"Dramatis personae" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... visit and comfort her. But the blandishments of the fair one were of no avail; he had no taste for adventures, and, moreover, was afraid to be caught and beaten by the said husband. A second love-story is told at greater length. The dramatis personae are Chopin, John Peter Pixis, and Francilla Pixis, a beautiful girl of sixteen, a German orphan whom the pianist-composer, then a man of about forty-three, had adopted, and who afterwards became known as a much-admired singer. Chopin made ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... leading or as minor characters, they recur again and again; and more than that we find the same characteristics—presented no doubt with less incisiveness and less brilliancy—reappearing in the Dramatis Personae of the whole Elizabethan group. Such were the gentlemen of England who fought the Spaniard and overthrew him; such were ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... been searching among the leaves of the play. "Look here," I said, "here's the list of the Dramatis Personae. There's ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... opened for the season, in which to study the ways of the birds in peace, I was often disturbed by a negro passing across the lawn, taking no heed of fences, for there's no sort of a fence in that country that they will not pass over as if it were not there. Of course this always put to flight the dramatis personae of my study. One day an interesting (or interested) person of color appeared on the scene equipped for white-washing, and proceeded to adorn tree trunks, fences, buildings, etc., etc., relieving his labors by questioning me about northern manners ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... in the drama was brought about by this great man. He added one actor more to the dramatis personae, and raised the chorus to fifteen persons, introducing them into the main action, and giving to all of them such parts to perform as tended to the carrying on of one uniform, regular plot. Encouraged by the great success of his pieces, the honours ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... a bedroom, colonel; it is our sitting-room now. We shall find them all there, or at least the young ladies; and perhaps the doctor. The baroness goes to bed early. Meantime I can show you one of our dramatis personae, and an important one too. She rules ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... characters which divert the current of progress, is equally true, in a minor degree, of speeches and sentences which arrest the culminating interest by calling attention away to other objects. It is an error which arises from a deficient earnestness on the writer's part, or from a too pliant facility. The DRAMATIS PERSONAE wander in their dialogue, not swayed by the fluctuations of feeling, but by the author's desire to show his wit and wisdom, or else by his want of power to control the vagrant suggestions of his fancy. The desire for display and the inability to control ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... Time, summer. Dramatis personae, a couple of small brown garden-ants, and a lazy clustering colony of wee green 'plant-lice,' or 'blight,' or aphides. The exact scene is usually on the young and succulent branches of a luxuriant rose-bush, into whose soft shoots the aphides have deeply buried their long ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... "Cynthia's Revels" was "Every Man Out of his Humour." It was first printed in 1600, and Ben Jonson amused himself by adding to its list of Dramatis Personae this piece of ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... white feathers brightened with pearls and silver lace, and on his head a coronal of snowy plumes. Before each mounted masquer rode a torch-bearer, whose right hand waved a scourge of flame, instead of a leathern thong. In a gorgeous chariot, preceded by a long train of heralds, were exhibited the Dramatis Personae—Honor, Plutus, Eunomia, Phemeis, Capriccio—arrayed in their appointed costumes; and it was rumored that the golden canopy of their coach had been bought for an enormous sum. Two other triumphal cars conveyed the twelve chief musicians of ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... scene I have followed Dindorf's text, although many improvements have been made in the disposition of the dramatis personae. Every one will confess that the length of [Greek: io io] commonplaces in this scene would be much against the play, but for the animated conclusion, a conclusion, however, that must lose all its finest interest to the reader who ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... WALMSLEY[1]—to whose cost and liberality this edition owes its appearance—to be a volume, in itself, of pleasant and profitable perusal; composed perhaps in a quaint and original style, but in accordance with the characters of the Dramatis Personae. Be this as it may, it is a work divested of all acrimonious feeling—is applicable to all classes of society, to whom harmless enthusiasm cannot be offensive—and is based upon a foundation not ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... one of those loud, violent, blustering, boisterous personages who always put me in mind of the description so often appended to characters of that sort in the dramatis personae of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, where one constantly meets with Ernulpho or Bertoldo, or some such Italianised appellation, "an old angry gentleman." The "old angry gentleman" of the fine old dramatists generally keeps the promise of the play-bill. He storms and rails during the ...
— Mr. Joseph Hanson, The Haberdasher • Mary Russell Mitford
... but as it does occur in Sedley's Bellamira; or, The Mistress (1687), one can only conclude that Aphra gave it to Sir Charles and altered her own character's nomenclature. Mrs. Behn, it may be remembered, was more than once extraordinarily careless with regard to the names of the Dramatis Personae in her comedies. A striking example occurs in Sir Patient Fancy, where the 'precise clerk' is called both Abel and Bartholomew. In The Feign'd Curtezans Silvio and Sabina are persistently confused, and again, in The Town Fop (Vol. III, p. 15 and p. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... outstanding jokes are kept in recollection upon the margin, till he can find some opportunity of funding them to advantage in the text. The consequence of all this is, that the dialogue, from beginning to end, is a continued sparkling of polish and point: and the whole of the Dramatis Personae might be comprised under one common designation of Wits. Even Trip, the servant, is as pointed and shining as the rest, and has his master's wit, as he has his birth- day clothes, "with the gloss on." [Footnote: This is one of the phrases that seem to have perplexed the taste of Sheridan,—and upon ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... 'Vice' of the play; 'Nichol Newfangle, the Vice,' says the list of dramatis personae. We noticed in our consideration of Hick Scorner that one of the Vices, Imagination, was eminent for his more detailed character and readier villany. The trick has been adopted; the favourite has grown fast. He has become the Vice. Compared with him the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... yesterday when I was just finishing my Sevigne; I mean, reading it over. I have plenty of Notes for an Introductory Argument and List of Dramatis Personae, and a clue to the course of her Letters, so as to set a new reader off on the right tack, with some previous acquaintance with the People and Places she lives among. But I shrink from trying to put such Notes into shape; all writing always distasteful to me, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... personages acting on these changes have varied with the progress of the adventurer's fortune, and do not present that combined plot, (the object of every skilful novelist), in which all the more interesting individuals of the dramatis personae have their appropriate share in the action and in bringing about the catastrophe. Here, even more than in its various and violent changes of fortune, rests the improbability of the novel. The life of man ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... to him in the light of a digression. Hence his names are, for the most part, expressive even to an unpleasant degree of distinctness: and, to add to our satiety, he not unfrequently tacks explanatory descriptions to the dramatis personae. On the other hand, he acted upon the principle, that the comic writer must exhibit real life, with a minute and petty accuracy. Generally he succeeded in seizing the manners of his own age and nation: in itself this was deserving of praise; but even here he confined himself too much to external ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Mouse and a Crocodile and a Man and a Goat and a Lion." I had never heard the 'dramatis personae' tumbled into a story with such profusion and in such reckless haste; and it fairly took my breath away. Even Sylvie gave a little gasp, and allowed three of the Frogs, who seemed to be getting tired of the entertainment, to hop away into the ditch, ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... immensely popular for more than a score of years, he has to his credit not a single figure—man or woman—generally accepted by the public as either a type or a person. With remarkably few exceptions he has seen his dramatis personae from without and—doubtless for that reason—has apparently felt as free to saw and fit them to his argument as he has felt with his plots. Something preposterous in the millionaire reformer Mr. Crewe, something ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... with us. Pendennyss and his sister follow immediately; so, my dear madam, the dramatis personae will all be ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... their characters, and so make us feel that every act of their personages is not only natural but even—given the conditions—inevitable. We recognise that their story is the sole logical outcome of the interaction of their dramatis personae. Now, I am not a great novelist; I cannot create and imagine characters and situations. But I have something of the novelist's gift; I apply the same method to the real life of the people around me. I try to throw myself into the person of others, and to feel how their character ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... DRAMATIS PERSONAE—MISS PAYSLEY, twenty-one, small, with a dignified carriage, when she remembers it, otherwise she is as impulsive as a little girl. She is pale, blond, blushes easily and has a way of looking at one ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... nation. Suffering is uniform in its expression, especially physical suffering. Thus, having instinctively felt, like all men of genius, that here there must be no variety of idea, the musician, having hit on his leading phrase, has worked it out in various keys, grouping the masses and the dramatis personae to take up the theme through modulations and cadences of admirable structure. In ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... charge, and stands recorded as our friend and benefactor. Our case is just that of the Trojans, who entertained the tragic actor only to find him reciting their own calamities. Well, recite away, our tragedian, with these pests of ours for dramatis personae. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... than Madame Morlot, and, behold, Herr Driesbach has knocked out that underpinning. I am bewildered, and I say, helplessly, "What shall I admire and be a la mode?" But if it is so disheartening to me, who am only a passive listener, what must be the agonies of the dramatis personae? "Hang it!" says Charles Lamb, "how I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!" And do Nancie, Harriette, and Herr Driesbach like it any less? What shall avenge them for their spretae injuria formae? What can repay the hapless ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... gloomy green curtain drops, the dramatis personae are duly disposed of, the nimble candle snuffers put out the lights, and the audience goeth pondering home. If the critic take the pains to ask why the author, who hath been so diffuse in describing the early and fabulous acts of Mrs. Catherine's existence, should so hurry off the catastrophe ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... which moved with a certain rhythmic cadence. "A holy tune was in my soul when I fell asleep; it was going when I awoke. This melody is always moving along in the background of my spirit. If I wish to compose, I abstract my attention from the things which occupy the front of the stage, the 'dramatis personae' of the moment, and fix myself upon the deeper scene in the rear." "All day my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle, unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody," he ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... favorite art-form, the dramatic, or, rather, psychologic, monologue, which is quite original with himself, and peculiarly adapted to the constitution of his genius and to the revelation of themselves by the several "dramatis personae", presents certain structural difficulties, but difficulties which, with an increased familiarity, grow less and less. The exposition presented in the Introduction, of its constitution and skilful management, and the ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... the court of the despotic monarch Hiero." For the "dramatis personae" see Dr. Holden's Introduction ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... who has listened for four hours to the conversation of a group of sheep drovers, named, respectively, Splodger, Rabbit, Parson, Bottler, Dingo, and Hairy-toothed Ike, will agree with me as to the impossibility of getting the dialogue of such dramatis personae into anything like printable form. The bullock drivers were bad enough, but these fellows are out ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... room almost instantaneously remarkable. I have described Mr. Walker thus accurately, because, in truth, it is more with characters than with astounding events that this little history deals, and Mr. Walker is one of the principal of our dramatis personae. ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... collection, under the similar descriptive title of "Dramatis Personae," he added to this class of work, shaping in the mould of blank verse mainly used for "Men and Women" his personifications of the Medium Mr. Sludge, the embryo theologian Caliban, the ripened mystical saint of "A Death in the Desert"; ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... that these words are put in the mouth of that one of his dramatis personae who is of the most melancholy and brooding disposition; but he ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... better of him. In a community of strong men with sullen virtues and charmingly fascinating vices, he was tolerated as possessing neither—not even rising by any dominant human weakness or ludicrous quality to the importance of a butt. In the dramatis personae of Redwood Camp he was a simple "super"—who had only passive, speechless roles in those fierce dramas that were sometimes unrolled beneath its green-curtained pines. Nameless and penniless, he was overlooked by the census and ignored ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... plays are, in the strictest sense of the term, abstractions. Some very prominent feature is taken from the whole man, and that single feature or humour is made the basis upon which the entire character is built up. Ben Jonson's 'dramatis personae' are almost as fixed as the masks of the ancient actors; you know from the first scene—sometimes from the list of names—exactly what every one of them is to be. He was a very accurately observing man; but he cared only to observe what was external or ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge |
