"Shakespearean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Dajlah (Tigris) and Furat (Euphrates) see vols. viii. 150- ix. 17. The topothesia is worse than Shakespearean. In Weber's Edit. of the "New Arabian Nights" (Adventures of Simoustapha, etc.), the rivers are called "Ilfara" ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... claimed to be a tenor, but was more correctly a tenorino, his voice possessing far more sweetness than power. He was already well-known and popular, for he had taken the part of Romeo in Gounod's well-known opera based on the Shakespearean play. Like many another singer, Victor Capoul might have become forgotten before very long, but a curious circumstance, having nothing to do with vocalism, diffused and perpetuated his name. He adopted a particular way of dressing his hair, ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... literary testimonies that I consider the most striking evidence of the influence of Italian professional technique on English professional actors. It is a remarkable discovery made by the highly esteemed Shakespearean archaeologist, Edmund Malone, about a century ago, in Dulwich College, that mine of ancient English dramatic research, founded by the actor ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... not in the least bumptious. He began very nervously with a carefully prepared Shakespearean quotation—"'I am no orator as Brutus is,'" in compliment to Jenkinson. Then he gave me a lift. He said that my presence there was a proof, if proof were needed, of the solidarity—he would repeat the ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... give one entertainment a month?" asked Mary Reynolds eagerly. "I am sure President Morton would let us have Greek Hall. We could give different kinds of entertainments. One month we could give a Shakespearean play and the next a Greek tragedy; then we could act a scenario, or have a musical revue or whatever we liked. We could make posters to advertise each one and state frankly on them that the proceeds were to go to the Harlowe ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... main extent a different hand, and it is now generally admitted to have been the work of Fletcher. With the keenest insight he noticed that the magician Prospero was an impersonation of Shakespeare himself; and George Brandes, the most thoroughgoing of Shakespearean scholars, afterwards came ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... and was as exhausting emotionally as the Passion Play is said to be. I had the vision of a great period of Communist art, more especially of such open-air spectacles, which should have the grandeur and scope and eternal meaning of the plays of ancient Greece, the mediaeval mysteries, or the Shakespearean theatre. In building, writing, acting, even in painting, work would be done, as it once was, by groups, not by one hand or mind, and evolution would proceed slowly until once again the individual emerged from ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... along with the souls of men, the ass that carried Balaam is one, the dog of the Seven Sleepers the other. This is no small distinction. From what has been written about this beast might be compiled a library of great splendor and magnitude, rivalling that of the Shakespearean cult, and that which clusters about the Bible. It may be said, generally, that all literature is ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... recognized the true emporium of taste. We resolved that this discriminating company should not repent its choice. A week before the great first night, magnificent posters in red and blue set before us, in very choice English, the dramatic performances, "Shakespearean and otherwise," destined to take place among us. The leading parts were to be assumed by Mr. and Mrs. Van Rensellaer Wilde, "two of the foremost artists in the stellar world, supported ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... What Shakespearean characters does Geoffrey of Monmouth introduce? How is Layamon's Brut related to Geoffrey's chronicle? Point out a likeness between the Brut and the work ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... old heathen novels that held its ground, that can be traced in more than one early monastic library, and that was translated into every vernacular—Anglo-Saxon first. This was the Romance of Apollonius of Tyre, from which comes the story of that Shakespearean play, ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... of dramatic approach in their plays are absolutely and fundamentally different. Even their very methods of writing verse are entirely different. Tennyson’s blank verse seems at its best to combine the beauties of the Miltonic and the Wordsworthian line; while nothing is so rare in his work as a Shakespearean line. Now and then such ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... considered that great plays live longer than great actors, though little plays do not live nearly so long as the worst of their exponents. The consequence is that the great actor, instead of putting pressure on contemporary authors to supply him with heroic parts, falls back on the Shakespearean repertory, and takes what he needs from a dead hand. In the nineteenth century, the careers of Kean, Macready, Barry Sullivan, and Irving, ought to have produced a group of heroic plays comparable in intensity to those of Aeschylus, ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... distinguished draughtsman and engraver, about the end of the eighteenth century fabricated a pretended Shakespeare MSS., which as a literary forgery was the most remarkable of its time. Previous to his confessions it had been accepted by the Shakespearean scholars as unquestionably the work of the immortal bard. The following is a citation from ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... and Isaac (Riverside L. S. vol., p. 7); The Deluge or others in the Everyman Library vol., pp. 29-135 (but the play 'Everyman' is not a Mystery play and belongs to the next assignment); or any in Manly's 'Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama,' vol. I, pp. 1-211. The Towneley Second Shepherds' Play (so called because it is the second of two treatments of the Nativity theme in the Towneley manuscript) is one of the most notable plays, but is very coarse. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Examples of the miracle-plays may be found in Marriott's Collection of English Miracle-Plays, 1838; in Hone's Ancient Mysteries; in T. Sharpe's Dissertaion on the Pageants.. . anciently performed at Coventry, Coventry, 1828; in the publications of the Shakespearean and other societies. See especially The Harrowing of Hell, a miracle-play, edited from the original now in the British Museum, by T. O. Halliwell, London, 1840. One of the items still preserved is a sum of money paid for keeping ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... extracts from this story, for I wished to convey a notion of the author's pulsating, vibrant, and impassioned style. There is more of the drama here than of the novel, and an elemental fierceness like that of Shakespearean drama. It would be well if these pages, so profound in the bitterness of their injustice, were to become widely known. It would be well if the poor women who, in all love as a rule, adopt a superhuman pose, could be made to realise, by means of this madman's outpourings, the ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... Memorial edifice. There is a theatre, in a round tower which has borrowed some traits from the octagon "Globe" theatre of Shakespeare's day; a Shakespeare library and portrait gallery are forming; and in due time these buildings, of stately dimensions and built solidly of brick, will constitute a Shakespearean centre which will attract to itself many mementoes now scattered about in various ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... our dear departed Mary Brooks would say," declared Katherine, "is: Blessings brighten as diplomas come on apace. Between trying not to miss any fun and doing my best to distinguish myself in the scholarly pursuits that my soul loves, I am well nigh distraught. Don't mind my Shakespearean English, please. I'm on the senior play committee, and I recite ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... grades, except one, who had taken his High School examinations and is now at the head of a department in a large department store and a prominent member of a political study club. The others, who had expected to play prominent Shakespearean parts with little or no work, were easily discouraged, dropped off and were seen no more. The reading of very simple plays at first is a good stepping-stone to a study of Shakespeare later, but the plays must be ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... Slave Traffic all rot. He had worked sufficiently in the bad towns of the South Welsh coast and had had an initiation into the lower-living parts of Birmingham and London to be skeptical about the existence of these poor, deluded virgins, lured from their humble respectable homes and thrust by Shakespearean procuresses, bawds, and bullies into an impure life. If they went to these places abroad it was probably with the hope of greater gains, better food, and stricter medical attention. However, he kept most of these thoughts to himself and ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... Gaudissart' (The Illustrious Gaudissart), and 'La Muse du departement' (The Departmental Muse). Of these 'Eugenie Grandet' is of course easily first in interest, pathos, and power. The character of old Grandet, the miserly father, is presented to us with Shakespearean vividness, although Eugenie herself has, less than the Shakespearean charm. Any lesser artist would have made the tyrant himself and his yielding wife and daughters seem caricatures rather than living ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... by your ardent expressions of sympathy and friendship. You scarcely know what Lord Byron was to us at the dawn of our literature, how our greatest poets, Poushkin and Lermontov, were swayed by him. You scarcely know to what an extent the Shakespearean Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, has become a part of our literature, how near to us is ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... is sufficiently near to the point in question, to make clear what I mean: the supremacy of Antony and Cleopatra in the Shakespearean aesthetic is yet jealously disputed, and it seems silly to the academic to put it up against a work like Hamlet. But it is the comparatively more obvious achievement of Hamlet, its surface intellectuality, which made it the favourite of actors ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... Library contains the manuscript copy of Charles Macklin's COVENT GARDEN THEATRE, OR PASQUIN TURN'D DRAWCANSIR in two acts (Larpent 96) which is here reproduced in facsimile.[1] It is an interesting example of that mid-eighteenth-century phenomenon, the afterpiece, from a period when not only Shakespearean stock productions but new plays as well were accompanied by such farcical appendages.[2] This particular afterpiece is worth reproducing not only for its catalogue of the social foibles of the age, but as an ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... young defendants and begun in this strain: "Gentlemen of the Jury, are you prepared that these two young men shall enter upon life and go through life with the stain of a dishonourable transaction for ever affixed to them," and so forth at just sufficient length and with just enough of Shakespearean padding about honour. The result with that emotional and probably irregular Western court is obvious, and the story concludes with the quite credible assertion that the defendants themselves were relieved. Any good jury would, of course, have been steeled ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... German translation of Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" that became very popular. Poets wrote plays in the style of Terence, or copied English models; and even in the present day the Germans recall with pride the fact that the Shakespearean plays were appreciated by them during and after the Elizabethan age much more than they were by the ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... the late "eighties," Lady Constance Leslie's two elder daughters, now Mrs. Crawshay and Lady Hope, developed a singular gift. They could improvise blank verse indefinitely, and with their father, Sir John Leslie, they acted little mock Shakespearean dramas in their ordinary clothes, and without any scenery or accessories. Every word was impromptu, and yet the even flow of blank verse never ceased. I always thought it a singularly clever performance, for Mrs. Crawshay can only have ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... an immense amount of enthusiasm there was, as Sainte-Beuve confessed, an incredible amount of ignorance—so that Cromwell was supposed to be historical; and with a passionate delight in form there co-existed a strangely imperfect understanding of material—so that Hernani was supposed to be Shakespearean. To this ignorance and to this imperfect understanding Hugo owed a certain part of his authority; the other and greater he got from his unrivalled mastery of style, from his extraordinary skill as an artist in words. To the opposing faction his innovations were horrible: ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... we should be without a vestige of his handwriting. For certain other signatures, professing to be his, inscribed in books, may be dismissed as imitations. Such forgeries come up from time to time, as might be expected, and are placed upon the market. The Shakespearean forgeries, however, of W. H. Ireland were perpetrated rather with a literary intent than as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... an end. At first he had imagined it possible to become supreme in histrionic art,—one who should sway the emotions of thousands by a word, a look or a gesture,—he had meant to be the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day; and with his knowledge of French, which was as perfect as his knowledge of English, he had even foreseen the possibility of taking the French stage as well as the English by storm. But when he gradually came to discover the mean tricks and miserable treacheries used ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... prophesied would be the highest class of poetry in the immediate future (which prophecy was fulfilled), does not interest Mr. De La Mare; maybe he feels that it has been done so well that he prefers to let it alone. His remarkable thirteen poems dealing with Shakespearean characters—where he attempts with considerable success to pluck out the heart of the mystery—are all descriptive. Perhaps the most original and beautiful of ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... "skirling" of the pipes; but no Scotchman even could pretend to delight in the shrill notes of the cennamella. The former at least of these two popular instruments of southern Italy was well known to the omniscient author of the Shakespearean plays, for in Othello we have a direct allusion to the uncouth braying music still made to-day by ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... whole volume does he allow his prejudices, his opinions, his sentiments to crop out. We lose complete sight of the author in his work. With marvellous fidelity he explains the movements, the vices and the virtues of each party, and with Shakespearean tact, he conceals his identity, so that we are troubled with none of that Byronic vice of 'dipping ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... due regard to the works of the great masters—though here again I suppose they were really following the traditions of the theatre as preserved by the pictures. The figures gained by hiding their legs, but Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus had not this advantage. They were princes and were like Shakespearean young men of the brilliant water-fly type, such as Osric. Misandro was also a prince. He was a swaggerer and behaved as badly as any paladin, but he was not a buffo. When they do the Nativita at Christmas a buffo is permitted, he accompanies the Shepherds ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... neighbour might be passing to whom he could proclaim his boyish jaunt. The 'Well I never, sir,' even of a rural parishioner did in some sort minister to his vanity. An audience was a necessity to him. He regretted that his cloth forbade him to indulge in private theatricals, but he encouraged Shakespearean readings and often 'dressed up to please the children.' Sometimes of an evening he would perform upon the piano, indulging in a series of broken chords which he called improvisation, and upon these occasions he felt that he was a kind and thoughtful master when he set the drawing-room ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... reappeared at the Broadway Theatre, New York. In February, 1853, "Macbeth" was produced in grand style, with new scenery and appointments. The tragedy was played on twenty consecutive nights, then by far the longest run of any Shakespearean play in America. The cast was very strong. It included Conway, Duff, Davenport, Pope, Davidge, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... whose heirs they declared themselves to be—(like every other nation in Europe). Every now and then they felt they ought to include Shakespeare. That was the touchstone. There were two schools of Shakespearean interpreters: the one played King Lear, with a commonplace realism, like a comedy of Emile Augier: the other turned Hamlet into an opera, with bravura airs and vocal exercises a la Victor Hugo. It never occurred to them that reality could be poetic ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... own lap in such abundance that the white snow wreaths hung half a yard beyond the roof; in some places folded back with consummate art. The grey-black wall under the snow wreaths looked like an old Persian fabric. It seemed ready to appear in a Shakespearean drama. The background of mountains and hills gleamed in ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... Shakespearean in its capacity for creating characters of real flesh and blood; for making great historical personages as real and vital as our next-door neighbors, and for bursts of sustained story telling that carry the reader on for scores of pages ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... 'As You Like It,'" he observed. "These Shakespearean heroines are a bad lot. May I ask just why you want me to propose to you, my dear? Do you have to collect a certain number of scalps by this particular rare day in June? Or is it that you think you would enjoy the exquisite pleasure of seeing ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... production, it remains, with its noble public library in its midst, and with Harvard University on its outskirts, a great centre of culture. I shall always remember a luncheon party at Harvard, where I was the guest of an eminent Shakespearean critic, and had for my fellow guests a very learned Dante scholar (one of the most delightful talkers imaginable), a famous psychologist, a political economist, and a lecturer on English literature. ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... too many glass windows about," was the excuse of one editor, softening the return of a manuscript. But Berlioz did not fully know himself or appreciate the tendencies fermenting within him until in 1830 he became the victim of a grand Shakespearean passion. The great English dramatist wrought most powerfully on Victor Hugo and Hector Berlioz, and had much to do with their artistic development. Berlioz gives a very interesting account of his Shakespearean enthusiasm, which also involved ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... pencil, eyebrowed with brown grease-paint; whose long, shapeless body, eloquent, expressive hands, and legs that were very good as legs go, taking them separately, but did not match, had been that night, his admirers declared, moved and possessed by the very spirit of Shakespearean Tragedy—"He was so great! Don't you agree with ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the younger people of the present generation know, by personal experience, how nobly and incomparably Edwin Booth enriched the modern stage with his vivid portraitures of Shakespearean characters. The tragic fervor, the startling passion, and the impressive dignity with which he invested his various roles, have not been equaled, I daresay, by any actor on the English speaking stage since the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... by mere Shakespeare and Milton, Though Hubbard compels me to rave; If I should lay laurels to wilt on That foggy Shakespearean grave, How William would squirm ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... they had a mind to; there were those who had them set far over back—wide-awake men, who wanted a clear prospect; while careless men, who did not know, or care, how their hats sat, had them shaking about in all directions. The various hats, in fact, were quite a Shakespearean study. ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... hardly too much to say that it was the first chapter in the literary exploitation of witchcraft. Out of the Declaration Shakespeare and Ben Jonson mined those ores which when fused and refined by imagination and fancy were shaped into the shining forms of art. Shakespearean scholars have pointed out the connection between the dramatist and the exposer of exorcism. It has indeed been suggested by one student of Shakespeare that the great playwright was lending his aid by certain allusions in Twelfth Night to Harsnett's attempts ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... which Ibsen can be said to show maturity of craftsmanship is The Vikings at Helgeland. It is curious to note that both in The Vikings and in The Pretenders, two plays which are in some measure comparable with Shakespearean tragedies, he opens with a firmly-touched einleitende Akkord. In The Vikings, Ornulf and his sons encounter and fight with Sigurd and his men, very much after the fashion of the Montagues and Capulets in Romeo and Juliet. In The Pretenders ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... thrust out on to the sand on the slender provocation of a bandstand, the man who had built his hotel with a roof covered with cupolas and minarets and had called it "Westward Ho!" must, Ellen thought, be lovely people, like Shakespearean fools. She liked it, too, when they came to the vulgarer part of the town and the place assumed the strange ceremented air that a pleasure city wears in winter. The houses had fallen back, and the esplanade was overhung now by a steep green slope on which asphalt walks linked shelters, in which ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... at his father's house in Canada, he bought up all the stove-pipe wire in the town, and tacked it to a rail fence between the house and a telegraph office. Then he went to a village eight miles distant and sent scraps of songs and Shakespearean quotations ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... prove, however, that his marriage to Harriet Westbrook took place in a Presbyterian church in Edinburgh, and that, at a later period, he was twice arrested for debt. Mr. Ingpen holds that they also prove that Shelley "appeared on the boards of the Windsor Theatre as an actor in Shakespearean drama." But we have only William Whitton, the solicitor's words for this, and it is clear that he had been at no pains to investigate the matter. "It was mentioned to me yesterday," he wrote to Shelley's father in November, 1815, "that Mr. P.B. Shelley was exhibiting himself ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... rather say to conjecture, the authorship of the humorous scenes in prose, showing as they generally do a power of comparatively high and pure comic realism to which nothing in the acknowledged works of any pre-Shakespearean dramatist is even remotely comparable. Yet, especially in the original text of these scenes as they stand unpurified by the ultimate revision of Shakespeare, there are tones and touches which recall rather the clownish horseplay and ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... are sculptor, painter, architect. Of detail criticism ("dry-as-dust" criticism, to use Carlyle's term) there is much, though none too much, which work requires scholarship and painstaking, and is necessary. Malone is a requirement of Shakespearean study. But, candidly, is verbal, textual criticism the largest, truest criticism? Dust is not man, though man is dust. No geologist's biography of the marble from Carrara, nor a biographer's sketch of the sculptor, will explain the statue, nor do justice to the artist's conception. ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... Reginald Bug, a young Englishman, who loved her passionately for a few years; then the renowned Pierre Dentifrice from the Comedie Francaise; then Angelo Carlini, and Basto Caballero (founder of the Shakespearean Theatre in Barcelona); then Dimitri Chuggski, a very temperamental, highly strung Russian (it is in Volume VIII. of Edgar Sheepmeadow's "Beds and their Inmates" that he relates the story of Chuggski's desertion of Gretchen; ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... don't forget Judge Tracer's dinner to-morrow night. You will have to come home earlier than usual, for it is such a long drive, and it will never do to keep his mulligatawny waiting. And, by the way, I made a new engagement for you to-day. Mrs. General Leighton has invited us to join the Shakespearean Club which she is getting up. It is to be very select. Will meet at the different houses, you know, with a choice little supper at the close. She says the one she belonged to in Atlanta was a brilliant affair. She comes from one of Georgia's first ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... team, was to make a few grief-saturated remarks. So was Perkins. Every one was confidently expecting Perkins to make the effort of his life and swamp the chapel in sorrow. He was in the secret and he afterward said that he would rather try to write a Shakespearean tragedy offhand than to write another funeral oration about a man who he knew was at that moment sitting in a pair of pajamas in an upper room half a mile away and yelling ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... critics thought little of Shakespeare because he failed to follow in the footsteps of the great Greeks, so some modern critics care naught for the best work of the dramatists of our own time, because this is not cast in the Shakespearean mold. The Elizabethan critics could not know the difference between the theater of Dionysius in Athens and the bare cockpit of the Globe in London; and there are their kin to-day who cannot perceive the difference between the half-roofed playhouse for ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... glories, Canterbury began to decline, and the dissolution of the two great monasteries and the demolishing of Becket's shrine must have been to the city, on a much larger scale, what the sweeping away of all the Shakespearean landmarks and relics from Stratford-on-Avon of to-day would imply. Nevertheless the city could afford to present Queen Elizabeth with l. 30 in a scented purse when she came thither in 1564, and the fact that Canterbury remained the chief centre of the authority and state of the English ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home
... face, said: "I have taught a Sunday-school class of sixteen young men for three years, and have not seen one of them converted. I believe I know why, and now confess my sin. Being a teacher in the city schools, I thought I must see a Shakespearean play, and went to the theater one night. I saw several of my class there, and they all seemed to be looking at me as if surprised. Next day I met some of them, and they confessed surprise that I was at the theater. I have been conscious from that time that I ...
— The Art of Soul-Winning • J.W. Mahood
... perhaps Shakespearean rather than English, and in a fashion escapes from any national labelling. But the note of silence which Shakespeare suddenly brings in upon the turmoil, and with which he is so fond of completing what he has done, would not be possible ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... them,—towns awakened by the cries of the watchmen, running with glad shouts, to meet the divine Bridegroom, whose footsteps shake the earth,—the vast store of thoughts, passions, musical forms, heroic life, Shakespearean hallucinations, Savonarolaesque prophecies, pastoral, epic, apocalyptic visions, all contained in the stunted body of the little Thuringian cantor, with his double chin, and little shining eyes ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... Liebesverbot ("The Prohibition to Love"), written in 1834, is eminently symptomatic of the first stage. It is a coarser rendering of that bluntest of all Shakespearean plays, Measure for Measure; its sole subject is the pursuit of sensual pleasure, in which all indulge, and the ridiculing of those who appear to yearn for something higher. To detail the contents of the text—it ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... then than now. But when it came to the eclaircissement, and the pretty boys, who had been playing the parts of women disguised as men, had to own themselves women, the effect must have been confused if not weakened. If Mme. Bernhardt, in the necessity of doing something Shakespearean, had chosen to do Rosalind, or Viola, or Portia, she could have done it with all the modern advantages of women in men's roles. These characters are, of course, "lighter motions bounded in a shallower brain" than the creation she ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... while I was thus under the full spell of the Shakespearean necromancy that a significant event occurred. My Father took me up to London for the first time since my infancy. Our visit was one of a few days only, and its purpose was that we might take part in ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... History of Theatrical Art in Ancient and Modern Times. Authorised Translation by Louise von Cossel. Vol. III, "The Shakespearean Period in ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... operatic music, furnished me with the keynote of my conception, which was directed more particularly against puritanical hypocrisy, and which thus tended boldly to exalt 'unrestrained sensuality.' I took care to understand the grave Shakespearean theme only in this sense. I could see only the gloomy strait-laced viceroy, his heart aflame with the most passionate love for the beautiful novice, who, while she beseeches him to pardon her brother condemned to death ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... writes on Shakespeare must owe much to his predecessors. Where I was conscious of a particular obligation, I have acknowledged it; but most of my reading of Shakespearean criticism was done many years ago, and I can only hope that I have not often reproduced as my ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Schiller's Brigands and Cabal and Love, were greeted as the promising forerunners of the national literature to come. Their subjects were German and modern, not French or classic; in their plan they affected Shakespearean liberty; in their language they were at once familiar, strong, and original; in their inspiration they were protests against the social prejudices and political abuses of the time, vehement ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... reason to believe that he was carefully groomed for the role of a national hero at a critical time, the process being like the launching by American politicians of a Presidential or Gubernatorial boom at a time when a name to conjure with is badly needed. He is a striking answer to the Shakespearean question. His name alone is worth many army corps for its psychological effect on the people; it has a peculiarly heroic ring to the German ear, and part of the explanation of its magic lies probably in the fact that the last syllable, "burg," means fortress or ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... reconciled, produce every night a thrill of admiration. Our cook told my mother (there is a servants' night, you know) that she and the housemaid were "just prood to be able to say it was oor young gentleman." To sup afterwards with these clothes on, and a wonderful lot of gaiety and Shakespearean jokes about the table, is something to live for. It is so nice to feel you have been dead three hundred years, and the sound of your laughter is faint and far off in the centuries.—Ever ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of style and harmony in the successive works of Shakespeare must in some indefinite degree be perceptible to the youngest as to the oldest, to the dullest as to the keenest of Shakespearean students. But to trace and verify the various shades and gradations of this progress, the ebb and flow of alternate influences, the delicate and infinite subtleties of change and growth discernible in the spirit and the speech of the greatest among ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... remarks on several of the plants, which I had added with a special reference to the horticultural character of "The Garden" newspaper. But I decided to retain them, on finding that they interested some readers, by whom the literary and Shakespearean notices were ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... laughter, no hoydenish swagger in her masquerading; it was all subtly, irresistibly feminine. And George Travis, watching from the obscurity of a back seat, pounded his knee with triumph and swore he would make her the greatest Shakespearean ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... dramatic form, Beddoes will survive to students, not to readers, of English poetry, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ebenezer Jones and Charles Wells. Charles Wells was certainly more of a dramatist, a writer of more sustained and Shakespearean blank verse; Ebenezer Jones had certainly a more personal passion to express in his rough and tumultuous way; but Beddoes, not less certainly, had more of actual poetical genius than either. And in the end only one thing counts: ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Edwin Booth in a Shakespearean play. I was told that all my wealthy hunting friends would join me at breakfast the next morning. I was up at seven o'clock and waiting for them. The hours dragged slowly by and no guests arrived. I was nearly famished, but did not dare eat until the ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... negligibilius nihil esse possit, and the book is a great one from beginning to end. The mere historians who quarrel with it have probably never read the romances which justify it, even from the point of view of literary 'document.' The picturesque opening; the Shakespearean character of Wamba; the splendid Passage of Arms; the more splendid siege of Torquilstone; the gathering up of a dozen popular stories of the 'King-and-the-Tanner' kind into the episodes of the Black Knight and the Friar; the admirable, if a little conventional, sketch of Bois-Guilbert, the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... of the vices that are so unpopular that the mob may be easily persuaded to attack them. One of the chief differences between the two kinds of virtue, I fancy, is that while true virtue regards the mob-spirit as an enemy, simular virtue (if we may adopt the Shakespearean phrase) looks to the mob as its cousin and its ally. To be virtuous in the latter sense is obviously as easy as hunting rats or cats. Virtue of this kind is simply the eternal huntsman in man's breast with eyes aglint for a victim. It is Mr Murdstone's virtue—the persecutor's virtue. It ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... on the same order as the formal ball. The invitations are issued two or three weeks before the date set for the dance, and as for the debut dance, the word ball does not appear on it. Instead the words "Costumes of the Twelfth Century" or "Shakespearean Costumes" or whatever may be decided upon are printed in the lower left-hand corner ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... Mary, from what a thrifty and hard-working lot of ancestors you are descended! You inherit from your mother your love of work and from your father your love of books. Your father's uncle was a noted Shakespearean scholar." ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... frequently played but, although the stage-mounting has been exceptionally good, and we have had such very fair actors as Creswick, and Hoskins, and Scott-Siddons, a high, authority has recently declared that Rignold's 'Henry V.' is the only Shakespearean performance, that has paid ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... said that Aeschylean Tragedy is more nearly allied to sculpture; Shakespearean Tragedy to ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... one—not quite entire but substantive—prose tale in Anglo-Saxon, the version of the famous story of Apollonius of Tyre, which was to be afterwards declined by Chaucer, but attempted by his friend and contemporary Gower, and to be enshrined in the most certain of the Shakespearean "doubtfuls," Pericles. It most honestly gives itself out as a translation (no doubt from the Latin though there was an early Greek original) and it deals briefly with the subject. But as an example of narrative style it is very far indeed from being contemptible: and in passages such as Apollonius' ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... frankly enough to David. At such times his language took an exasperating Shakespearean turn. He was abominably fond of posing as Lear or Jaques—as a man much buffeted, and acquainted with all the ugly secrets of life. Purcell stood generally for 'the enemy;' and to Purcell his half-mad fancy attributed most of his misfortunes. It was Purcell who had ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... worship that which is not-me, the Selfless world, though we would fain bring in the Self to help us. We are shouting the Shakespearean advice to warriors: 'Then simulate the action of the tiger.' We are trying to become again the tiger, the supreme, imperial, warlike Self. At the same time our ideal is the selfless ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... discreet holes and corners the letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearean." ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... origin, and in the form of the legend of "Barlaam and Josaphat" was familiar in all the literatures of the Middle Ages. Combined with this in the plot is the tale of Abou Hassan from the "Arabian Nights," the main situations in which are turned to farcical purposes in the Induction to the Shakespearean "Taming of the Shrew." But with Calderon the theme is lifted altogether out of the atmosphere of comedy, and is worked up with poetic sentiment and a touch of mysticism into a symbolic drama of ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... old maids. "Love's Labour's Lost" is filled with the same energy, and there it falls even more definitely into the scope of our subject, since it is a comedy in rhyme in which all men speak lyrically as naturally as the birds sing in pairing time. What the love of love is to the Shakespearean comedies, that other and more mysterious human passion, the love of death, is to "L'Aiglon." Whether we shall ever have in England a new tradition of poetic comedy it is difficult at present to say, but we shall assuredly never have it until we realise that comedy is built upon ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... story of Zenothemis and Menecrates (in "Toxaris, vel De Amicitia"). The third scene of the third act, where Lassenbergh in the hearing of the enchanter chides Lucilia for following him, is obviously imitated from "Midsummer Night's Dream," and in single lines of other scenes we catch Shakespearean echoes. But the writer's power is shown at its highest in the scene (iii. 6) where Lucilia's faltering recollection strives to pierce the veil of her spell-bound senses, gains the light for an instant, and then is lost again in the tumult of contending ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... Bawcock, if you please, an', by the way, won't mind my calling you Bawcock, will you? Good Shakespearean word, bawcock: ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... a Shakespearean, bold and unabashed, is not content with a mere summing-up, but, with a gravity and wealth of detail worthy of De Foe, has presented us with what purports to be a verbatim report of so much of the proceedings in a ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell |
