"Playwright" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Battle," was produced in 1851; but it was not until November, 1852, with the appearance of "Masks and Faces"—the story which he afterwards adapted into prose under the title of "Peg Woffington"—that Reade became famous as a playwright. From 1852 until his death, which occurred on April 11, 1884, Reade's life is mainly a catalogue of novels and dramas. Like many of Charles Reade's works, "Hard Cash, a Matter-of-Fact Romance," is a novel ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... little by little yielding up their secret, disclosing all the subtle interplay of human motives. From the heights of his knowledge the critic surveys the spectacle; with an insight born of his learning, he penetrates the mysteries of the playwright's craft. He knows what thought and skill have gone into this result; he knows the weary hours of toil, the difficulties of invention and selection, the heroic rejections, the intricacies of construction, the final triumph. He sees it all from the point of view of the master-workman, ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... John Wilkes, Joseph, and the girls. All of the boys are known to more or less of fame; none of them in his art has reached the renown of the father; but one has sent his name as far as that of the great playwright to whom they were pupils; wherever Shakspeare is quoted, John Wilkes Booth will be named, and infamously, like that Hubert in "King John," who would have murdered the ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... PLAYWRIGHT—"There is a great climax in the last act. Just as two burglars climb in the kitchen window the clock ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey
... have been levelled for so long a period at the British theatre—the most important of these reproaches being that it possessed no drama at all—perhaps I say we may grant in a spirit of charity that these reproaches ought not to be wholly laid at the door of the native playwright. If it be true that he has been in the habit of producing plays invariably conventional in sentiment, trite in comedy, wrought on traditional lines, inculcating no philosophy, making no intellectual appeal whatever, may it not be that the attitude of the frequenters ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... D'ALUMINIO? And to come nearer home, did not the German—but why pursue the "motive" until you run it to earth, and even then it won't be killed, but will be flourishing thousands of years hence, when the New Zealand playwright among the ruins of London shall take up his note-book and commence a scenario on the old, but to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 5, 1892 • Various
... end. There is a great difference among writers as to the sense of need for a complete preliminary framework on which to build. But beyond doubt many feeble, many abortive, results come of having too little preparatory framework, too slender a scenario, to use a playwright's word which authors and editors are borrowing ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... scenes, though the first act is headed Actus Primus, Scaena Prima. The first systematic division into scenes was made by Nicholas Rowe, poet laureate to George I, in the edition which he issued in six octavo volumes in 1709. In this edition Rowe, an experienced playwright, marked the entrances and exits of the characters and introduced many stage directions and the list of dramatis personae which has been the basis for all later lists. A second edition in eight volumes was published in 1714. Rowe followed very ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... When a playwright produces a plot whose incidents are just within the possibilities, and far beyond the probabilities, of this life, it is said to be "ingenious," because of the crowd of circumstances that are huddled into each scene. According to this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... properties of the traditional revolution were concerned, plots, conspiracies, powder-smoke, blood and thunder, any one of the ten thousand squabbles in the mediaeval, Italian, and Flemish towns, furnishes far more material to the romancer or playwright than did the ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... Australia is not a matter for surprise. No one, indeed, would seriously think of attempting to do so. Gordon was a mounted policeman, a horse-breaker, a steeplechase-rider—anything but a professional man of letters; Marcus Clarke was a journalist and playwright, and wrote only two novels in fourteen years; Rolf Boldrewood's books were written in spare hours before and after his daily duties as a country magistrate; Henry Kingsley returned to England before publishing anything; Kendall held a Government clerkship which he exchanged for journalism; ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... thirsty. Clarence Steyle pointed out the celebrities with conscious delight. Over yonder—that man with the mixed gray hair—was a composer who came every night for inspiration,—musical and otherwise, Clarence added, with a laugh. And there was the young and well-known decadent playwright who wore strangling high collars and transposed all his plays from French sources; he lisped and was proud of his ability to dramatize the latest mental disease. And a burglar who had written a famous book on the management of children during hot weather sat meekly resting before ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... girl, taken mainly from the tradition of the stage, is so fantastically wrong. With regard to the stage, no characters in the least like gipsies ever appeared on the boards, save the characters in Tom Taylor’s ‘Sir Roger de Coverley.’ In the eyes of the novelist, as well as in the eyes of the playwright, devilry seems to be the chief characteristic of the gipsy woman. The fact is, however, that in the average gipsy woman as she really exists there is but little devilry. “Romany guile,” which is well defined in the gipsy phrase as “the lie for the Gorgios,” does ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... his mind as he heard the whistle of the "Lark" flying a mile a minute over the rails to what might be a horrible disaster that here was a real "thriller" exceeding the imagination of any cheap novelist, aspiring playwright or industrious scenario writer. Later when he rehearsed in his mind what happened that night, he realized that in fact truth was often stranger than fiction. Every newspaper man eventually ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... went from my lessons to my bed before midnight." "To the Greek, Latin and Hebrew learned at school the scrivener advised him to add Italian and French. Nor were English letters neglected. Spencer gave the earliest turn to the boy's poetic genius. In spite of the war between playwright and precisian, a Puritan youth could still in Milton's days avow his love of the stage, 'if Jonson's learned sock be on, or sweetest Shakspeare Fancy's child, warble his native wood-notes wild' and gather from the 'masques and antique ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... Yeats became identified with the new spirit; he dreamed of a national poetry that would be written in English and yet would be definitely Irish. In a few years he became one of the leaders in the Celtic revival. He worked incessantly for the cause, both as propagandist and playwright; and, though his mysticism at times seemed the product of a cult rather than a Celt, his symbolic dramas were acknowledged to be full of a haunting, other-world spirituality. (See Preface.) The Hour ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... always taken an intense interest in the drama, and at the time he was managing editor of Harper's Weekly had made his first efforts as a playwright. Robert Hilliard did a one-act version of Richard's short story, "Her First Appearance," which under the title of "The Littlest Girl" he played in vaudeville for many years. E. H. Sothern and Richard had many schemes for writing a play together, but the only actual result ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... a little unexpected to read his impressive and earnest denunciations of masquerades and theatres (in which latter, by the way, one Samuel Foote had very recently been following the example of the author of Pasquin); but Fielding the magistrate and Fielding the playwright were two different persons; and a long interval of changeful experience lay between them. In another part of his charge, which deals with the offence of libelling, it is possible that his very vigorous appeal was ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... obliged to leave his university course unfinished, he worked for a time with his step-father as a brick-layer. At the age of eighteen he enlisted as a volunteer in the Low Countries; but in 1596 he settled in London, as a playwright. His first comedy, "Every Man in his Humour," did not meet with immediate success. It was remodelled, at Shakespeare's suggestion, and when afterwards presented was received with marked favor. His first tragedy, "Sejanus," was acted in 1603. His masques, of which there are thirty-six, ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... but a mediocre playwright, envious of Moliere's growing fame, wrote for the Hotel de Bourgogne, which eagerly accepted, if it did not bespeak, his piece, Le Portrait du Peintre ou la Contrecritique de l'Ecole des Femmes, in which he ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... of letters. Of course, they were very ignorant about art, and especially about foreign art: but they all pretended more or less to some knowledge of it: and often they really loved it. There were Councils which were very like the coterie of some little Review. One of them would be a playwright: another would scrape on the violin; another would be a besotted Wagnerian. And they all collected Impressionist pictures, read decadent books, and prided themselves on a taste for some ultra-aristocratic art, which was almost always ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... writings of this period, mention should be made of a few poems of the fugitive kind which seem to have taken a permanent place in popular regard. John Howard Payne, a native of Long Island, a wandering actor and playwright, who died American consul at Tunis in 1852, wrote about 1820 for Covent Garden Theater an opera, entitled Clari, the libretto of which included the now famous song of Home, Sweet Home. Its literary pretensions were of the humblest ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... dramatic author must deal with his actors, and with his actors alone. Certain moments of suspense, certain significant dispositions of personages, a certain logical growth of emotion,—these are the only means at the disposal of the playwright. It is true that, with the assistance of the scene-painter, the costumier and the conductor of the orchestra, he may add to this something of pageant, something of sound and fury; but these are, for the dramatic writer, beside ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... coarse words he was curiously feminine. Intercourse with Beardsley, for example, had backed his humorous gentleness with a sort of challenging courage; his new intimacy with Lord Alfred Douglas, coming on the top of his triumph as a playwright, was lending him aggressive self-confidence. There was in him that [Greek: hubris] (insolent self-assurance) which the Greek feared, the pride which goeth before destruction. I regretted the change in him ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Every American playwright goes about his work these days oppressed by a foreboding. He suspects that before long a censor is going to materialize out of thin air to take stern and morose charge of the American theatre. It is true that no statutory precipitation of such an agent has been definitely proposed. ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... adaptation. The wit, observe, is lost. And Cherubino—that sparkling little enfant terrible—becomes a sentimental fellow—a something I don't know what—between a girl and a boy—a medley of romance and impudence—anyhow a being quite unlike the sharply outlined playwright's page. I confess I am not a musician; the drama is my business, and I judge things by their fitness for the stage. My wife agrees with me to differ. She likes music, I like plays. To-night she was better pleased than I was; for she got good music tolerably well rendered, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the first time Bunce had appeared as a playwright. There had been seen, on June 10, 1850, at the New York Bowery Theatre, a tragedy entitled "Marco Bozzaris; or, The Grecian Hero," and in the cast were J. Wallack, Jr., and his wife, together with John Gilbert. It was not based on the poem by Fitz-Greene ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce
... is only in Ireland, of the countries that retain a Celtic culture, that the movement is the dominating influence in writing in English; and it is with the drama only that I have now to deal, though when a playwright is a poet or a story-teller, too, I have written of his attainment in verse and tale also. Had I been writing five years ago, I should have said that it was in poetry that the Celtic Renaissance had attained ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... would be easy to recapitulate what every biographical dictionary will provide, a long list of famous names associated with our counties; to remind you that we have produced two poet-laureates—John Skelton, of Diss, the author of Colyn Cloute, and Thomas Shadwell, of Broomhill, the playwright—the latter perhaps not entirely a subject for pride; two very rough and ready political philosophers, Thomas Paine, born at Thetford, and William Godwin, born at Wisbeach; a very popular novelist in Bulwer Lytton, and a very popular theologian in Dr. ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... acquaintanceship, many whom he could find far from Slumber-land. His steps led to the apartment of a certain theatrical manager, whom he found engaged in a lively tournament of the chips, jousting with two leading men, one playwright, a composer and a merchant prince. The latter, of course, was winning. The host, contributing both chips and bottled cheer, was far from optimistic until the arrival of the ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... outburst of poem and sonnet writing in the manner of the poets of the age, he gave up the career of gentleman-poet to devote himself wholly to the more independent if not so socially distinguished one of actor-playwright. "Venus and Adonis" and "Lucrece" were the only poems of his published under his supervision and the only works with the dedication to a patron such as it was customary to write at ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... Jutland—where he spent most of his summers. His painting was his favourite pastime, but poetry the serious work of his life. He was a very prolific writer, not only of verse and lyrical poems, but of plays and prose works, and was a very successful playwright. Drachmann's personality was a strong one, though not always agreeable to his countrymen. He had a freedom-loving spirit, and lived every moment of his life. Some of his best poems are about the Skaw fishermen, and later in life ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... would supply a modern playwright with a square foot of gold-beaten invective. "True poems," said Irving, "are caskets which enclose in a small compass the wealth of the language—its family jewels." But when poems are paid by the line, bards are pardonable for diffuseness. And then, besides diffuseness, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... there was many a nobleman who found that his expenditure could not be met by dabbling in trade where others plunged, or by the revenues yielded by the large tracts of Italian soil over which he claimed exclusive powers. The playwright of the age has figured Indigence as the daughter of Luxury;[110] and a still more terrible child was to be born in the Avarice which sprang from the useless cravings and fierce competitions of the time.[111] The desire to get and to hold had ever been a Roman vice; but, it had ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... give a few specimens of an anecdotical history of French bibliolatry, beginning, as is courteous, with a lady. "Can a woman be a bibliophile?" is a question which was once discussed at the weekly breakfast party of Guilbert de Pixerecourt, the famous book- lover and playwright, the "Corneille of the Boulevards." The controversy glided into a discussion as to "how many books a man can love at a time;" but historical examples prove that French women (and Italian, witness the Princess d'Este) may be bibliophiles of the true strain. Diane ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... void of power in the subdued humorous twinkle or genial by-play in which Stevenson excelled. But he has more of dramatic power, pure and simple, than Stevenson had—his novels—the best of them—would far more easily yield themselves to the ordinary purposes of the ordinary playwright. Along with conscientiousness, perception, penetration, with the dramatist must go a certain indescribable common- sense commonplaceness—if I may name it so—protection against vagary and that over-refined egotism and self-confession which is inimical to the drama and in ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... make another "confession" in a work of less resounding notoriety, but equally interesting as a revelation of himself. In his Autobiography he has related the origin of the piece. In the spring of 1774 there fell into his hands the recently published Memoires[166] of the French playwright Beaumarchais, which told a story that reawakened painful memories of his own past. Beaumarchais had two sisters in Madrid, one married to an architect; the other, named Marie, betrothed to Clavigo, a publicist of rising fame. On Clavigo's ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... tell the story seems to be to let it tell itself. Dramas are made up of incidents that have happened to somebody sometime, but in no instance that I ever heard of have all the situations pictured in a play happened to the persons who played the parts. The business of the playwright is selection and rejection, and usually the dramatic situations revealed have been culled from very many lives over a long course of years. Here the author need but reveal the tangled skein woven by Fate, Meddling Parents, Pride, Prejudice, Caprice, Ambition, Passion. In other words it is human ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... to be modified, chiefly in its higher regions. Intimately connected with this question is the case of the "deadhead," argued with the zeal that is according to knowledge by that eminent playwright, Mr. HEMMERDE, who knows all about the free-list and its services in "enabling the management to keep the house properly dressed"—this refers, of course, to the front of the house—during the doubtful first weeks of a ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... she would be here at five o'clock, sir," answers Mary, who, according to the playwright, then goes out. But Mary ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... bitten with the theatrical mania, who annoys a manager with impertinent flattery and advice. It is said that Thomas Vaughan, a playwright of small reputation, was the original of this character.—Sheridan, The Critic ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... that I left Auckland for Sydney on the 28th June. The voyage took five days over a calm sea, and was quite without incident. We were, however, enlivened by the presence of Mr. Dion Boucicault, the well-known playwright and actor, with his company, who were on their way to fulfil engagements in Melbourne and Sydney, after some years stay in America; we had many amusing, but highly-coloured anecdotes. Among them one alone, told ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... columns of criticism to every line of writing; these endless books about books; these shrill praises and shrill denunciations; this silly worship of novelist Tom; this silly hate of poet Dick; this silly squabbling over playwright Harry. There is no soberness, no sense in it all. One would think, to listen to the High Priests of Culture, that man was made for literature, not literature for man. Thought existed before the Printing Press; and the men who wrote the best hundred books never read them. ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... the best attractions at the Chicago Grand Opera House, where he began at the very bottom of the ladder as an usher in the gallery, balcony and main floor. Finally he became chief usher—then sold tickets for the gallery—took tickets at the main door. The late Aaron Hoffman, famous playwright, was opera glass boy at that time with him, and the well-known star, Taylor Holmes, was one of his ushers! Eventually he became ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... attention from year to year. Punch's interest in theatricals is hardly surprising when it is remembered how closely identified with the drama have been many members of the Staff. Douglas Jerrold was a successful playwright before ever Punch was heard of, and as the author of "Black-Eyed Susan" and "Time Works Wonders" he made his name popular with many who had hardly heard of his connection with "the great comic." It has been computed that ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... it, George!' she said. 'Don't you come jollying me. I look like a high-brow playwright, don't I! No; I'm real glad you've made a hit, George, but don't start handing out any story about it's not being your own. I didn't ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... building it all up before me, well, you know what I said. I gave you more than hope—I promised you success. And then, when I got away into the hard, stagey world of Chicago, and my manager talked business to me, and my last playwright preached of technique, I began to wonder whether, after all, you could bring your ideas together like this, whether you would have a sense of perspective—you know what I mean, don't you? And you have it, and the play is going to be wonderful, and I shall ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that finally became established hymns of praise. Meanwhile from accompanying rude imitations of the hero's acts, performed now by one and now by several, grew dramatic representations, which, little by little elaborated, fell under the regulation of a chief actor, who prefigured the playwright. And out of these germs, all pertaining to worship, came eventually the various professions of poets, actors, dramatists, and the subdivisions ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... be so alarmingly outspoken when she sings our praises to strangers. She gave him to understand that I am a full-fledged author and playwright, the peer of any poet laureate who ever held a pen; that Lloyd is a combination of princess and angel and halo-crowned saint, and Joyce a model big sister and an all-round genius. How she managed in the short time they were alone ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and the skin touches—is a cause or an effect of human conduct. Naught can be ruled out as negligible, as not forming part of the equation. Hence he who would beyond all others see life for himself—I naturally mean the novelist and playwright—ought to embrace all phenomena in his curiosity. Being finite, he cannot. Of course he cannot! But he can, by obtaining a broad notion of the whole, determine with some accuracy the position and relative importance of ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... she wept at His feet where He lay bound and delivered, and wrapped them, in the agony of her abandonment, in the hair of her head, the priest's lips almost moved in words other than those of the playwright—words that told her he knew the height and the depth of her sacrifice and forgave it, "Neither do I condemn thee...." In his exultation he saw what it was to perform miracles, to remit sins. The spark of divinity that was in him glowed to a white heat; the woman on the ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... To the young playwright, the difficulty of getting his characters on to the stage would seem much less than the difficulty of finding them something to say when they are there. He writes gaily and without hesitation "Enter Lord Arthur Fluffinose," and only then begins to bite the end of his penholder ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... intricate, creeds so metaphysical, that in a state of absolute reaction they demand definite instruction for daily living. Their whole-hearted acceptance of the teaching corroborates the statement recently made by an English playwright that "The theater is literally making the minds of our urban populations to-day. It is a huge factory of sentiment, of character, of points of honor, of conceptions of conduct, of everything that finally determines ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... Yet there were some which must be recalled with especial vividness as best exemplifying the scope of his genius and his general characteristics. Two of these parts, Werner and Melantius, were not Shakespearian creations, but they were at least devices of the poetical imagination, not of the mere playwright's handiwork. In both we have the spectacle of a proud and sensitive but open and loving nature blighted with dishonor and misery through the crimes of one near in blood and cherished with an unsuspecting affection. Here were conceptions that made no demands on his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... that play on the spot. It may be a good play. I don't know. I never shall know, for I shall never see it. But why should it be assumed that you and I will run off to the pay box to see a new play "by a peer"? Suppose the anonymous playwright had been a lawyer, or a journalist, or a pork-butcher, or a grocer. Would the producer have thought it helpful to announce a new play by a pork-butcher, or a lawyer, or a grocer, or a journalist? He certainly ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... titles have been traced, except the last, which Poe either invented, or, in quoting, altered. Some of the works named he apparently had not read, since their character is not suited to his purpose. Jean Baptiste Louis Gresset (1709-1777) was a French poet and playwright; the two works mentioned are poems,—the first, a tale of an escaped parrot who stopped at a convent and shocked the nuns by his profanity. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) was a famous Italian historian and statesman, ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... universal adulation of her dark and changeful face, her savage and sovereign beauty. There was insolence in her tread, and mad allurement in the rounded beauty of her powerful white arm—and at his weakest the young playwright admitted that all else concerning her was of ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... from Lycidas. The words were written in pencil and enclosed in brackets. I was merely drawing Mr. FLEAY'S attention to the similarity of expression between Milton's words and the playwright's; but by some unlucky chance my marginal pencilling was imported into the text. I now implore the reader to expunge the line. On p. 116, l. 12 (in the same volume), for with read witt; p. 125 l. 2, for He read Ile; p. 128, l. 18, for pardue read perdue; p. 232, ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... to seek real generalities, we must not consult the playwright. Perhaps we may find the best conditions for general statement where we do not even have to deal with an individual, but can listen to the mind of the race and can absorb its wisdom from its proverbs. ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... alone; and something as Mr. Hardy, in The Return of the Native, paints Egdon Heath—"Haggard Egdon"—in its shifting moods before he introduces a single human being upon the scene of their coming tragedy, it is quite possible for the modern playwright, with an artist to aid him, to show the audience the scene of his drama, to let its suggestive beauty, its emotional possibilities, charm or fire their fancies before the speech and action begin. So also, as Wagner and Mr. ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... things,' everybody said. 'Here's a Mr. Tomson, that no one has ever heard of, bothers Burleigh with his rubbish, and then accuses him of petty larceny. Is it likely that a man of Burleigh's position, a playwright who can make his five thousand a year easily, would borrow from an unknown Tomson?' I should think it very likely, indeed," Lucian went on, chuckling, "but that was their verdict. No; I don't think I'll ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... gutter, you shall accompany me," repeated twice with the slight variation, "If I am flung into the gutter for the second time, you shall accompany me," used for the last exit. Again, Torvald Helmer has a long monologue in the final Act that a practised playwright would have "broken up" with the assistance of a portrait, or a letter, or something. From this it would appear that the Editor, WILLIAM ARCHER (without the "Mr.") has very faithfully produced the exact translation of the original. To ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... French novelist and playwright, died suddenly yesterday evening while at dinner The cause of death was syncope due ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... turns out to be not the emotion IN the drama, but rather the emotion FROM the drama,—a unique independent emotion of tension, otherwise a form of the characteristic aesthetic emotion with which we have been before engaged. The playwright who scornfully rejects the spectator supposed to be aesthetic, ideally contemplative and emotionally indifferent, is vindicated. There must be a vivid emotional effect, but it is the spectator's very own, and not a copy of the hero's ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... argued from the fact that in these plays, which contain nothing salacious or indecent, there is scarcely a character of any rank who scruples to tell lies; and the truth is not to be found in works intended to school the public to virtue. The ingenious old playwright's memoirs are full of gossip concerning that poor old Venice, which is now no more; and the worthy autobiographer, Casanova, also gives much information about things that ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Foote (1720-1777), actor and playwright. His solo entertainments, in 'The Dish of Tea, An Auction of Pictures', 1747-8 (see his comedy 'Taste'), were the precursors of 'Mathews at Home', and a long line of successors. His farces and curtain-pieces were often "spiced-up" with more or less malicious ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... of weekly sermons—and planning his dream in marble; Phidias was cutting away the needless portions of the white stone of Pentelicus and liberating wondrous forms of beauty; Sophocles was revealing the possibilities of the stage; AEschylus was pointing out the way as a playwright; and the passion for physical beauty was everywhere an ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... first attempt in literature, Cromwell, was a complete failure, this did not deter him from longing to become a successful playwright. After having established himself as a novelist, he turned again to this field of literature. Having written several plays, he was acquainted, naturally, with the leading actresses of his day; among these was Madame Dorval, whom he liked. He purposed giving ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... of 1663 was celebrated by a fete at which a troupe headed by Moliere was heard in a piece by the great dramatist called Impromptu de Versailles, In the month of May, 1664, Louis commanded a performance of "Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle," in which his favorite actor and playwright furnished the comedy, Lully the music and the ballets, and an Italian mechanician the decorations and illuminations. On the first day there was tilting at the ring, in which pastime Louis XIV played a part, wearing a diamond-embroidered costume. The next day, on ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... The playwright has always been a formidable rival to the novelist, insomuch that in a period of dramatic activity the novel, as our author remarks, can hardly maintain itself. But from the middle of the seventeenth century the stage had fallen low, while the formal and fantastic romance, the long-winded ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... whether or not Chesterton is a playwright. His one play was a fine one about a fine subject, but I do not think it had the qualities that would be popular in an ordinary theatre in London. There is a certain suggestion of a problem about it which is a little obscure. We are not sure whether ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... English playwright who wrote a number of important tragedies in verse, but who died destitute at the age of 33. The Coopers were familiar with his work; James Fenimore Cooper used quotations from Otway's "The Orphan" ...
— The Lumley Autograph • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... months of March-July in 1844, in the magazine Le Siecle, the first portion of a story appeared, penned by the celebrated playwright Alexandre Dumas. It was based, he claimed, on some manuscripts he had found a year earlier in the Bibliotheque Nationale while researching a history he planned to write on Louis XIV. They chronicled the adventures of a young man named D'Artagnan who, upon entering ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... had already," he said. "Shaw is the only playwright clever enough to write dialogue that will hold any number of people in the theatre. The motion picture has made the public demand action. It has changed the plot and ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... arrested for debt. He himself as a young man had been whipped at the command of the landowner and thrown into jail. The small town which had been the witness of these humiliations should be witness of the restoration of his honor. Where he had been spoken of as the actor and playwright of doubtful fame, there would he be seen again as the honored possessor of house and land. There and elsewhere should the people, who had counted him among the proletariat, learn to know him as a gentleman, that is as a member of the lesser nobility.... ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... Students' League," said Ann demurely, "the Federation of Arts, National Society of Portrait Painters, Architectural League, Watercolor Society, Authors' League and the Prince who thinks he's a playwright." ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... to a poet as an audience to a playwright; Keats realized this truth when he printed Endymion. He knew it was full of faults and that he could not revise it. But he also knew that its publication would set him free, and make it possible for him immediately to write something better. This seems to have been the case ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... a young newspaper man and author, who came to me for the loan of five dollars. I had never seen him before, but I knew his brother, a brilliant playwright, in a ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... disgrace with Henslowe and his former associates, Jonson offered his services as a playwright to Henslowe's rivals, the Lord Chamberlain's company, in which Shakespeare was a prominent shareholder. A tradition of long standing, though not susceptible of proof in a court of law, narrates that Jonson ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... That was the real character of the man. He tried many things, and he produced much; but the root of him was that he was a humorous thinker. He did not write first-rate plays, or first-rate novels, rich as he was in the elements of playwright and novelist. He was not an artist. But he had a rare and original eye and soul,—and in a peculiar way he could pour out himself. In short, to be an Essayist was the bent of his nature and genius. English literature is rich in such men,—in men whose works are cherished for the individuality ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... one of the leading lights in that new sect which prides itself upon the cultivation of abstract beauty, and occasionally touches the verge of concrete ugliness. There were a newspaper man—the editor of a fashionable journal—and a middle-aged man of letters, playwright, critic, humourist, a man whose society was in demand everywhere, and who said sharp things with the most supreme good-nature. The only ladies whose society Mr. Smithson had deemed worthy the occasion were a fashionable actress, with her younger sister, the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... 1361 and following years was John Wickliffe, who has too often been confused with his great contemporary and namesake, the reformer. And the village claims as a son Thomas May (1595-1650), playwright, translator of Lucan's "Pharsalia," secretary to Parliament ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Nor should the playwright fail for lack Of matter, if with curious eyes He follows in our Pressmen's track, Who find the source of their supplies In Life, that ever-flowing font, And "give the public what ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... people in their ranks, I am told," said the vicar, "writers and so forth. Quite a distinguished playwright, my eldest daughter was ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... international law. The ancestral home of the Balestiers was near Brattleboro', Vt., and here Mr. Kipling brought his bride. The young Englishman was so impressed by the Vermont scenery that he rented for a time the cottage on the "Bliss Farm," in which Steele Mackaye the playwright wrote the ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... may not have, as I have said, an exalted and intense inner life. I have known a number of cases where a man who seemed thoroughly commonplace and unemotional has all at once surprised everybody by telling the story of his hidden life far more pointedly and dramatically than any playwright or novelist or poet could have told it for him. I will not insult your intelligence, Beloved, by saying how he has ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... were T.W. Robertson, the playwright, and his friend and companion, E.P. Hingston. His literary executors were Horace Greeley and Richard H. Stoddard. In his will, he bequeathed among other things a large sum of money to his little valet, a bright little ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... Twain saw the play and the actor at their best. Kate Field played the part of Laura Hawkins, and there was a Hartford girl in the company; also a Hartford young man, who would one day be about as well known to playgoers as any playwright or actor that America has produced. His name was William Gillette, and it was largely due to Mark Twain that the author of Secret Service and of the dramatic "Sherlock Holmes" got a fair public start. Clemens and his wife loaned Gillette the three thousand ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... possible an upward step into straight comedy. Even as we talked a capacity house was laughing at his skit, "Who Killed Cock Robin?" just around the corner from his lodgings. So his story was not the invention of a rejected playwright to cover the non-appearance of a ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... Leicester Silk Buckingham (1825-1867), achieved no little popularity as a playwright, several of his free adaptations of French comedies being produced in London between ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... desire to write for the stage, Daudet must have been inadequately endowed with the dramaturgic faculty, that special gift of playmaking which many a poet lacks and many a novelist, but which the humblest playwright must needs have and which all the great dramatists have possessed abundantly in addition to ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... brought a vivacity to the American stage that no other American playwright has thus far succeeded in emulating. The total impression of his work leads one to believe that he also brought to the American stage a style which was at the same time literary and distinctly ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... duty for all, and let us consider, for example, the mechanism of a modern cotton mill, or of a boot factory, or a Hoe printing press, or a plant for electric lighting. All these would be impossible if it had not been for inventive faculties as rare in their way as those of a playwright like Mr. Shaw. ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... generally. These early patrons of the more practical parts of the drama are entitled to be forbearingly judged, however. Their comfort was little studied, and it is not surprising, under the circumstances, that they should have favoured a brisk and vivacious class of representations. The tedious playwright did not merely oppress their minds; he made them remember ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... and playwright, b. at Barrhead, Renfrewshire, s. of a Dissenting minister, entered the chemical department of a sugar refinery in Greenock in his 13th year, returning after one year to school as a pupil teacher. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... them. Scotland lags a little, yet the energy and enthusiasm of Mr Alfred Wareing and the citizens of Glasgow have enabled them to create an institution not unlikely to serve as the home of a real Scots drama. They offer to the native playwright an opportunity of showing that a national drama—not a drama merely echoing the drama of other lands—lies inherent in the race. Who knows that they may not induce that wayward man of genius, J.M. Barrie, to become the parent ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... really great poem or painting or statue or theory lives on from age to age, long after the other products of its time have been forgotten. And if it is really great, the older it grows, the greater it seems. Shakespeare, to his contemporaries, was merely an actor and playwright like any one of a score of others; but, with the passing of years, he has become the most wonderful figure in the world's literature. Rembrandt could scarcely make a living with his brush, industriously as he used it, and passed his days in misery, haunted by his creditors ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... Augustus Thomas, the brilliant playwright, whose home was near the Remingtons on Lathers' Hill, and whose wife, so young, so beautiful and so accomplished, made ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... preface. It is cultured, leisured Europe before the war. When the play was begun not a shot had been fired; and only the professional diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby is foreign policy even knew that the guns were loaded. A Russian playwright, Tchekov, had produced four fascinating dramatic studies of Heartbreak House, of which three, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, had been performed in England. Tolstoy, in his Fruits of Enlightenment, had shown us through it in his most ferociously contemptuous ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... of all kinds—drama, comedy, farce, opera, operetta and ballet. M. Meilhac's new partner was the nephew of the Halevy who is best known out of France as the composer of the Jewess, and he was the son of M. Leon Halevy, poet, philosopher and playwright. Two years younger than M. Henri Meilhac, M. Ludovic Halevy held a place in the French civil service until 1858, when he resigned to devote his whole time, instead of his spare time, to the theatre. As the son of a dramatist and the nephew of a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... Then she had brought back with her some new books and foreign reviews. After dinner she was lying on the great lounge before the fire, curled up in a soft dress of pale lilac, seriously absorbing an article on a Russian playwright. Hers was a little face,—pale, thin, with sunken eyes. The brow was too high, and latterly Margaret paid no attention to arranging her hair becomingly. It was not a face that could be called pretty; it would not be attractive to most men, her husband ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... that we too, in spite of our oppressive forms of government, which permit only a condition of passivity, are men who have their passions and can act, no less than a Frenchman or a Briton.' He therefore cautioned any playwright who might try his hand upon the subject to lay the scene not in a foreign country but in ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... late Marcelino Men['e]ndez y Pelayo, whose death in 1912 was a great blow to Portuguese as well as to Spanish literature, would certainly have changed his view if he had lived. In his brilliant study of Gil Vicente, a 'sovereign genius,' 'the most national playwright before Lope de Vega[26],' 'the greatest figure of our primitive theatre[27],' he remarked that if Vicente had been a goldsmith and one of such skill he must infallibly have left some trace of it in his dramatic works and that the contemporaries who ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... began at last to write. The precious Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, hob-a-nobbed with every Muse in her amazing divagations. But the earliest professional woman of letters was Aphra Behn, the novelist and playwright, to whose genius justice has only quite lately been done by Mr. Montague Summers. Mrs. Behn died in 1689, and it seemed at first that she had left no heritage to her sex. But there presently appeared a set of female ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... exclaimed Hunt. And then: "Say, you're some stage-manager! Or rather same playwright! Playwrights that know tell me it's one of their most difficult tricks—to get all their leading characters on the stage at the same time. And here you've got it all fixed to bring on Miss Sherwood, Dick, Maggie, yourself, and the all-important me—for don't forget I shall be ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... opera, he was obliged to shut him up in a room with his mistress and his favourite cats, without them at his side he could do nothing. The fifth act of Pizarro was actually finished by Sheridan on the first evening of its performance, when the illustrious playwright was shut up in a room with a plate of sandwiches and two bottles of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... work, and the gentleman and scholar is always present. For in contradiction to most of their fellow-workers, they were not on the stage; they never took part in its more practical affairs either as actors or managers; they derived the technical knowledge necessary to a successful playwright from ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... unmercifully; but her reason survived the marriage by two years only, and there were those familiar with the late Lord Rokesle's [Footnote: Born 1685, and accidentally killed by Sir Piers Sabiston in 1738; an accurate account of this notorious duellist, profligate, charlatan, and playwright is given in Ireson's Letters.] peculiarities who considered that in this, at least, the crazed lady was fortunate. Among these gossips it was also esteemed a matter deserving comment that in the shipwrecks not infrequent ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... I can't, Lady Hilda,' Arthur answered. 'My evenings are so dreadfully full just now; and besides, you know, I'm not accustomed to so much society, and it unsettles me for my daily work. After all, you see, I'm a journeyman playwright now, and I have to labour at my unholy calling just ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... my feelings the most entertaining of old Ben's comedies, and, more than any other, would admit of being brought out anew, if under the management of a judicious and stage-understanding playwright; and an actor, who had studied ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... Austrian Minister, eagerly. "And then there is the prerogative of the author and of the playwright to drop a curtain whenever he wants to, or to put a stop to everything by ending the chapter. That isn't fair. That is an advantage over nature. When some one accuses some one else of doing something dreadful at the play, down comes the curtain ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... adultery is the dramatic subject par excellence, and indeed that a play that is not about adultery is not a play at all. I was considered a heresiarch of the most extravagant kind when I expressed my opinion at the outset of my career as a playwright, that adultery is the dullest of themes on the stage, and that from Francesca and Paolo down to the latest guilty couple of the school of Dumas fils, the romantic adulterers have all been ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... proportion of the great mass of correspondence which I turned over. There were letters from Carlo Angiolini, who was afterwards to bring the manuscript of the Memoirs to Brockhaus; from Balbi, the monk with whom Casanova escaped from the Piombi; from the Marquis Albergati, playwright, actor, and eccentric, of whom there is some account in the Memoirs; from the Marquis Mosca, 'a distinguished man of letters whom I was anxious to see,' Casanova tells us in the same volume in which he describes his visit to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Evie's young daughter Alex is the fifth woman in the family, and the drama of The Distaff Side centers chiefly in her and her two suitors who represent such different things. But if the plot belongs to Alex, the honors of the play go to her mother—for seldom has a modern playwright drawn so warm and womanly and endearing a character as Evie. The family life of these people is extraordinarily human, but it is Evie that it revolves around, Evie who ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... interview with Dr. Nash in spite of its importance. For the church clock had been striking eleven when the mare, four minutes after leaving Dr. Nash, reached Strides Cottage. A great deal of talk may be got through in a very little time, as the playwright knows ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... actor at the Lyceum," he said, "and had never met him. He wrote and asked if we would let him read a play to us. As a rule we never do that; but, remembering that Pinero was himself a player, we made an exception. So it came about that one day, after a rehearsal, the actor playwright read his piece to us in the foyer of the St. James's. We never expected anything at first, but the reading ended in our taking the play immediately, though we scarcely knew what we should do with it, seeing it was a two-act play. We found an opportunity, however, and ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... "well-made" play. They are not content, like their predecessors, to leave their characters quite at the mercy of the actor who, in "creating" them, gave them whatever small resemblance to humanity they may have possessed. And as the play gains in vitality, the playwright begins to feel the absolute necessity for writing decent dialogue—not mere stage dialect that may be scamped and ranted ad libitum by the "star" to suit his own taste, or want of it, but real dialogue, which, while ideally ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... his sole, object was to amuse the groundlings. If he often took himself and his art with hardly more seriousness than does the writer of the vaudeville skit or musical comedy of to-day, if he often wished primarily to gain the immediate laugh, then much of Langen's long list of the playwright's dramatic delinquencies is somewhat beside ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... Grub-street writer; writer for the press, gentleman of the press, representative of the press; adjective jerker[obs3], diaskeaust[obs3], ghost, hack writer, ink slinger; publicist; reporter, penny a liner; editor, subeditor[obs3]; playwright &c. 599; poet &c. 597. bookseller, publisher; bibliopole[obs3], bibliopolist[obs3]; librarian; bookstore, bookshop, bookseller's shop. knowledge of books, bibliography; book learning &c. (knowledge) 490. Phr. "among the giant fossils of my past" [E. B. Browning]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... golden secret. Sometimes a character appears but once in the course of a great drama. The man or woman, comes on the stage to deliver one message, and then disappears. But that one brief word has its place in the playwright's scheme, and its effect on the action of the piece. This child was sent to Syria to utter one speech, to speak one name, and because she spoke her little speech, kindly and clearly, things went better with ever ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... around him this Friday evening imbibing chocolate. 'It will be translated into every tongue.' He had passed with a characteristic bound from satisfaction with the Ghetto triumph into cosmopolitan anticipations. 'See,' he added, 'my initials make M.P.—Master Playwright.' ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... this power to reform our institutions is defeat by a vehement "swing of the pendulum" at the next election. Therein lies the peril and the glory of democratic statesmanship. A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation—or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays—is like a blind man's dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... artist like yourself I need hardly suggest that The Nights still offers many a virgin mine to the Playwright; and I inscribe this volume to you, not only in admiration of your genius but in the hope that you will find means of exploiting the hidden wealth which awaits ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... country. Its great power is contested by none; rather, all recognise it, and many and violent are the disputes as to its right use and purpose. I propose to consider two of the disputants—the propagandist playwright and the art-for-art's-sake artist, since they raise issues that are our concern. It is curious that two so violently opposed should be so nearly alike in error: they are both afraid of life. The propagandist ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... a few shillings, and do next to nothing on the stage does not seem a glorious beginning for our heroine, but think of the inestimable luxury of brushing up against Colley Cibber. This remarkable man, who would be in turn actor, manager, playwright, and a pretty bad Poet Laureate before death would put an extinguisher on his prolific muses, had at first no exalted ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... rather comic that all the reviews hailing from Germany where the play was very soon produced compare Chesterton with Shaw and many of them say that he is the better playwright. "He means more to it," a Munich paper was translated as saying, "than the good old Shaw." Chesterton's superiority can hardly be entertained in the matter of technique. Actually what the critic meant was that he preferred the ideas of Chesterton to the ideas of Shaw. Both men were chiefly concerned ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... a temple to Theseus, the Ionian hero; the shrine of AEsculapius at Epidau'rus was famous throughout the classic world; and the exploits of Hercules were commemorated by the Dorians at the tomb of a Ne'mean king. When the bard and the playwright clothed these tales in verse, all Greece hearkened; and when the painter or the sculptor took these subjects for his skill, all Greece applauded. Thus was strengthened the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... were bobbing. Whence came their tunes, so quaintly weird, so boisterous and yet so full of melancholy? The composer has sought to catch them, has touched them with his refining art and has spoiled them. The playwright has striven to transfer from the field to the stage a cotton-picking scene and has made a travesty of it. To transfer the passions of man and to music-riddle them is an art with stiff-jointed rules, but the charm of a cotton-picking scene is an essence, and is breathed but cannot be caught. Here ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... his dream with that dogged pertinacity which is only to be seen in the case of a master passion. When they first were married, he was struggling to be a dramatist. He was quite conscious that, in the trade of the writer, wealth was only to be achieved by the successful playwright. He believed that his was essentially the playwright's instinct. Although his plays met with abundance of good words, they did not attain production. It seemed as if they never would. When they began to be actually starving, she suggested that he should put aside playwriting for a ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... reasonable bounds.[133] With the help of all these, and especially of the last, I shall apply this theory of criticism to Hamlet, not in the hope of saying anything new, but of bringing something to the support of the thesis, that, if Shakespeare was skilful as a playwright, he was even greater as a dramatist,—that, if his immediate business was to fill the theatre, his higher object was to create something which, by fulfilling the conditions and answering the requirements ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... as the unpleasant business which had brought him to Florence. Often after their banquets the Academicians were wont to amuse themselves with short impromptu dramatic representations, and so this evening the distinguished playwright and poet Filippo Apolloni called upon those who generally took part in them to bring the festivities to a fitting conclusion with one of their usual performances. Salvator at once withdrew to make all ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... attachment to another woman who deserts him when he falls into poverty, all coincide with the facts in his own career. From this we may infer that what follows has also a substratum of truth regarding a temporary connection of Greene with Alleyn's company as playwright, though it is evident that he describes Alleyn's theatrical conditions as they were between 1589 and 1592 and after Alleyn had acquired the theatrical properties of the old Admiral's company from Richard Jones, Robert Browne, and his brother, John Alleyn, ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... were terrible, and might be heard for miles. The country folk left their homes until after his death. "It is to be hoped," says Mr. Dodd, the local historian, "that the statement about the man being gibbeted alive is a fiction." Some years ago, a local playwright dramatised the story for the Spennymoor theatre, where ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... part Czar Alexander had played at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. A vehement outcry arose at the universities against the interference of foreigners in German affairs. The wrath of the Liberals turned against August von Kotzebue, the prolific playwright, who held the office of Russian agent in central Germany. Kotzebue conducted a weekly newspaper at Mannheim in which he inveighed against the German national movement of the day, and ridiculed the patriotic eccentricities of the students. Having himself ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... Subsequent editors and critics, notably the Cambridge editors and the Rev. F. G. Fleay, in his "Shakespearian Manual," starting from this view, have gone so far as to say that "Macbeth," as we have it, is not all Shakespeare's, but in part the work of Thomas Middleton, a second or third-rate playwright contemporary with Shakespeare, who wrote a play, called "The Witch," which is plainly an imitation of the supernatural scenes in this tragedy. The Cambridge editors believe that Middleton was permitted to supply certain scenes at the time of the writing of Macbeth: ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... for the Francais. Sebastien was devoted to the author,—who occasionally gave him tickets to the pit,—and applauded his pieces at the parts which du Bruel told him were of doubtful interest, with all the faith and enthusiasm of his years. In fact, the youth looked upon the playwright as a great author, and it was to Sebastien that du Bruel said, the day after a first representation of a vaudeville produced, like all vaudevilles, by three collaborators, "The audience preferred the ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... attacks are planned and delivered against the most sacred institutions, when people are not at their best, but are restless, rebellious and impatient of restraint; for nations like individuals can go mad. Then it is that the wide-awake novelist and playwright see their opportunity, and the temporary success of the sex-play or the breezy romance is the reflection of the thoughts—none of the best—that are for the moment flitting through men's feverish minds. But we soon return to saner moments; ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... politician, was born May, 1805. He was the son of William Earle Bulwer, and owes his chief fame to his novels, some of which are among the best in the English language, notably The Caxtons, My Novel, What will He do with It? and A Strange Story. As a playwright he was equally successful; he was the author of The Lady of Lyons—the most popular play of modern days;—Richelieu, Not so Bad as we Seem, the admirable comedy of Money, etc. A man of prodigious industry he showed himself equal to the highest efforts ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... possible to earn a livelihood as an actor and playwright. Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn, the leading actors of their generation, made large fortunes. Shakspere himself made enough from his share in the profits of the Globe to retire with a competence, some seven ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... nearly all his time in going to the playhouse every day. It was at Southampton's suggestion, that, in the week preceding the Christmas of 1594, the Lord Chamberlain sent word to The Theatre in Shoreditch, where Shakespeare was at work as playwright and actor, that the poet was expected at Court on two days following Christmas, in order to give his sovereign on the two evenings a taste of his quality. He was to act before her ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... and Lancelot Vane, the young man, budding poet and playwright, who had found himself involved in a dangerous squabble, which might mean his death, over a girl whom he had only seen for a few minutes, had the sense to take it. But it was no easy task to extricate himself. A burly ruffian was approaching ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... all literature, dear boy. Clarissa is a masterpiece, there are fourteen volumes of her, and the most wooden-headed playwright would give you the whole of Clarissa in a single act. So long as I amuse you, what have you to complain of? That costume was positively lovely. Don't you like camillias? Would you rather have dahlias? No? Very good, chestnuts then, here's for you." (And probably Bixiou flung a chestnut ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... Grub-street writer; writer for the press, gentleman of the press, representative of the press; adjective jerker^, diaskeaust^, ghost, hack writer, ink slinger; publicist; reporter, penny a liner; editor, subeditor^; playwright &c 599; poet &c 597. bookseller, publisher; bibliopole^, bibliopolist^; librarian; bookstore, bookshop, bookseller's shop. knowledge of books, bibliography; book learning &c (knowledge) 490. Phr. among the giant fossils of my past [E. B. Browning]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... were paid for," said the playwright. "They were not broken purposely. In her anger, because we remonstrated with her ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... of the differences of human character, an appreciation for which there was no need in the miracle. In the morality again the action is no longer determined by tradition, and it becomes incumbent on the playwright to provide motives for the movements of his puppets. It follows naturally from this that situations must be devised to show up the particular quality which each type symbolizes. We need not enter the vexed question of the origin ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... a patron of art and literature that Louis XIV gained much of his celebrity. Molire, who was at once a playwright and an actor, delighted the court with comedies in which he delicately satirized the foibles of his time. Corneille, who had gained renown by the great tragedy of The Cid in Richelieu's time, found a worthy successor in Racine, the most distinguished perhaps of French ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... have your existence perpetuated in gymnasiums, and your immortality laboriously dragged about in a schoolboy's satchel. A precious recompense for your lavished blood to be wrapped round gingerbread by some Nuremberg chandler, or, if you have great luck, to be screwed upon stilts by a French playwright, and be made to move on wires! ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the role of a domestic Cassandra. Flaminio and not Marcello is made the main instrument of Vittoria's crime and elevation. The Cardinal Montalto is called Monticelso, and his papal title is Paul IV. instead of Sixtus V. These are details of comparative indifference, in which a playwright may fairly use his liberty of art. On the other hand, Webster shows a curious knowledge of the picturesque circumstances of the tale. The garden in which Vittoria meets Bracciano is the villa of Magnanapoli; Zanche, the Moorish ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... himself to be the criminal, imagines how he would act under the same circumstances, and he imagines to such purpose that he generally finds the man he wants. I have often told Lyle that if he had not been a detective he would have made a great success as a poet or a playwright. ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... York City; playwright, author of "Chinese Lily." Once matron of Framingham reformatory for purpose of studying prison conditions. Arrested picketing Nov. 10, 1917, and sentenced to 30 days ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... works are the famous pastoral romance of the Arcadia, written to please his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, and the short Apology for Poetry, a very spirited piece of work, immediately provoked by a rather silly diatribe against the theatre by one Stephen Gosson, once a playwright himself, but turned Puritan clergyman. Both appear to have been written about the same time—that is to say, between 1579 and 1581; Sidney being then in London and in the society of Spenser and other ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... was connected as well as it was derived, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for instance, being the novelist's cousin. He was educated at Eton and Leyden: but his branch of the family being decidedly impecunious, was thrown very much on his own resources. These were mainly drawn from literature, first as a playwright then as a novelist, journalism and miscellanies coming in. But he was called to the Bar: and though he probably did not make much money there, he obtained the poorly paid and hard-worked but rather important ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury |
