"Dramatist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... published as his, must certainly have preceded "Every Man in His Humour" on the stage. The former play may be described as a comedy modelled on the Latin plays of Plautus. (It combines, in fact, situations derived from the "Captivi" and the "Aulularia" of that dramatist). But the pretty story of the beggar-maiden, Rachel, and her suitors, Jonson found, not among the classics, but in the ideals of romantic love which Shakespeare had already popularised on the stage. Jonson never again produced so fresh and lovable a feminine personage ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less, we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good a dramatist he was,—and he is the best in the world. But it turns out that what he has to say is of that weight as to withdraw some attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all languages, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... seemed like "the enchantment of Circe brought out of Italy to mar men's manners in England." "An Italianate Englishman," ran the harder proverb of Italy itself, "is an incarnate devil." The literary form which this imitation took seemed at any rate ridiculous. John Lyly, distinguished both as a dramatist and a poet, laid aside the tradition of English style for a style modelled on the decadence of Italian prose. Euphuism, as the new fashion has been named from the prose romance of Euphues which Lyly published in 1579, ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... your statement of his position, I think he entertains quite a sensible view, and, when we take into consideration that he is a minister, a miraculously sensible view. It is not the business of the dramatist, the actor, the painter or the sculptor to teach what the church calls morality. The dramatist and the actor ought to be truthful, ought to be natural—that is to say, truthfully and naturally artistic. He should present pictures of life properly ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... at which every acquaintance, however slight, attracts some degree of attention. In the desert island, even poor Poll was something of a companion to Robinson Crusoe. Kenny is a writer of a class which, in our time, is at the very bottom of the literary scale. He is a dramatist. Most of the farces, and three-act plays, which have succeeded during the last eight or ten years, are, I am told, from his pen. Heaven knows that, if they are the farces and plays which I have seen, they do ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Broadway. He bought a ticket and entered, wondering if he would find the house empty. To his surprise it was full—orchestra, balcony, and gallery. The play was a serious effort by a brilliant young dramatist of the modern school of realism. In two minutes from the rising of the curtain the play had gripped him with relentless power. Slowly, remorseless as fate, he saw the purpose of the author unfold itself in a series of tense and ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... Sir Fastolfe, and was by him bequeathed through a friend to Magdalen College, Oxford. This must not be confused with the Boar's Head of Shakespeare, which stood in Eastcheap on the other side of the river, though it is a remarkable coincidence that it was in the latter inn the dramatist laid the scene of Prince Hal's merrymaking with the Sir John Falstaff we all know. The earliest reference to the Southwark Boar's Head occurs in the Paston Letters under date 1459. This is an epistle from a servant of Fastolfe to John ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... missed recording itself, except by chance glimpses through the history of the times. For this voluntary oblivion it has been rarely compensated in the immortality it meets with through Hawthorne. Not that he set himself with forethought to the illustration of it; but, in studying as poet and dramatist the past from which he himself had issued, he sought, naturally, to light it up from the interior, to possess himself of the very fire which burned in men's breasts and set their minds in movement at that ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... in fact, a mental obsession, then Iago becomes abnormal and consequently more or less irresponsible. But this suggestion of Emilia's faithlessness made in the early part of the play is never followed up by the dramatist, and the spectator is left in complete uncertainty as to whether there be any truth or not in Iago's suspicion. If Othello has played his Ancient false, that is an extenuating circumstance in the otherwise extraordinary guilt of Iago, and ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... great French poet, dramatist, and novelist, was born at Besancon, on February 26, 1802. He wrote verses from boyhood, and after minor successes, achieved reputation with "Odes et Poesies," 1823. Hugo early became the protagonist of the romantic movement ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... imagination,' Trombin observed, following his own train of thought. 'In me a great romancer has been lost to our age, another Bandello, perhaps a second Boccaccio! An English gentleman of taste once told me that my features resemble those of a dramatist of his country, whose first name was William—I forget the second, which I could not learn to pronounce—but that my cheeks are even rounder than his were, and my mouth smaller. Under other circumstances, who knows but that I might have been the William Something of Italy? My English ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... another matter; a combination of collation and judicious borrowing, it was provided by George Steevens. Steevens' contributions to the text and annotation of Shakespeare's plays concern students of the dramatist; That Johnson had to say about the plays concerns Johnsonians as veil as Shakespeareans. And it is unfortunately true that too little attention has been paid to what is after all Johnson's final and reconsidered judgment on a number of passages ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... without, and in a moment his company was mounted in line; handsome, dashing fellows; one the son of an English nobleman, one the brother of an eminent Canadian politician, one related to a celebrated English dramatist. He ran his eye along the line, then turned to Mab, raised his cap with machine-like precision, and said: "No, I suppose you do not understand that. Keep Aleck Windsor from Pretty Pierre and his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was also a dramatist, and given to composing stupendous quintillas and cuartetas in his day, which, despite their flatness, were received with applause, had ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... former being printed without his signature. If he had been permitted to remain until the close of his season, he would have earned enough, with what he had already, to attain the independence which was his aim and hope. His best friends in London were Charles Reade, Tom Hood, Tom Robertson, the dramatist, Charles Mathews, the comedian, Tom Taylor and Arthur Sketchley. He did not meet Mr. Dickens, though Mr. Andrew Haliday, Dickens' familiar, was also his intimate. He was much persecuted by lion hunters, and therefore had to keep ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... ignorance. The merits of St. Real are undoubtedly great; but Otway's indebtedness to him is exceedingly slight; and it is remarkable to see how ingeniously, from a few meagre historical details, the great dramatist has constructed one of the noblest imaginative works of which literature can boast. The names of nearly all the dramatis personae with the exception of Belvidera, are taken from St. Real; but their characters are Otway's, and his ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Thomas Otway
... shoulder, colloquial, slangy. He dealt often in the first person and the present tense. He told a plain tale from its simple beginning to its simple end. But Pete—. His language had all Honey's simplicity lined terseness and, in addition, he had the literary touch, both the dramatist's instinct and the fictionist's insight. His stories always ran up to a psychological climax; but this was always disguised by the best narratory tricks. He was one of those men of whom people always say, "if he could only write as he talks." ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... offered for the introduction to American schools of another selection from the works of so eminent a dramatist as Manuel Tamayo ...
— Ms vale maa que fuerza • Manuel Tamayo y Baus
... scarlet on her hat and a most tantalizing flash of scarlet ankle. It was Flora Desimone, fresh from her morning bath and a substantial breakfast. The errand that had brought her from Aix-les-Bains was confessedly a merciful one. But she possessed the dramatist's instinct to prolong a situation. Thus, to make her act of mercy seem infinitely larger than it was, she was determined first to cast the Apple of Discord into this charming corner of Eden. The Apple of Discord, as every man knows, is the ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... atmosphere and jargon of denationalised culture—even those of them who have never left our shores. They would take pains to be intimately familiar with the domestic affairs and views of life of some Galician gipsy dramatist, and gravely quote and discuss his opinions on debts and mistresses and cookery, while they would shudder at 'D'ye ken John Peel?' as a piece of uncouth barbarity. You cannot expect a world of that sort ...
— When William Came • Saki
... general essay and not an introduction, it would be proper to say something of Daudet's early attempts as poet and dramatist. Here it need only be remarked that it is almost a commonplace to insist that even in his later novels he never entirely ceased to see the outer world with the eyes of a poet, to delight in colour and movement, to seize every opportunity to indulge in vivid description couched in a ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... explained. I do not know.... A comic opera singer! But I shall always love those light-hearted companions, who were cheerful under misfortune, who accepted each new calamity as a jest by the Great Dramatist. Perhaps the truth is, this last calamity was brought about by my desire to aid them without letting them know who I was. I have committed many foolish acts, but innocent and hurtless. To you I have been perfectly frank. From the first I warned you; and many times ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... what her bright colouring would have been in the midst of gaudy, cheap chintzes and "Axminsters," such as abounded in Askatoon, is better left to the imagination. It was not, therefore, in sordid, mean, or incongruous surroundings that Crozier told his tale; as would no doubt have been arranged by a dramatist, if he had had the making and the setting of the story; and if it were not a true tale told just as ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... became enlivened and invigorated by the presence and smiles of my mistress. In the art of love-making I was at home, particularly with the Juliet of that night. I entered at once into the spirit of the great dramatist, and the curtain dropped amidst thunders of applause. My name was announced for a repetition of the play, and I was dragged forward before the curtain, to thank the grocers, tallow-chandlers, cheesemongers, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... aspiration to do those things for which nature had not fitted me, and to the extent that I recognized my inability to do those things I failed to be content. I should have liked to be a great writer, a poet, a great dramatist, a novelist—a little of everything in the literary world. I should have liked to know Shakespeare, to have been the friend of Milton; and when I came out of my dreams it made me unhappy to think that such I never could be, until one day this idea came to me: all the happiness of life is ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... presentation was an unprecedented event in the history of the theatre. The work of Greban was rehandled and enlarged by Jean Michel, and great was the triumph when it was given at Angers in 1486. Greban was not to be outdone either by his former self or by another dramatist; in collaboration with his brother Simon, he composed the yet more enormous Actes des Apotres, in sixty-two thousand lines, demanding the services of five hundred performers. When presented at Bourges as late as 1536, the happiness of the spectators was extended ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... elementary parts of the dramatic art had then been conceived and rudely practised. But the first regular play was produced in Greece, where the great Eschylus, whose works are handed down to us, flourished not only as a dramatist, but as an illustrious statesman ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... technical perfection. His drama is regarded as the literary counterpart of the Parthenon. Its calm and statuesque excellence exactly met the requirements of the taste which we call classic, and seems to correspond with the character of the dramatist, which was notably gentle, and with his form, which was typically beautiful. His characters are less heroic, and nearer to common humanity than those of Aeschylus. He appeals more to pity. His art is more subtle, especially ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... days! Old Priam and all his aged council pay her reverence. Menelaus is the only one of the Grecian heroes that had no other wife or mistress—here was devotion and constancy! Andromache has been, and ever will be, the pride of the world. Yet the less refined dramatist has told of her wrongs; for he puts into her mouth a dutiful acquiescence in the gallantries of Hector. Little can be said for the men. Poor old Priam we must pardon, if Hecuba could and did; for Priam told her that he had nineteen children by her, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... of war; for the Parliamentary Committee of Secrecy, charged in 1794 to report on seditious proceedings would, if it were possible, have fastened on so compromising an act. Its members belonged to a higher class than those of Hardy's Society; for they included Romney the painter, Holcroft the dramatist, Horne Tooke, the humorous litterateur, and Thelwall, the ablest lecturer of the day.[276] That these men had advanced far beyond the standpoint of the Whiggish "Friends of the People," appears from a letter from one of the Norwich Radical Clubs ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... thousandfold more necessary in editions of plays, but they are practically non-existent in the latter, the brief one which is prefixed to Dekker's Satiro-Mastix, 1602, being nearly the only example that is to be found in any that appeared during the literary career of the great dramatist.'' ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... Siciliennes*. A play by Casimir Delavigne, a French dramatist and poet, and published in 1819. The subject of the play is the massacre of the French in Sicily by the Sicilians in 1282, and which began ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... because I am an artist, and it seemed inartistic to intervene—to interrupt the action at an inopportune moment—to stultify what promised to be an unusually involved complication. When first I saw and recognized you on the Nevski, it was like one of those divine surprises of the master dramatist, M. Sardou. Really, I was indebted for the thrill of it. Besides, had I spoken, the prince might have tossed you overboard; he is quite capable of doing so. That, too, would have been inartistic, would have turned a comedy ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... character? Does her calmness and tenderness with her husband after the guests have left the banquet indicate her wisdom in dealing with him, or the pathetic weakening of her strong character, or a natural tenderness? Give reasons. What makes the sleep-walking scene so pathetic? How has the dramatist prepared us for her breakdown? What, if anything, do you find in her ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... London Archaeological Society.—Mr. H. N. HUDSON, whose lectures on SHAKSPEARE have made him widely and favorably known as a critic, has been engaged by a Boston publishing house to edit a new edition of the works of the great Dramatist, which will be published during the coming year. Mr. Hudson's ability and familiarity with the subject will enable him to make a very valuable and interesting work.—GARIBALDI, who achieved distinction in the defense of Rome against the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... mistrust or indifference from allowing others to look into what passes within them; and to speak with any thing like emotion or agitation of that which is nearest our heart is considered unsuitable to the tone of polished society. The orator and the dramatist find means to break through these barriers of conventional reserve. While they transport their hearers into such lively emotions that the outward signs thereof break forth involuntarily, every man perceives those ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... conducted us to this pessimistic conclusion Le Roy finds it repugnant, and is unwilling to acquiesce in it. Like an embarrassed dramatist he escapes from the knot which he has tied by introducing the ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... his prospects did not improve. He failed to find employment for his talents: nobody could be got to purchase his sketches or sit to him for a portrait; an attempt to interest Iffland, the actor and dramatist, in him failed; and no publisher could be found for his musical productions. Everything he was willing to do came to nothing. Then came other misfortunes. His ready-money, consisting of six Louis d'or, was stolen from him; news reached him of the death of his dearly-loved ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Thomas Dekker, a British dramatist, wrote in 1630: "A starre? Nay, thou art more than the moone, for thou hast neither changing quarters, nor a man standing in thy circle with a bush of ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... them was the stately austere Euripides, the tragic dramatist. Turning his back to the company, absorbed in thought and tracing designs on the ground, as though he were always at work, stood Phidias, the man "who made gods for Athens." On the edge of the fountain sat a man with his legs dangling and his mouth ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... a more popular dramatist than either AEschylus or Sophocles. His fame passed far beyond the limits of Greece. Herodotus asserts that the verses of the poet were recited by the natives of the remote country of Gedrosia; and Plutarch says that the Sicilians were so fond of ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... primarily and ultimately, to the head and to the heart. Whoever seeks, therefore, by the production of Shakespearean drama chiefly to please the spectator's eye shows scant respect both for the dramatist and for the spectator. However unwittingly, he tends to misrepresent the one, and to mislead the other, in a particular of first-rate importance. Indeed, excess in scenic display does worse than restrict opportunities of witnessing Shakespeare's plays on the stage in London ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... of Shakespeare, the greatness which has made men try to make a dozen specialists out of him, is not so very wonderful when one considers that he was a dramatist. A dramatist cannot help growing great. At least he has the outfit for it if he wants to. One hardly wants to be caught giving a world recipe,—a prescription for being a great man; but it does look sometimes as if the habit of reading for persons, of being a sort of spiritual ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... in France needs correction in certain respects,[137] but it seems to indicate some first-hand knowledge and very definite opinions. He quotes Moliere frequently throughout his writings, and always speaks of him with admiration; but with no other French dramatist does he seem to have been familiar to such a degree. Judging French tragic poets too much from the Shaksperian point of view, he was not prepared to do them justice.[138] On the dramatic unities, of which he remarked, "Aristotle says so little and his commentators ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... beauty, expression and significance with the briefest phrases. As a set-off against this, it has led Wagner to indulge in repetitions that would be intolerable in a purely dramatic work. Almost the first thing that a dramatist has to learn in constructing a play is that the persons must not come on the stage in the second act and tell one another at great length what the audience has already seen pass before its eyes in the first act. The extent to ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... preceding day. I was thus able to discover the origin of the substance of the materialization of the writing, and also its psychic origin.' In other words, he claims that the message was not from the shade of the great dramatist, but was a precipitation of the blood of the psychic and an exercise of her subconscious mind, all of ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... to carry them out. A mimic tower of Babel is more preposterous than a mimic temple of Dagon; yet, unless Rubinstein's stage directions are to be taken in a Pickwickian sense, we ought to listen to this music while looking at a stage-setting more colossal than any ever contemplated by dramatist before. We should see a wide stretch of the plain of Shinar; in the foreground a tower so tall as to give color of plausibility to a speech which prates of an early piercing of heaven and so large as to provide room for a sleeping multitude on its scaffoldings. Brick kilns, derricks, and ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... name there is a simple directness about the theme of Mr. WARWICK DEEPING'S Unrest (CASSELL) that I found refreshing. Martin Frensham was a dramatist, and the fortunate possessor of an adoring wife, a charming home and a successful reputation. So quite naturally he grew bored with all three. Then there came on the scene one Judith Ruddiger, a widow, with red lips, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... Virgin in the sky above has just brought to a standstill; there a child being spared by her lifting the wheel of a heavy truck about to crush it. It would be hard to imagine anything more crude either in conception or execution than these signs of gratitude. To judge by them the Virgin would make a dramatist of the first rank; there was not a picture in which the miraculous assistance came a moment too soon, never & hero of our ancient, pre-Edison melodramas appeared more exactly "in the nick of time." The famous ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... "tells his churlish tale in his manner," of which manner the less said the better; while in the "Reeve's Tale," Chaucer even, after the manner of a comic dramatist, gives his Northern undergraduate a vulgar ungrammatical phraseology, probably designedly, since the poet was himself a "Southern man." The "Pardoner" is exuberant in his sample-eloquence; the "Doctor of Physic" is gravely and ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... stage of its development and every variety of its operation, is as distinctly pronounced on the pages of Scripture as in the scenes of the dramatist. Of Shakespeare it is said, "He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives." He has been called the "thousand-minded," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... still pursuing his Latin and Greek studies; and one article, on a classical subject, deserves especial notice. It is a thorough criticism of all the dramas of Euripides, in which he takes a view of the dramatist exactly the reverse of that maintained by Walter Savage Landor—asserting that he was a bungler in the tragic art, and far too much addicted to foisting his stupid moralisings into his plays. Another article in the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... had fled from him. He seemed to be no longer on an equality with her. He was diffident, he was respectful. If this girl was a friend of Mr. Gay the distinguished poet and dramatist whose latest work, "The Fables," was being talked about at Button's, at Wills', at every coffee-house where the wits gathered, she must be somebody in the world of fashion and letters. Perhaps she was an actress. She had the assured ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... psychological phenomenon of a dramatist depicting a psychosis correctly in "Concerning Hamlet and Orestes." Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. XIII, ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... precious MS.? In this age of Shakspearian research, when every newly discovered relic is hailed with intense delight, may I inquire of some of your numerous readers, who seem to take as much delight as myself in whatever concerns our great dramatist and his writings, whether they can throw any ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... and he discussed these matters also with the great representative of Roman Catholic Socialism, Count Albert de Mun. The list of his Diary engagements, ranging over a long period of time, is filled with the names of French writers, from Ludovic Halevy, the novelist and dramatist (passages from whose Belle Helene he would recite and whistle), to Anatole France; and of politicians of every school of thought, from Leon Say, 'a statesman of rare competence,' to M. Delcasse, whom he saw often, ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... Mr. Martin's Privately Printed Books, but neither our dramatist nor his press is there alluded to. Touching the latter, Mr. Wallace says in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... surface, but stains that have sunk deep into the very substance of the soul, and have dyed every thread in warp and woof to its centre, are not to be got rid of so. The awful words which our great dramatist puts into the mouth of the queenly murderess are heavy with the weight of most solemn truth. After all vain attempts to cleanse away the stains, we, like her, have to say, 'There's the smell of the blood still—will these hands ne'er ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... chief actor, and the source from which the dramatist must cull his choicest beauties, painting up to nature the varied scenes which mark the changeful courses of her motley groups. Here she opes her volume to the view of contemplative minds, and spreads her treasures forth, decked in all the variegated tints that ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... the commissionership, must often have admitted of performance by deputy; for in 1707, the Whigs having become stronger, Lord Halifax was sent on a mission to the elector of Hanover; and, besides taking Vanbrugh the dramatist with him as king-at-arms, he selected Addison as his secretary. In 1708 Addison entered parliament, sitting at first for Lostwithiel, but afterwards for Malmesbury, which he represented from 1710 till his death. Here ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the rhyme, 'dear brother Jem,' as being ludicrous; but we all enjoyed the joke of hitching in our friend James Tobin's name, who was familiarly called Jem. He was the brother of the dramatist; and this reminds me of an anecdote which it may be worth while here to notice. The said Jem got a sight of the "Lyrical Ballads" as it was going through the press at Bristol, during which time I was residing in that city. One evening he came to me with a grave face, and said, "Wordsworth, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... play Was acted on this stage, has passed away Its noble author from the gaze of men, No more, alas! to wield his facile pen. In Knebworth's ancient park, across the sea, Lord Lytton sleeps, but not his witchery. The dramatist, romancer, poet, still Can touch our hearts and captivate our will; For laureled genius has the power to brave Death's fell advance, and lives beyond the grave: Bear witness, this grand audience clustered here. Your plaudits cannot reach dead Lytton's ear, But no more sweet libation ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... been able to consider the case logically and without prejudice, I should probably have scorned this presentation of rigid alternatives as the invention of a romantic mind; I might have recognised in it the familiar device of the dramatist. But I had so far surrendered myself to the charm of Anne's individuality that I accepted her statement without the least shadow of criticism. It was the search to find some mechanical means of influencing the Jervaises' decision that reminded me ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... chamber is called a study: the word reminds us that hard mental labour must generally be gone through when we are alone. Any interruption by others breaks the train of thought; and the broken end may never be caught again. You remember how Maturin, the dramatist, when he felt himself getting into the full tide of composition, used to stick a wafer on his forehead, to signify to any member of his family who might enter his room, that he must not on any account be spoken to. You remember the significant arrangement of Sir Walter's library, or rather study, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... occurs in Scotland, I have but one apology to offer. My lecture contains but little; but then, such is the scantiness of the materials on which I had to work, that it could not have contained much: if, according to the dramatist, the "amount be beggarly," it is because the "boxes are empty." Partly, apparently, from the circumstance that the organisms of this flora were ill suited for preservation in the rocks, and partly because, judging ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... and, as a consequence, some prominent Maskilim, too weak to resist the allurements, precipitated themselves into the Greek Catholic fold. Abraham Peretz, financier and champion of Jews' rights, consented to be converted, as also Loeb Nebakhovich, the dramatist, whose plays were produced in the Imperial theatre of St. Petersburg and performed in the presence of the emperor.[30] Equally bad, if not worse, for the cause of Haskalah was the conduct of those who, disdaining, or unable, to profess the new religion, discarded every vestige of traditional ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... gives so damning an impression of his day as the fact that he found actors to repeat his words and audiences to applaud them. Men such as Wycherly gave Milton models for the Belial of his great poem, "than whom a spirit more lewd fell not from heaven, or more gross to love vice for itself." The dramatist piques himself on the frankness and "plain dealing" which painted the world as he saw it, a world of brawls and assignations, of orgies at Vauxhall and fights with the watch, of lies and doubles-ententes, of knaves and dupes, of men who sold their daughters, and women who cheated ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... so long as we are alive to the pathos, the dignity, the comedy of human life, so long shall we continue to rank above the philosopher, higher than the politician, the great artist, be he called dramatist or historian, who makes us conscious of the divine movement of events, and of our fathers who were before us. Of course we assume accuracy and labor in our animated historian; though, for that matter, other things ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... and Capell the editor of Shakespeare has come to a clear idea of his "true duty." Rowe had no suspicion of the textual problems awaiting his successors. A dramatist himself, he wished merely to publish Shakespeare's plays as he would publish his own. Accordingly he modernised the spelling, divided the scenes, and added lists of dramatis personae; and the folio gave place to ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... called) the magic of poetry; but he has seldom drawn a tear, and millions of radiant eyes have been witnesses for Otway, by those drops of pity which they have shed. Otway might be no scholar, but that, methinks, does not detract from the merit of a dramatist, nor much assist him in succeeding. For the truth of this we may appeal to experience. No poets in our language, who were what we call scholars, have ever written plays which delight or affect the audience. Shakespear, Otway ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... sorceries. He speaks amid the incantations of Balaam, raises Samuel's spirit in the witch's cavern, prophesies of the Messias by the tongue of the Sibyl, forces Python to recognize His ministers, and baptizes by the hand of the misbeliever. He is with the heathen dramatist in his denunciations of injustice and tyranny, and his auguries of divine vengeance upon crime. Even on the unseemly legends of a popular mythology He casts His shadow, and is dimly discerned in the ode or the epic, as in troubled water or in fantastic dreams. All that is good, all that ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... "A dramatist was to read a comedy at the countess' house in two days' time; I went thither, intending to outstay the others, so as to make a rather singular request to her; I meant to ask her to keep the following evening for me ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... dramatist of considerable reputation, all his productions, except the copy now reprinted, appear to have utterly perished; and, I believe, the only materials to be found for his biography are the subjoined memoranda in ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... to overlook the special form in which Emerson gave most of his thoughts to the world, as it would be to leave out of view the calling of Shakespeare in judging his literary character. Emerson was an essayist and a lecturer, as Shakespeare was a dramatist and ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... speaking at the moment not so much as a dramatist as a man without a cook, said that he agreed heartily with the sentiments of the gentleman who ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... from 'Pelham' to 'What will he do with it?'" (which was the last he had then written). "A poet's fame is lasting, a novelist's is comparatively ephemeral." Moved by a similar sentiment, Reade once said, "The most famous name in English literature and all literature is a dramatist's; and what pygmies Fielding and Smollett, and all the modern novelists, from Dickens, the head and front of them, down to that milk-and-water specimen of mediocrity, Anthony Trollope, seem ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... are engaged in the action, and who represent different perceptions of it at different moments and from different points of view. Love and nature, duty and desire, and a dozen other moral antitheses, are the limbs moved by the wire of the dramatist, who makes them fall into all the tragic attitudes. What is really curious and amusing is that the people of all others the most vivacious, gay, and intelligent, should have always understood the grand style in this pompous, pedantic ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the bragging "tobacconist" is pictured for us in Ben Jonson's "Bobadil." Bobadil may perhaps be somewhat of an exaggerated caricature, but it is probable that the dramatist in drawing him simply exaggerated the characteristic traits of many smokers of the day. This hero, drawing tobacco from his pocket, declares that it is all that is left of seven pounds which he had bought only "yesterday was seven-night." A consumption ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the thoughts we despise; we see eyes—ah, ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... For some time he could write nothing at all. Fortunately, after an unprofitable month or two, he fell in with John Howard Payne, now remembered only for his "Home, Sweet Home," but then esteemed as an actor and dramatist. Irving had met him several years before, and now became associated with him in some dramatic translating and adapting. The results were nearly worthless from a literary point of view, but served to keep him busy, and to put him once ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... touch very lightly on the literary aspects of the play. Its plot, like that of the modern novel, was of so subtile a nature as not to be visible to the naked eye. I doubt if the dramatist himself could have explained it, even if he had been so condescending as to attempt to do so. There was a bold young prince—Prince Rupert, of course—who went into Wonderland in search of adventures. He reached Wonderland by leaping ...
— The Little Violinist • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... vehicle for stage effect—for such merely, has the author evidently intended it; his arrangement of the machinery, such as it is, demands warm praise for its perspicuity and just order, and if the alarming and horrific be legitimate objects for a dramatist, Mr. Dimond ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... first taught the Italians to write comedy, taxing him with downright mendacity; and he stoutly denies the probability of Naharro's comedies ever having been performed on the Italian boards. The critic seems to be in the right, as far as regards the influence of the Spanish dramatist; but he might have been spared all doubts respecting their representation in the country, had he consulted the prologue of Naharro himself, where he asserts the fact in the most explicit manner. Comp. Propaladia, prol., and Signorelli, Storia Critica de' Teatri, tom. ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... which we associate with the heroes of the romantic novels of the age. He believed in the almost unlimited powers of the human mind, and his own career, which saw his rise from stable-boy and cobbler to dramatist, was itself a monument to the human will. Looking in their mirrors, the progressives of that generation were tempted to think that perfection might have been within their reach had not their youth been stunted by the influence of Calvin ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... Hildegarde. "Poor Kit! he was a great dramatist; the next greatest after Shakspeare, I think,—at least, well, leaving out the Greeks, you know. He was a year younger than Shakspeare, and died when he was only twenty-eight, killed in a ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... perception of his place in the great hierarchy of privilege and obligation, from the lowest human being up to the Olympian gods, so copiously and magnificently set forth as in Pindar's Odes of Victory. And AEschylus was the first dramatist to see with clear vision the primacy of the intellect in the law of orderly development, seemingly at variance with the divine immutable will of Fate, yet finally in mysterious accord with it. When the philosophers of the later period came to the ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... be explained that Bernard Shaw added to his negative case of a dramatist to be depreciated a corresponding affirmative case of a dramatist to be exalted and advanced. He was not content with so remote a comparison as that between Shakespeare and Bunyan. In his vivacious weekly articles in the Saturday Review, the real comparison upon which everything turned ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... wealth of nations, with his pithy wisdom and quaint sagacity, began with two hundred pounds, and lived to view his mortgages, his statutes, and his judgments so numerous, that it was observed his papers would have made a good map of England. A contemporary dramatist, who copied from life, has opened the chamber of such an Usurer,—perhaps ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... I seem to see the Uhlans stand, Paying their pious sixpences to enter That little homestead of the Fatherland That housed the dramatist in Stratford's centre; A trifle flushed, maybe, with English beer, But mutely reverent and not talking chattily, They write beneath their names: "A friend lives here; Not to be ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia nearly twenty years later. She then spoke of the difficulties inherent in such a subject, "inequality of age adding to the unnatural incest. To shed any interest over such an attachment, the dramatist ought to adorn the father with such youthful attributes as would be by no means contrary to probability."[xvii] This she endeavored to do in Mathilda (aided indeed by the fact that the situation was the reverse of that in Myrrha). Mathilda's father was young: he married ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... attractive to all the girls I knew. Indeed, I think it was largely because of their envy that I was first led to accept his attentions. However, I was very young, utterly inexperienced, while he was thoroughly versed in every trick by which to interest one of my nature. He claimed to be a successful dramatist and author, thus adding materially to my conception of his character and capability. Little by little the man succeeded in weaving about me the web of his fascination, until I was ready for any sacrifice ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... something to the honour of St. Mary Overies, (the church in question,) to add that it was within its walls that the ceremony took place. Besides Gower, the parish registers state that Edmond Shakspeare ob. 1607 (one of the brothers of the great dramatist), John Fletcher ob. 1625, and Philip Massinger ob. 1640. (See Mr. Knight's Old England, eng. 548. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... The American dramatist has not been given, as a general rule, to such self-examination; he has contented himself with supplying the fashions of the day in the theatre, and has left to the ubiquitous press-agent the special prerogative of whetting public curiosity as to what manner of man he is and as to ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: In Mizzoura • Augustus Thomas
... one which is not only interesting as representative of the early type of Indian drama in America, but it is also interesting as reflective of the attitude of a dramatist with a problem to propound. "Ponteach" is our first American problem play. Parkman claims that at least part of it was written by Rogers, thus throwing doubt on his entire claim to authorship. There is not only a dignity displayed in the drawing of the main character ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... given this lake by the early French settlers at Crown Point in honor of Madam Scarron, the widow of a celebrated French dramatist and novelist, Paul Scarron. Along the margin of this lake we saw a Sunday-school teacher who had brought his class of boys for an outing. What lessons these growing lads will imbibe from the beauty of Nature around them. How can they help but think of the Creator when they dwell so ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... to practical politics.' In this grim sentence we read the dethronement of Clio. The poor thing must forswear her father's house, her tuneful sisters, the invocation of the poet, the worship of the dramatist, and keep her terms at the University, where, if she is really studious and steady, and avoids literary companions (which ought not to be difficult), she may hope some day to be received into the Royal Society as a second- rate ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Cork, an ancient city, which pagans and Danes once occupied, and which both Cromwell and Marlborough captured. Here Rev. Thomas Lee, by his preaching, inclined William Penn, "Father of Pennsylvania," to become a Quaker. Here was born Sheridan Knowles, the dramatist, and ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... American dramatist or novelist had taken for the ground work of a play or work of fiction the story of the Bidwell family to-day related on another page of the Herald, all European critics would have told him that the story was too 'American,' ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... into the instrument by which his most valuable provinces were, to be taken from him, and eventually re-organized into: an independent commonwealth. Could a vision, like that imagined by the immortal dramatist for another tyrant and murderer, have revealed the future to Philip, he, too, might have beheld his victim, not crowned himself, but pointing to a line of kings, even to some who 'two-fold balls and treble ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Sophocles is like the difference between the Satan of Milton and the Macbeth of Shakspeare. Aeschylus is equally artful with Sophocles—it is the criticism of ignorance that has said otherwise. But there is this wide distinction—Aeschylus is artful as a dramatist to be read, Sophocles as a dramatist to be acted. If we get rid of actors, and stage, and audience, Aeschylus will thrill and move us no less than Sophocles, through a more intellectual if less passionate ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... man, "known to the world as the author of the plays of Shakespeare"? No! for Mr. Greenwood writes, "nobody, outside a very small circle, troubled his head as to who the dramatist or dramatists might be." {0e} To that "very small circle" we have no reason to suppose that Manningham belonged, despite his remarkable opinion that Twelfth Night resembles the Menaechmi. Consequently, it is NOT "extremely ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... soi-disant summer is one entire amber mass, its unbroken divine days concrete in it, there is no inequality on which to forbid the banns between May and December. In San Francisco there is no work for the scene-shifter of Nature: the wealth of that great dramatist, the year, resulting in the same manner as the poverty of dabblers in private theatricals,—a single flat doing service for the entire play. Thus, save for the purpose of notes-of-hand, the Almanac of San Francisco might replace ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... the famous quadroon[8] is not more marvellous than the multiplicity of characters he assumes. "Dumas at Home and Abroad" offers an inexhaustible theme and a boundless field for pen and pencil caricaturists. Alternately dramatist, novelist, tourist, ambassador, the companion of princes, the manager of theatres, an authority in courts of justice, a challenger of deputies, and shining with equal lustre in these and fifty other capacities equally diverse, what wonder that the slightest work flowing from the pen of so remarkable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... compare Constant with Sir John Brute. Take Farquhar; and compare Archer with Squire Sullen. Take Congreve; and compare Bellmour with Fondlewife, Careless with Sir Paul Plyant, or Scandal with Foresight. In all these cases, and in many more which might be named, the dramatist evidently does his best to make the person who commits the injury graceful, sensible, and spirited, and the person who suffers it a fool, or a ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... environ, antagonize, and overwhelm. The unity of action and of interest is the personality of Julius Caesar. In dramatic technique the play is simple and effective. Out of masses of detail and historical incident the dramatist has shaped a symmetrical and well-defined plot marked by (1) the exposition, or introduction, (2) the complication, or rising action, (3) the climax, or turning point, (4) the resolution, or falling action, and (5) the catastrophe, or conclusion. It is almost a commonplace of criticism ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare |
