers on a desk, go off, and afterward return and lower the light. Bridges was doing the role of the ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... 'There's genteel comedy in your walk and manner, juvenile tragedy in your eye, and touch-and-go farce in your laugh,' said Mr Vincent Crummles. 'You'll do as well as if you had thought of nothing else but the lamps, from your ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... things is expressed with the dignity of the elements themselves, to all other operatic music, in which, however noble the music as music (think of Gluck, of Mozart, of Beethoven!), it is for the most part fettered to a little accidental comedy or tragedy, in which two lovers are jealous, or someone is wrongly imprisoned, or a libertine seduces a few women. Here music is like a god speaking the language of savages, and lowering his supreme intellect to the level of their speech. The melodious voice ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... of experience, comedy, and tragedy Wit is always at the elbow of want Without the money ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... He looked upon his great work as a whole, and he knew that the "raison d'etre of his song" was not only to celebrate, but, by the white light of truth, to represent and exhibit the great things of the world—Love and War, and Death by sea and land, and Man, half-angel, half-demon—the comedy of his fortunes, and the tragedy of his passions ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... some of this Spanish goo? The English department here is crazy on theatricals. They will probably want you for a grand revival of the Comedy of Errors." ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... who now, knowing only the English language, has a bookcase filled with the best English works. Our great man of the Middle Ages could not form any conception of any tragedy approaching Macbeth or Lear, or of any comedy equal to Henry the Fourth or Twelfth Night. The best epic poem that he had read was far inferior to the Paradise Lost; and all the tomes of his philosophers were not worth a page of the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the rude and vnskylfull: Other in that leaues are trymme, that is somwhat floryshynge also and garnyshed. Cicero vsed thys kynde in hys philosophicall disputacions, in the oraci for Quincius for Roscius y^e Comedy plaier, & Ter[en]ce, & Plautus in their Comedies. Such as c not hdsomly vse them selues in that mery conceyted slendernes of wordes, fall into a drye and ...
— A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes • Richard Sherry
... bite!" she said half-audibly as she slipped out of the room. "For I do not trust you, my fine madam, and there was something about that comedy this afternoon, which ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... rallier that curbs the force of his pleasantry and weakens it on purpose. For ridicule often decides matters of importance more effectually and in a better manner, than severity. Those poets by whom the ancient comedy was written, stood upon this [foundation], and in this are they worthy of imitation: whom neither the smooth-faced Hermogenes ever read, nor that baboon who is skilled in nothing but singing [the wanton compositions of] Calvus ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... took a delight in the black side of humanity, he loves to show the strength of false reasoning, of sophistry antagonistic to truth, and of cold expediency in opposition to the natural feelings of humanity. From a similar reason, his occasional attempts at comedy degenerate into mere farce. We question whether the scene between Death and Apollo in the "Alcestis," could be surpassed in vulgarity, even by the modern school of English dramatists, while his exaggerations in the minor characters are scarcely to be surpassed by the ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... virtues, and Chrysippus gave it place among the proper education of freemen. Athenaeus tells that gestures were even reduced to distinct classification with appropriate terminology. The class suited to comedy was called Cordax, that to tragedy Eumelia, and that for satire Sicinnis, from the inventor Sicinnus. Bathyllus from these formed a fourth class, adapted to pantomime. This system appears to have been particularly applicable to theatrical performances. ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... He looked in on a well-known dramatic agent, and raised the point. Reference to a ledger showed that Eileen Garth, age eighteen, tall, good-looking, no previous experience, had been a candidate for musical comedy, London engagement alone accepted; the almost certain sequel being that she had kept her name six months on the books without an offer ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... peculiar lines of popularity,—Bulwer with the romantic few, Thackeray with the appreciative intelligent, George Eliot with a still wider clientage, and Dickens with everybody, on account of his appeal to the universal sentiments of comedy and pathos. Scott's influence, somewhat checked during the growth of these reputations and the succession of fertile and accomplished writers on both sides of the Atlantic,—including the introspective analysts ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... literary associations. It was there that that most agreeable comedy The Importance of Being Earnest was written: the town even gave its name to the principal character—John Worthing; and it was there that Mr. Henley lived while the lyrics in Hawthorn and Lavender were coming to him. The beautiful dedication ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... probability of such events. But who has not heard of families with sons in either army, especially on the border, in Philadelphia, and Baltimore? We have heard seven such instances enumerated by one lady of the former city. Let us turn from tragedy to comedy: ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Penelope, was next considered. It was proposed to act what the Italians call a Comedy of Character; that is, not an exact drama, in which the actors deliver what is set down for them by the author; but one, in which the plot having been previously fixed upon, and a few striking scenes adjusted, the actors are expected to supply the dialogue extempore, or, as Petruchio says, from ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... lilies in it, a pile of manuscript and ledgers, and a human skull alongside of a crucifix, beautifully wrought of bronze by Desiderio da Settignano. A Latin translation of Plato's "Phaedo" was spread open on the desk, together with one of the earliest printed copies of the "Divine Comedy." ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... was sincere in repining for the radiance as in deprecating the scowls, though he overrated his ability to conjure that back, and these away. In the same July, apparently, on July 26, he played a little comedy of Orlando Furioso,—not the approach to a tragedy of eleven years after. His chamber in the Tower was the scene. The spectators were his Keeper and cousin, Sir George Carew, and Arthur Gorges. Gorges was still, like Carew, his friend in 1614, and ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... there is no need for more than playful defence, and no serious anxiety should that defence be taken as a disguised invitation. Thus the road is at once fully open toward the most civilized manifestations of the comedy of courtship. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... night was a drama that had in it so much comedy, dashed with tragedy, that I'm a little breathless over it yet. Jane, and my ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... those editions is to be found the title of "The Vision," which I have adopted, as more conformable to the genius of our language than that of "The Divine Comedy." Dante himself, I believe, termed it simply "The Comedy;" in the first place, because the style was of the middle kind: and in the next, because the story (if story it may ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... He was educated in the public schools of Jacksonville, at Atlanta University and at Columbia University. He taught school in his native town for several years. Later he came to New York with his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and began writing for the musical comedy stage. He served seven years as U. S. Consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. Author of The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, Fifty Years and Other Poems, and the English libretto to Goyescas, the Spanish ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... Crump invented three new metres, and published an edition of an exceedingly improper Greek Comedy, with no less than twenty emendations upon the German text of Schnupfenius and Schnapsius. These Services to religion instantly pointed him out for advancement in the Church, and he is now President of Saint Boniface, and very ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at the Comedy, and want to see him again, because he is a most amusing gentleman and figures in a case full of good things. There are two authors—as there should be—a Leader and his Junior. Mr. GEORGE MANVILLE FENN (a very excellent novelist) is the "silk," ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... writing was Lynde, Livingstone & Co. Mr. David Lynde lived in a set of chambers up town, and dined at his club, where he usually passed the evenings at chess with some brother antediluvian. A visit to the theatre, when some old English comedy or some new English ballet happened to be on the boards, was the periphery of his dissipation. What is called society saw nothing of him. He was a rough, breezy, thickset old gentleman, betrothed from his birth to apoplexy, enjoying life ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to refuse it, it would have been difficult and ungracious. But, on the whole, I thought the precedent good. Playfair tells me he tried to get it done in the case of Faraday and Babbage thirty years ago, and the thing broke down. Moreover a wicked sense of the comedy of advancing such a pernicious heretic, helped a ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... this Moorish gentleman's placid and unruffled features would lead the Western observer to suppose that he was a very simple person with no sort of interest in affairs. I had occasion to know him, however, for a statesman, after the Moorish fashion—a keen if resigned observer of the tragic-comedy of his country's politics, and a pious man withal, who had visited Mecca in the month that is called Shawall, and had cast stones on the hill of Arafat, as the custom is among True Believers. Some years had passed since our ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... Vladimir cross which has been conferred on him. The official in him has finally gained the ascendency over the artist; his still youngish face has grown yellow, and his hair scanty; he now neither sings nor sketches, but applies himself in secret to literature; he has written a comedy, in the style of a "proverb," and as nowadays all writers have to draw a portrait of some one or something, he has drawn in it the portrait of a coquette, and he reads it privately to two or three ladies who look kindly upon him. He has, ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... this suggestion was that his brother obtained the manuscript of "Lemons," a comedy that, under the title of "Wedlock for Seven," had been first produced at Augustin Daly's New Fifth Avenue Theater in New York. A copy of the play was sent on to Charles to enable him to prepare the presswork for it, and it was the first play manuscript he ever read. ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... knave Hits near us sometimes with his random shafts. Marriage for me! I cannot comprehend, I cannot take it to my heart; the thing Seems gross, absurd, ridiculous. Ah! well, My father bears the folly of it all; I'm but an actor in his comedy. My part is bad, but I must ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... proceeded accordingly to bring forward such laws as were in reality neither honorable nor advantageous for the public; his whole design being to outdo Caius in pleasing and cajoling the populace (as if it had been in some comedy), with obsequious flattery and every kind of gratifications; the senate thus letting it be seen plainly, that they were not angry with Caius's public measures, but only desirous to ruin him utterly, or at least to lessen his reputation. For when Caius proposed the settlement ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... given Dot Parris a leading part. Does that leave you cold? Impossible! Why, in theatrical circles it's a world-shaking event. I own I'm curious to see how she does in legitimate drama, after her career in musical comedy and at the halls, myself. I'm really very fond of her, poor little Dot. She's going to call herself Miss Charlotte Colthurst in the future, I understand. Did you ever hear such cheek? But then she always had the cheek of ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... of the Asiatic! This daring organizer, a match for the most astute minds of the West, believed that he could only make sure of fidelity by persuading me to go through what seemed the comedy of a mock adoption, a ceremony like the blood brotherhood of ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... trousers,—a truculent-looking figure which made the maids shudder and embrace one another with suppressed shrieks, but which somehow, even in the midst of his Eastern salaam, gave the Countess a sense that he was acting a comedy, and carried her involuntarily back to the Moors whom she had seen in the Cid on the stage. And looking again, she perceived that though brown and weather-beaten, there was a certain Northern ruddiness ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... regular Italian drama in a dramatized eclogue entitled Les Ombres in 1566. Later Nicolas de Montreux, better known under the name of Ollenix du Mont-Sacre, a writer of a religious cast, and author of a romantic comedy on the story of Potiphar's wife, composed three pastoral plays, Athlette, Diane, and Arimene, which appeared in 1585, 1592, and 1597 respectively. They are conventional pastorals on the Italian model, futile in plot and commonplace in style. He was also the author of the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... 59.—It appears from his notes of the state of his mind[126], that he suffered great perturbation and distraction in 1768. Nothing of his writing was given to the publick this year, except the Prologue[*] to his friend Goldsmith's comedy of The Good-natured Man[127]. The first lines of this Prologue are strongly characteristical of the dismal gloom of his mind; which in his case, as in the case of all who are distressed with the same malady ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... in a few days, or even hours. While a few gained a competence, many gained only a bare subsistence; thousands lost their health, and not a few their lives. It was a strange play that men enacted there, embracing all the confusion, glitter, rapid change of scene, burlesque, and comedy of a pantomime, with many a dash of darkest tragedy intermingled. Tents were pitched in all directions, houses were hastily run up, restaurants of all kinds were opened, boats were turned keel up and converted into cottages, while ships ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... that evening round the fire, when they talked of their next day's welcome to the new agent, became comedy of the highest, and he was so desperately canny in the moments he chose for silence or for comment! He had not been sure of their ignorance until he arrived, and it was a joke with him too deep for laughter. He had a special eye upon the ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... nasty old cat," said Lady Glencora, as soon as the door was closed; and she said these words with so droll a voice, with such a childlike shaking of her head, with so much comedy in her grimace, that Alice could not but laugh. "She is," said Lady Glencora. "I know her, and you'll have to know her, too, before you've done with her. It won't at all do for you to run away when she spits at you. You must hold your ground, and show your claws,—and ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... full sympathy with his theme, Shakespeare might be expected to paint a magnificent picture. But Prince Henry is anything but a great portrait; he is at first hardly more than a prig, and later a feeble and colourless replica of Hotspur. It is very curious that even in the comedy scenes with Falstaff Shakespeare has never taken the trouble to realize the Prince: he often lends him his own word-wit, and now and then his own high intelligence, but he never for a moment discovers to us the soul of his hero. He does not even tell ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... would not tell my poor Dick's story to Richard Jennifer, I may not set it down in cold words here for you. It was the age-old tragic comedy of a false friend's treachery and a woman's weakness; a duel, and the wrong man slain. And you may know this; that Falconnet's most merciful role in it was the part he played one chill November morning when he put Richard Coverdale to the ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... have boxes of new plays from London, and Harry was forbidden, under the pain of a whipping, to look into them. I am afraid he deserved the penalty pretty often, and got it sometimes. Father Holt applied it twice or thrice, when he caught the young scapegrace with a delightful wicked comedy of Mr. Shadwell's or ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... dated 1592, and curiously characteristic of Cervantes. It is an agreement with one Rodrigo Osorio, a manager, who was to accept six comedies at fifty ducats (about 6l.) apiece, not to be paid in any case unless it appeared on representation that the said comedy was one of the best that had ever been represented in Spain. The test does not seem to have been ever applied; perhaps it was sufficiently apparent to Rodrigo Osorio that the comedies were not among the best that had ever been represented. Among the correspondence of Cervantes ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... handkerchief into bits. It is a piece of inspired acting to make the discriminating weep, but my friend the audience always giggled irresistibly, as if the sound of rending lace, when a woman's agony was the most intense, were a bit of exquisite comedy. ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... pilasters, scrolls, bas-reliefs and tracery of the outside are not of fine workmanship, but are graceful and picturesque. The associations are interesting, beginning with Francis I. and ending with Rousseau, who spent there the autumn of 1746, as the guest of Madame Dupin, and wrote a comedy for its little theatre. The present proprietor, the Marquis de Villeneuve, is ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... depends on your funny bone. Mine's got blunted. I'm the lady that the Irish comedy guy slaps in the face with a bunch of lettuce. Say, there's something about you that makes a person get gabby and tell things. ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... good lady prattled on, placidly unconscious of her nearness to the border-line between comedy ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... upon the knees of the gods then: on the morrow the Queen would speak—betwixt then and now there was naught for it but to rest. And to hearken to Throckmorton was to be surprised as if she listened at a comedy. ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... Midsummer Ella Wheeler Wilcox Ashes of Roses Elaine Goodale Sympathy Althea Gyles The Look Sara Teasdale "When My Beloved Sleeping Lies" Irene Rutherford McLeod Love and Life Julie Mathilde Lippman Love's Prisoner Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer Rosies Agnes I. Hanrahan At the Comedy Arthur Stringer "Sometime It may Be" Arthur Colton "I heard a Soldier" Herbert Trench The Last Memory Arthur Symonds "Down by the Salley Gardens" William Butler Yates Ashes of Life Edna St. Vincent Millay A Farewell ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... tremendous, fly Fair Comedy's theatric brood, Light satire, wit, and harmless joy, And leave us dungeons, chains and blood. Swift they disperse, and with them go, Mild Otway, sentimental Rowe; Congreve averts the indignant eye, And Shakespeare mourns to view ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... feeling of disgust at the many failures of the war. The defection of Prussia and Spain, the fruitless waste of British troops in the West Indies, the insane follies of the French emigres, the ghastly scenes at Quiberon, and the tragi-comedy of Vendemiaire in the streets of Paris, sufficed to daunt the stoutest hearts. By the middle of the month of October 1795, Pitt decided to come to terms with France, if the Directory, newly installed in power, should found a stable ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... is true that nine times out of ten, when put to the test, these experts are found totally wanting. Then why did they engage themselves with you? They ought in truth to reply as does the cook in the comedy, who is dearly paid ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... letter I never noticed what you said about Aristophanes. If you will indeed send me some notes of the passages that interest you in the "Birds," it will not only be very pleasant to me, but quite seriously useful, for the "Birds" have always been to me so mysterious in that comedy, that I have never got the good of it which I know is to be had. The careful study of it put off from day to day, was likely enough to fall into the great region of my despair, unless you had chanced thus to remind me ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... danced waltzes on a charming lawn, and crowned with flowers the bust of her Majesty the Empress, and shepherds and nymphs from the opera executed dances, Finally, a theater had been erected in the midst of the trees, on which was represented a village fete, a comedy composed by M. Ittienne, and set to music by Nicolo. The Emperor and Empress were seated under a dais during this play, when suddenly a heavy shower fell, throwing all the spectators into commotion. Their Majesties did not notice the rain at first, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the period of Richelieu's ministry that Paris flowered the most profusely. The constructions of this epoch were so numerous and imposing that Corneille in his comedy "Le Menteur," first produced in 1642, made his characters ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... the general, "that I have had enough of this comedy, and that since Monsieur Koupriane has not been able to arrest these men, and since, on their side, they don't seem to decide to do their duty, I shall go myself and put ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... recorded in this Magazine, under such headings as "The Merry Gossips," "The Kissing Chronicle," and "The Undertaker's Harvest-Home," or "The Squallers—a tragi-comedy," "All for Love," and "Act V. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... scene might have been comic enough—notwithstanding the sacred character of the place—but neither my companion nor I were in any humour for comedy. Matters were still too serious; and although the idea of this skeleton barricade was a good one, we were not yet assured of safety. It might only give us a temporary respite; for we feared that our ferocious ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... little Southern bird which haunts the gardens of Greece, sings its "tio, tio, tio, tio, tix" of Aristophanes' comedy on this wind-swept Northern isle; the rose-coloured starling, that rare and beautiful bird of a warmer clime, has been seen here in the spring; the eagle and the golden eagle hover above its crags; the sparrow-hawk and the great gyrfalcon prey upon the small birds and little rodents; even ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... wheat from the chaff, is no trifling task. So much for the amusement which our "Companion" may yield to the Londoner: his utility as a cicerone or guide will be more obvious to our country friends, who flock in thousands to see and hear comedy and tragedy at this play-going season. A young girl comes to town to see "the lions," and, with her "cousin," goes to the opera, where one guinea is paid for their admission, or even more if they be installed. Two Londoners ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 360 - Vol. XIII. No. 360, Saturday, March 14, 1829 • Various
... They found a musical comedy, and laughed their way through it—Billy and Harrison had apparently no cares in the world, and Bob and Cecilia were caught up in the whirl of their high spirits, so that anything became a huge ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... applied their lips to a tobacco-pipe. Prynne, in his "Histriomastix," 1633, states that, even in his time, ladies were occasionally "offered the tobacco-pipe" at plays. Then, as now, new plays attracted larger audiences than ordinary. Dekker observes, in his "News from Hell," 1606, "It was a comedy to see what a crowding, as if it had been at a new play, there was upon the Acherontic strand." How the spectators comported themselves upon these occasions, Ben Jonson, "the Mirror of Manners," as Mr. Collier well surnames him, has described ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... as he thought how carefully he had stage-managed the day's comedy. Of the tragedy into which it had been turned by the death of his poor tool and accomplice, Peacock, he gave no thought, his whole mind was bound up in his jealous hatred of Leroy. Just why he hated him so he, himself, could hardly have explained; but with men of Jasper Vermont's calibre, ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... no less distinguished for comedy. Both tragedy and comedy sprung from feasts in honor of Bacchus; and as the jests and frolics were found misplaced when introduced into grave scenes, a separate province of the drama was formed, and comedy arose. At first it did not derogate from the religious ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... it without hunting far for words. I knew of this poor comedy, my lord, although it was not intended that I should know. It is to the credit of the devisers of it that they tried to conceal it—this comedy whose text and impulse ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... entrance had somewhat subsided, the three took up their parable, but it was not the parable of the play. They used dialogue not in the original. It had a significance which the audience were not slow to appreciate, and went far to turn "The Sunburst Trail" at this point into a comedy-farce. When this new dialogue began, O'Ryan could scarcely trust his ears, or ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... posters advertising a popular musical comedy which Campbell had at first suggested our witnessing the afternoon of our stay in New York. Hephzibah's shocked expression and my whispered advice had brought about a change of plans. We saw a perfectly respectable, though thrilling, ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... but when they heard themselves called high-born damsels, they could not contain their laughter, which was so loud that Don Quixote was quite ashamed of them and rebuked them, saying: "Modesty is a comedy ornament of the beautiful, and too much laughter springing from trifles is great folly; but I do not tell you this to make you the more ashamed, for my desire is none other than to do you all the ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... if tired of its artifices and its different metamorphoses, after having solely filled the divers parts of the comedy of life, exhibits itself with its natural face, and is discovered by haughtiness; so much so that we may truly say that haughtiness is but the flash and open declaration of pride. (1665, ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... of the Forum in 1895. The severance of relations was half a comedy, half a tragedy. The proprietors had only the remotest relation to literature; they had lost much money in the enterprise before Page became editor and only the fortunate accident of securing his services had changed their losing venture into a financial ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... supposed to draw a faithful picture of it. So we go to the theatre, and usually derive keen pleasure therefrom. But is pleasure all that we expect to find? What we should look for above everything in a comedy or a drama is a representation, exact as possible, of the manners and characters of the dramatis persona of the play; and perhaps the conditions under which the play was written do not allow such representation. The exact and studied portrayal of a character demands from the author ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... a hearty common sense, which fitted him rather to be a great critic than a great poet. He had a keen and ready sense of the comic in situation, but no humor. Fletcher was as much a poet as fancy and sentiment can make any man. Only Shakspeare wrote comedy and tragedy with truly ideal elevation and breadth. Only Shakspeare had that true sense of humor which, like the universal solvent sought by the alchemists, so fuses together all the elements of a character, (as in Falstaff,) that any question of good or evil, of dignified ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Godfather. His friendship with the Goucourts was of short duration; his frank and practical nature reacted against the ambiance of gossip, scandal, duplicity and invidious criticism that the two brothers had created around them in the guise of an Eighteenth Century style salon. He hated the human comedy, ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... complete stock-in-trade for any court or town Adonis; a perfect vocabulary of fashion, detailing the rise and progress of all the fashionable arts since the peace—the gazette appointments and disappointments—and elopements and faux pas, sufficient for all the comedy-writers of the present century—the respective claims of Spanish Refugees and Spitalfields Weavers—charitable concerts and opera benefits—and all the lumber and light artillery of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 368, May 2, 1829 • Various
... literature is the uniformity of style which marks the productions of each. In modern literature we find, at one and the same time, different styles of prose and poetry cultivated by one and the same author. A Goethe writes tragedy, comedy, satire, lyrical poetry, and scientific prose; but we find nothing like this in primitive literature. The individual is there much less prominent, and the poet's character disappears in the general character of the layer of literature to which he belongs. It is the discovery ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... cried Alice, gaily dancing about the studio, after she had finished in a little comedy scene, ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... begin to see the humor in this comedy. Which are we—allies of the Greeks or of the Masai? Are we to help the Greeks get away with Brown's cattle, or help the Masai steal 'em from the Greeks? Are your ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... a thousand," he repeated thoughtfully. "Yet think what that one may mean—a walking drama, a tragedy, a comedy, an epitome of life or death. There is more to be read in the face of that one than in the three hundred pages of the novel over which we yawn ourselves to sleep. Here is the train! Now let us watch the people together—that is, if you really mean that you have ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... commentary into three parts—the notes on the comedies, those on the tragedies, and those on the history plays—is arbitrary and mostly a matter of convenience. Some division was necessary, and it seemed advantageous to present introductions which could use Johnson's reaction to comedy, tragedy, and history plays—and Shakespeare's comedies, tragedies, and histories—as a point of departure. Were the notes reprinted in the order of appearance of the plays one would find Macbeth, coming after The Winter's ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... fly-leaf of a copy of this initial work, the poet, six years after its publication, wrote: "Written in pursuance of a foolish plan I forget, or have no wish to remember; the world was never to guess that such an opera, such a comedy, such a speech proceeded from the same notable person.... Only this crab remains of the shapely Tree of Life in my fool's Paradise." It was in conformity with this plan that he not only issued "Pauline" anonymously, but enjoined secrecy upon those to ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... will tell! You're game. You certainly handled the detective with European statecraft. Then your cousin Carlos broke in at the psychological moment to scatter their gum-shoe wits. It was beautiful comedy." ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... copies chanced to fall into a publisher's hands, it was habitually issued without any endeavour to obtain either author's or manager's sanction. In March 1599 the theatrical manager Philip Henslowe endeavoured to induce a publisher who had secured a playhouse copy of the comedy of Patient Grissell by Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton to abandon the publication of it by offering him a bribe of 2 pounds. The publication was suspended till 1603 (cf. Henslowe's Diary, p. 167). As late as 1633 Thomas Heywood wrote of 'some actors who think ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... The end is a half-line after a riming couplet—as if there were more to come—as there must be after every tragedy. Mere poetic justice will not satisfy Shakspere in a tragedy, for tragedy is life; in a comedy it may do well enough, for that deals but with life-surfaces—and who then more careful of it! but in tragedy something far higher ought to be aimed at. The end of this drama is reached when Hamlet, having attained the possibility of doing so, ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... actors in the drama stood, when I became an inmate of Hilltop, and accepted the master's invitation to undertake some of the minor classes in English, and stay on at the school indefinitely. It was my wish to see the little play—a pleasant comedy, I hoped—move forward to a happy ending. And yet—what was it that disturbed me now and then with forebodings? Something, doubtless, in the character of Keene, for he was the dominant personality. The key of the situation lay ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... to the realm of comedy, and it is high time to replace the Kantian question, "How are synthetic judgments a PRIORI possible?" by another question, "Why is belief in such judgments necessary?"—in effect, it is high time that we should understand that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... gossip, singing like the fireside kettle. In these moods he has an elegant homeliness that rings of the true Queen Anne. I know another person[26] who attains, in his moments, to the insolence of a Restoration comedy, speaking, I declare, as Congreve[27] wrote; but that is a sport of nature, and scarce falls under the rubric, for there is none, alas! to give ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Vivian, tired at these various and varying proposals, "this will never do. Out upon Tragedies; let's have a Comedy!" ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... The distress which follows and chastises extravagant luxury, often reduces the great to the use of the most humiliating expedients. When they desire to borrow, they employ the base and supplicating style of the slave in the comedy; but when they are called upon to pay, they assume the royal and tragic declamation of the grandsons of Hercules. If the demand is repeated, they readily procure some trusty sycophant, instructed to maintain a charge of poison, or ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... faith believe. When he published his first book of poems on quitting Oxford, the profits were to be reserved for a distressed clergyman. When he published his Latin poems, the poor of Leipzig were to have the sum they realised. When his comedy was ready to be acted, a Spaniard who had sheltered him at Castro was to be made richer by it. When he competed for the prize of the Academy of Stockholm, it was to go to the poor of Sweden. If nobody got anything from any one of these enterprises, the fault at all events ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... a few of the many interesting cases that have come within the experience of this great detective. But they give a fair portrayal of Muller's peculiar method of working, his looking on himself as merely an humble member of the Department, and the comedy of his acting under "official orders" when the Department is in reality following ...
— The Case of The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... Rockingham government in 1783, Burgoyne withdrew more and more into private life, his last public service being his participation in the impeachment of Warren Hastings. In his latter years he was principally occupied in literary and dramatic work. His comedy, The Heiress, which appeared in 1786, ran through ten editions within a year, and was translated into several foreign tongues. He died suddenly on the 4th of June 1792. General Burgoyne, whose wife died in June 1776 during his absence in Canada, had several natural children (born ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... remember that I used to say that I thought I could bear a real tragedy if it came to me with purple pall and a mask of noble sorrow, but that the dreadful thing about modernity was that it put tragedy into the raiment of comedy, so that the great realities seemed commonplace or grotesque or lacking in style. It is quite true about modernity. It has probably always been true about actual life. It is said that all martyrdoms seemed mean to the looker on. ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... Sonneck enters into a long discussion of the life of Forrest, he fails to give any satisfactory account of John Leacock. In fact, he says in closing, "If Andrew Barton, Esq., is to be a pseudonym, it seems to me that John Leacock, claimed (by Mr. Hildeburn) to have written the tragi-comedy of 'The Fall of British Tyranny,' should not be cast aside so cheerfully ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... to that of his antagonist, and said, "A farce, Sir—F-A-R-S- E, Farce." Aldrich caught my eye as I was sitting behind my client and noticed my look of infinite amusement. His anger yielded to the comedy of the occasion. He burst into a roar of laughter and peace was saved. If Lee had spelled the word farce with a "c," there would ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... am choking with anger; I cannot speak calmly. Listen to me; as I was dressing just now for the wedding, I looked in the glass and saw how grey my temples were. Sasha, this must not be! Let us end this senseless comedy before it is too late. You are young and pure; you have all your life before ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... and over again, are wretched, and there is no use in denying it. This doctrine appears in his familiar talk, and even in the papers which he meant to be light reading. He begins the prologue to a comedy ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... that lawyers used to carry green bags towards the end of the {60} seventeenth century, is to be found in the Plain Dealer, a comedy by Wycherley. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... part of the enterprise, and theirs was the task of seeing that none of the chapter funds were used, so that no possible criticism could arise. A pretty young actress offered to give a premiere of a comedy which she was about to take on the road, for the benefit of the street, and every one was delighted until they saw a rehearsal. It was one of those estranged-husband-one-cocktail-too-many farces, full ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... woman, consumed by ambition and covetousness, might possibly play a comedy of pure love while she was disgusted in her heart. She might catch by vile tricks a foolish old man, and make him marry her, openly and avowedly selling her beauty and her youth. Such things happen, and ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... wonderful Falstaff," Shakespeare's eulogists will say, "of him, at all events, one can not say that he is not a living character, or that, having been taken from the comedy of an unknown author, ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... tragedy as soon as I saw where we were, and the play ended quite in your manner, didn't it? like the Comedy of Dante. Or do you mean that you have any doubts about that last act ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... answered my father, and his countenance clouded as it always did when he alluded to his brother. "We are twin brothers, and our extraordinary resemblance in youth and early manhood caused mistakes as numerous as those recorded in the Comedy of Errors, and laid the foundation of a tragedy seldom found in the ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... himself on reducing literature to an art, sat down to write a poem which should attain the height of popularity, he said sorrow must be its theme, and wrote "The Raven." Tragedy will always have a deeper hold upon the public than comedy; it appeals to deeper principles, stirs more powerful emotions, imparts an assured sense of strength, is more intimate with our nature, or certainly it would not be tolerated. There is no delight in the exhibition of misery ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... with his grievous crabtree cudgel; and other people he saw who are with us always,—the handsome Madam Bubble, and the young woman whose name was Dull, and Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Mr. Facing Bothways, and Byends, all the persons of the comedy of human life. ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... of a convex lens or a concave mirror. This method of producing fire does not antedate the more primitive methods such as striking quartz or rubbing wooden sticks, because the materials required are not readily found or prepared, but it is of very remote origin. Aristophanes in his comedy "The Clouds," which is a satire aimed at the science and philosophy of his period (488-385 B. C.), mentions the "burning lens." Nearly every one is familiar with an achievement attributed to Archimedes in which he destroyed the ships ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
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