"Tragi-comedy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thought the Master, contemptuously, being like Uncle Ewen a classic of the classics. But the face of little Alice Hooper, which he caught from time to time, watching—with a strained and furtive attention—the conversation between Pryce and her cousin, was really a tragedy; at least a tragi-comedy. Some girls ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was speaking figuratively, and that his meteorology was entirely personal to Lapham. "What do you mean?" he asked, without vivid interest in the allegory, his mind being full of his own tragi-comedy. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... unity of main action. But it borrows from the romance-idea the liberty of a large accretion and divagation of minor and accessory plot:—not the mere "episode" of the ancients, but the true minor plot of Shakespeare. It assumes, necessarily and once for all, the licence of tragi-comedy, in that sense of the term in which Much Ado About Nothing and A Winter's Tale are tragi-comedies, and in which Othello itself might have been made one. And it follows further in the wake of the Shakespearean drama ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... admiration which Menander and Philemon expressed for him, and their open avowals that he was their great master, entitle us to consider their dramas as of a middle species, between tragedy and comedy,—not the tragi-comedy, or thing of heterogeneous parts, but a complete whole, founded on principles of its own. Throughout we find the drama of Menander distinguishing itself from tragedy, but not, as the genuine old comedy, contrasting ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... treason; an operation which, according to custom for time out of mind, has always entitled the operator to that distinction. The predecessor of Dun was Gregory Brandon, from whom the gallows was called the Gregorian tree, by which name it is mentioned in the prologue to Mercurius Pragmaticus, tragi-comedy ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... because, although Sonneck enters into a long discussion of the life of Forrest, he fails to give any satisfactory account of John Leacock. In fact, he says in closing, "If Andrew Barton, Esq., is to be a pseudonym, it seems to me that John Leacock, claimed (by Mr. Hildeburn) to have written the tragi-comedy of 'The Fall of British Tyranny,' should not be cast aside so cheerfully ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... and believed him already dead: "What!" says that knight, "is Mr. Partridge, whom I met just now going on both his legs firmer than I can, allowed to be quite dead; and shall Africanus, without one limb that can do its office, be pronounced alive?" What heightened the tragi-comedy of this market for annuities was, that the observation of it provoked Monoculus[368] (who is the most eloquent of all men) to many excellent reflections, which he spoke with the vehemence and language both of a gamester and an orator. ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... I am doing a tragi-comedy in two acts, and have got on tolerably; but it will be refused, or worse. I never had luck with anything ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... singular want of tact Carlyle further aggravated when he insisted on his wife accepting the invitations of his hostess. These visits, always against the grain, were rendered more irritating from a half-conscious antagonism between the chief female actors in the tragi-comedy; the one sometimes innocently unobservant of the wants of her guest, the other turning every accidental neglect into a slight, and receiving every jest as an affront. Carlyle's "Gloriana" was to the mind of ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... The Tragi-Comedy of Court Intrigue, which had ever found its principal theatre in Spain since the accession of the House of Austria to the throne, was represented with singular complication of incident and brilliancy of performance during the reign of Philip the ...
— Calderon The Courtier - A Tale • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the story of his youth, it was at least seen through a long perspective of years, and his own personality might seem to be scarcely interested. Hazlitt chose, in the strange book called the 'New Pygmalion,' or 'Liber Amoris,' to invite the British public at large to look on at a strange tragi-comedy, of which the last scene was scarcely finished. Hazlitt had long been unhappy in his family life. His wife appears to have been a masculine woman, with no talent for domesticity; completely indifferent to her husband's ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... of this "little theatre" is not known in detail. For its actors Ogilby himself wrote at least one play, entitled The Merchant of Dublin,[695] and Henry Burnell a tragi-comedy entitled Landgartha, printed in 1641 "as it was presented in the new theatre in Dublin with good applause." But its chief playwright was James Shirley, who came to Dublin in 1636 under the patronage ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... to compete with the novel in the intricacy of its plot, in the number of its dramatis personae, in the representation of the peculiarities, or as they used to be called, the humours of men. These have now a better scene for their exhibition than the old five-act play, or tragi-comedy, could afford them; but the high passions of mankind, whatever is most elevated or most tender, whatever naturally leads the mind, be it good or evil, to profound contemplation—this will still find its most complete, and powerful, and graceful development in the poetic form ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... be the spectator of my own life-drama, to be fully conscious of the tragi-comedy of my own destiny; and, more than that, to be in the secret ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... of the tragic fable, is unpleasingly broken. The spectators cannot bear to be so suddenly tossed from the serious to the mirthful, and from the mirthful to the serious. In short, such an heterogeneous adulteration has all the absurdity reproached to the motley mixture in tragi-comedy, without any thing of that connection which is preserved in that kind of justly exploded dramatic composition. How easy too to avoid this defect, by adapting the subjects of the dances to the different exigences of the different dramas, whether ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... London with his sister to offer it for the stage. The good Genius of the poet again interposing, the play was decisively rejected, and Wordsworth went back to Allfoxden, himself the hero of that first tragi-comedy so common to ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Edmonton" was often acted at the Cock-pit, in Drury-lane, and once at Court, with singular applause. It was never printed till the year 1658; and was composed by Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, as a tragi-comedy. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... pastoral and satirical poetry indicates the first origin of the Spanish secular drama. Towards the close of the fifteenth century, these pastoral dialogues were converted into real dramas by Enzina, and were publicly represented. But the most important of these early productions is the "Tragi-comedy of Calisto and Meliboea," or "Celestina." Though it can never have been represented, it has left unmistakable traces of its influence on the national drama ever since. It was translated into various languages, and few works ever had a more brilliant success. The ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... gay Duchesses de Montbazon and de Chatillon—although the youngest of that famous trio whom Mazarin found so formidable in the arena of politics, obviously claims alike from her exalted rank and the memorable part she played in the tragi-comedy of the Fronde, priority of notice among the bevy of ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... James Mabbe, which he disguised under the Spanish pseudonym of Diego Puede-ser; Diego for James, and Puede-ser for Mabbe or May-be! He translated, with the same spirit as his Guzman, Celestina, or the Spanish Bawd, that singular tragi-comedy,—a version still more remarkable. He had resided a considerable time in Spain, and was a perfect master of both languages,—a rare talent in a translator; and the consequence is, that he is ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Whither, then? Is not the whole world everywhere the same? And does not Truth's own mirror in its frame Lie equally to all the sons of men? No, we will stay and watch the merry game, The conjurer's trick, the tragi-comedy Of liars that are dupes of their own lie; Stiver and Lind, the Parson and his dame, See them,—prize oxen harness'd to love's yoke, And yet at bottom very decent folk! Each wears for others and himself a mask, Yet one too innocent to take to task; Each one, a stranded sailor ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... up to her bedroom, and burst into tears. It was such a tragi-comedy ending to her literary ambition. She would rather the girls had been more indignant than that they had laughed ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... of attracting other Protestant gentry to the Jacobite cause—offered to submit to General Carpenter under certain conditions. Carpenter's reply was a demand for unconditional surrender, and the hopeless little tragi-comedy was played out. The last scene took place on Tower Hill three months later, when the gallant young Earl, then only twenty-six years old, laid down the life which, after all, had been spent in the service of others, with no selfish ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... about a week: Sunday, 3d June, 1731; with great magnificence, in presence of the high guests and all the world: and Wilhelmina is the affianced Bride of Friedrich of Baireuth:—and that enormous Double-Marriage Tragi-comedy, of Much Ado about Nothing, is at last ended. Courage, friends; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... interpretation of the wavering moods of meditation, irony, and frenzy with which Kyd had dealt only crudely. The later development of this type proceeded without much regard to Shakespeare's Hamlet, but rather in the direction started by Marston's tragedies and his influential tragi-comedy, The Malcontent. While Hamlet may be described as centering attention on a meditative and high-minded avenger, Tourneur, Webster, Middleton, and later dramatists found greater interest in the study of villainy and intrigue. Revenge is born ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... the town, and thence, of course, the whole nation, were informed that Mr. Fitzpatrick had very little powder in his hair.' Walpole sheltered himself behind the corner of a pension to sneer at the tragi-comedy of life; but if his feelings were not profound, they were quick and genuine, and, affectation for affectation, his cynical coxcombry seems preferable to the solemn coxcombry of the men who shamelessly wrangled for ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the fate and fortunes of the leading male actors who figured in the Fronde, we will now glance briefly at the closing scenes in the careers of the fair politicians whom we have seen playing such brilliant and prominent parts in that curious tragi-comedy. ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... as death? What could such advantages accomplish taken as actual moving causes of a human race, innumerable because constantly renewed, which unceasingly moves, strives, struggles, grieves, writhes, and performs the whole tragi-comedy of the history of the world, nay, what says more than all, perseveres in such a mock-existence as long as each one possibly can? Clearly this is all inexplicable if we seek the moving causes outside the figures and conceive ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... drama? What is said of the laws of the drama? Name the two chief divisions. Define tragedy; comedy. What is tragi-comedy? farce? melodrama? opera? What is the difference between grand opera and opera bouffe? What is meant by unity of action? What other two unities are there? What is meant by unity of time? What is meant by unity of place? Where are the three unities strictly observed? Which ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... humour forces us to be candid with ourselves, then it can be reconciled, not only with the cardinal virtues—which are but a chilly quartette—but with the flaming charities which have consumed the souls of saints. The true humourist, objects Sir Leslie Stephen, sees the world as a tragi-comedy, a Vanity Fair, in which enthusiasm is out of place. But if the true humourist also sees himself presiding, in the sacred name of duty, over a booth in Vanity Fair, he may yet reach perfection. What Father Faber opposed so strenuously were, not the vanities of the profane, of the openly and ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... was only an infamous conspiracy to ruin the young man. The Belgian capitalist, this count apparently so respectable, was only an expert card-sharper whom Chauvignac had brought from Paris to play out the vile tragi-comedy, the denouement of which would be the ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... is a piece of masterly tragi-comedy. When I say that this scene is suggestive of Balzac, I mean a ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... to paint a pleasant picture of the sentiment of the Cole children on this touching occasion; something, perhaps, in the vein of tragi-comedy with which Mr. Kenneth Graham embroiders a similar occasion in his famous masterpiece—but in this case there was very little sentiment and no tragedy at all. They did not think of the event beforehand, and then when it suddenly occurred there was all the ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... Thus the tragi-comedy went on day after day. The plebs enjoying the pageants because they did not know that they were being fooled, and the patricians looking on because they ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Gloucester to the nobles on the loss of the provinces of France by the king's marriage with Margaret of Anjou. The pretensions and growing ambition of the Duke of York, the father of Richard III, are also very ably developed. Among the episodes, the tragi-comedy of Jack Cade, and the detection of the ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... the world has anything so absurd as the English Tragi-Comedy. 'Tis a Drama of our own invention; and the fashion of it is enough to proclaim it so. Here, a course of mirth; there, another of sadness and passion; a third of honour; and the fourth, a duel. Thus, in two hours and a half, we run through all ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... top to bottom. The evil dream has become a concrete tragi-comedy which is worse. It is inextricable, heavy, crushing. I flounder from detail to detail of it; it drags me along. Behold what is. Behold, therefore, what will be—exploitation to the last breath, to the limit of ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... upon this strange tragi-comedy of a man of letters. There is no better epilogue than words of his own:—"We fix our gaze on the ruins of a triumphal arch, of a portico, a pyramid, a temple, a palace, and we return upon ourselves. All is annihilated, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Jealous Bridegroom is the earliest, and most certainly one of the weakest of Mrs. Behn's plays. This is, however, far from saying that it is not a very good example of the Davenant, Howard, Porter, Stapylton school of romantic tragi-comedy. But Aphara had not yet hit upon her brilliant vein of intrigue. In The Forced Marriage she seems to have remembered The Maid's Tragedy. The situation between Alcippus and Erminia, Act ii, III, has some vague resemblance to that of Amintor and Evadne, Act ii, I. Aminta ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... Hoe" and "Northward Hoe" we are probably indebted to his associate, Dekkar. His play of "Appius and Virginia" is far from being an adequate rendering of one of the most beautiful and affecting fables that ever crept into history. "The Devil's Law Case," a tragi-comedy, has not sufficient power to atone for the want of probability in the plot and want of nature in the characters. The historical play of "Sir Thomas Wyatt" can only be fitly described by using the favorite word in which Ben Jonson was wont to condense his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... expending her passions. In the world of imagination, she had discharged the stormful energy which would have been destructive in actual life. And in thought she had bound herself to the mast while sailing past the Sirens. Through sympathy, also, from childhood, with the tragi-comedy of many lives around her, she had gained experience of the laws and limitations of providential order. Gradually, too, she had risen to higher planes of hope, whence opened wider prospects of destiny and duty. More than all, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... about midnight, Madame d'Imbleval was seized with the first pains. The nurse, Mlle. Boussignol, had had some training as a midwife and did not lose her head. But, an hour later, Madame Vaurois' turn came; and the tragedy, or I might rather say the tragi-comedy, was enacted amid the screams and moans of the two patients and the bewildered agitation of the nurse running from one to the other, bewailing her fate, opening the window to call out for the doctor or falling on her knees to implore the aid of Providence.... Madame Vaurois was the first to bring ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... lightning, accompanied by a tremendous clap of thunder. Down tumbled the dead; off bolted the living; loud screamed the wounded; while far and wide, all over the woods, nothing was to be heard but the running of tories, and the snorting of wild bounding horses, snapping the saplings. Such a tragi-comedy was hardly ever seen. On running up to their fires, we found we had killed twenty-three, and badly wounded as many more; thirteen we made prisoners; poor fellows who had not been grazed by a bullet, but were so frightened that they could not budge a peg. We got eighty-four stand of arms, ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... buffoons, who, in the merriment of their pride, were insulting with every species of contumely the fallen dignity of the rest of Europe. But Britain, though not personally appearing to bear her part in this monstrous tragi-comedy, was very far from being forgotten. The new-robed regicides found a representative for her. And who was this representative? Without a previous knowledge, any one would have given a thousand guesses before he could arrive at a tolerable divination ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Chief among them was a feeling of disgust at the many failures of the war. The defection of Prussia and Spain, the fruitless waste of British troops in the West Indies, the insane follies of the French emigres, the ghastly scenes at Quiberon, and the tragi-comedy of Vendemiaire in the streets of Paris, sufficed to daunt the stoutest hearts. By the middle of the month of October 1795, Pitt decided to come to terms with France, if the Directory, newly installed in power, should found a stable Government and ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... politician, the hair-splitting diplomatist, the self-sacrificing martyr, the self-seeking courtier, present essentially one type in the twelfth, the sixteenth, the nineteenth, or any other century. The human tragi-comedy seems ever to repeat itself with the same bustle, with the same excitement for immediate interests, for the development of the instant plot or passing episode, as if the universe began and ended with each generation—as in reality it would appear to do for the great ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the manner in which the Bolsheviki concluded peace with Germany, it is necessary to be on guard against prejudice engendered by the war and its passions. The tragi-comedy of Brest-Litovsk, and the pitiable role of Trotzky, have naturally been linked together with the manner in which Lenine and his companions reached Russia with the aid of the German Government, the way in which all ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... 'beat, maim or kill' on his master's behalf; a frustrated elopement and a compulsory visit to the mayor—all these with the picturesque old town of Lyme for a background, suggest a most appropriate first act to Harry Fielding's biographical tragi-comedy." [13] It is possible that Fielding's own pen supplied the conclusion to this first act. For he tells us, in the preface to the Miscellanies, that a version, in burlesque verse, of part of Juvenal's sixth satire was originally sketched out before ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... stage, and a company of servants are acting their parts, you should come out in the garb of a philosopher, and repeat, out of Octavia, a discourse of Seneca's to Nero, would it not be better for you to say nothing than by mixing things of such different natures to make an impertinent tragi-comedy? for you spoil and corrupt the play that is in hand when you mix with it things of an opposite nature, even though they are much better. Therefore go through with the play that is acting the best you can, and do not confound it because another that is pleasanter comes into your thoughts. ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... is a tragi-comedy by Sir William Berkely, and is advertised to be sold at the shop of the Holy Lamb in the year 1639, which we may take as the probable date of its publication. Dorothy would play Hermione, the heroine. We can imagine her speaking with ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... The petty vices of womankind had never been hers. He knew now that he had been something to her, and that knowledge would make sunshine for him even in the shadow of a prison. It gave him courage also to play out the tragi-comedy to the end, to make a brave ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... servants are acting their parts, you should come out in the garb of a philosopher, and repeat out of 'Octavia' a discourse of Seneca's to Nero, would it not be better for you to say nothing than by mixing things of such different natures to make an impertinent tragi-comedy? For you spoil and corrupt the play that is in hand when you mix with it things of an opposite nature, even though they are much better. Therefore go through with the play that is acting the best you can, and do ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... thoughtfullest, noblest men and women shut themselves up, precisely where they could be of least use. They are very fine things, for us painters, now,—the towers and white arches upon the tops of the rocks; always in places where it takes a day's climbing to get at them; but the intense tragi-comedy of the thing, when one thinks of it, is unspeakable. All the good people of the world getting themselves hung up out of the way of mischief, like Bailie Nicol Jarvie;—poor little lambs, as it were, dangling there for the sign of the Golden Fleece; or like Socrates in ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... night of the 19th of June, 1900, with all its tragedy and tragi-comedy, though I live to be a hundred. It allowed me to see something of real human nature in momentary flashes; of how mean and full of fear we really are, how small and how easily impressed. A hundred times I longed to have the time and the power to set down exactly so that everyone might understand ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... gods: what a tragi-comedy it is. Man has never seen one of his gods, never heard the voice of one of his gods, does not know the shape, expression, or bearing of one of his gods. Yet man has cursed man, hated man, hunted man, tortured man, and murdered man, for ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... my lord, of all these wonderful events?" said the tyrant, after a long silence, to de Sigognac, beside whom he was riding. "It all ends up like a regular tragi-comedy. Who would ever have dreamed, in the midst of the melee, of the sudden entrance upon the scene of the grand old princely father, preceded by torches, and coming to put a little wholesome restraint on the too atrociously outrageous pranks of his dissolute young son? And then the recognition ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... attributable to the folly of the planters—who doggedly refuse to accommodate themselves to the new state of things, and to entice the negroes from the back settlements by a promise of fair wages. But we have no reason to suppose that the whole tragi-comedy would not be re-enacted in the Slave States of America, if slavery were summarily abolished by act of Congress to-morrow. Property among the plantations consists only of land and negroes: emancipate the negroes—and the planters have no longer any capital for the cultivation of the ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... which was still harping on the necessity of his conquering the suffrages of the public in his character of dramatist. He now set himself to write a play called Mercadet or the Faiseur,[*] the latter word implying by its meaning the tragi-comedy of a penniless financier—the novelist's own experience was there to guide him—who invents a thousand and one stratagems for keeping his creditors at bay, and for creating the illusion of a wealth which he had not; who deceives ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... than I could ever get, you will admit, out of dancing attendance on my very respectable cousins. My mother taught me to see everything dramatically. We have no drama in England at the present moment worth a cent; so I amuse myself with this great tragi-comedy of the working-class movement. It stirs, pricks, interests me, from morning till night. I feel the great rough elemental passions in it, and it delights me to know that every day brings us nearer to some great outburst, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Mrs. Ireland would be near sixty years old, I would take it, dressed in a brown sac, such as had been fashionable ten years back, and her daughter, I should think about thirty years old. They told me that they had been to supper, and to the play in the Duke's Playhouse, where Mr. Shirley's tragi-comedy The Young Admiral had been done; and that Mr. Ireland was to come for them here, as presently he did, for it was scarce safe for ladies to be abroad at such an hour in the streets without an escort, so wild were the pranks played (and worse ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... this amazing testimony you may detect a contempt of human life and justice, an indifference to suffering, an eager lust after unearned dollars, which are without parallel. The persons who play their part in this austere, begrimed tragi-comedy, come for the most part from oversea, and have but a halting knowledge of the language spoken by judges and senators. Yet their very ignorance stamps their speech with authenticity, and enhances its effect. The ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... withstand the torrential current of skepticism and revaluation that swept through the intellectual world and uprooted its spiritual mainstays. Though the action of his plays was based upon eternal conflicts of the human tragi-comedy—the irreconcilable contrast between two generations, between two orders of life, between love and duty—his characters are of the new type, his unheroic heroes are like the men he saw about him, reeds swayed by the breath of the Zeitgeist, and true to the naturalistic creed of his generation they ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... Erminia veil'd. In Sir William Barclay's The Lost Lady (folio 1639), a good, if intricate, tragi-comedy, which was received with applause after the Restoration [Pepys saw it 19 January, 1661, and again, rather more than a week later, on the 28th of the same month], and not forgotten by Buckingham when he penned The Rehearsal, Milesia (supposed dead), ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... kill" in his master's behalf; a frustrated elopement and a compulsory visit to the mayor—all these, with the picturesque old town of Lyme for a background, suggest a most appropriate first act to Harry Fielding's biographical tragi-comedy. But to do such ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... divided into two chapters, and between the chapters there is a slab of unmitigated dreariness. It is my hour of pessimism. The tide has ebbed, the water is dead-low, and there is a vista of endless mud. It is then that this tragi-comedy of life touches bottom, and I see the heavens all hung with black. I despair of humanity, I despair of the war, I despair of myself. There is not one gleam of light in all the sad landscape, and the abyss seems waiting at my feet to swallow me up with everything that I cherish. ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... may be news even to him, that in the year 1863 their case was pitiable. Hanging about with the east wind humming in my teeth, and my hands (I make no doubt) in my pockets, I looked for the first time upon that tragi-comedy of the visiting engineer which I have seen so often re-enacted on a more important stage. Eighty years ago, I find my grandfather writing: "It is the most painful thing that can occur to me to have ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sermonizing drawn from it. Oliver Twist is the history of a child born in a workhouse and brought up by parish overseers, and there is nothing introduced that is out of keeping with the design. It is a series of pictures from the tragi-comedy of lower life, worked out by perfectly natural agencies, from the dying mother and the starved wretches of the first volume, through the scenes and gradations of crime, careless or deliberate, which have a frightful consummation in the last volume, but are never without the reliefs ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... or two suggestions. The great things of the science of Darwin, Huxley, Wallace, and Balfour remain mainly untold. In the book of nature there are written, for instance, the triumphs of survival, the tragedy of death and extinction, the tragi-comedy of degradation and inheritance, the gruesome lesson of parasitism, and the political satire of colonial organisms. Zoology is, indeed, a philosophy and a literature to those who can read its symbols. In the contemplation of beauty of form and ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... Tou-tous were abstracted from their adoring mistresses with marvellous adroitness; whereupon two or three days would elapse while the adoring mistress wept buckets full of tears and set the police of M. Fouche, Duc d'Otrante, by the ears in search of her pet. The next act in the tragi-comedy would be an anonymous demand for money—varying in amount in accordance with the known or supposed wealth of the lady—and an equally anonymous threat of dire vengeance upon the tou-tou if the police were put upon ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... advice. But the general opinion was that, had he retained the portfolio of foreign affairs, the Spanish revolution would have terminated with more decorum and good faith than was exhibited in the tragi-comedy acted at ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... (En Fallit: literally A Bankruptcy) was partly written in Rome, partly in Tyrol, and published at Copenhagen in 1875. It was a thing entirely new to the Scandinavian stage for a dramatist to deal seriously with the tragi-comedy of money, and, while making a forcible plea for honesty, to contrive to produce a stirring and entertaining play on what might seem so prosaic a foundation as business finance. Some of the play's earliest critics dismissed it as "dry," "prosaic," ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... committing the murder than when he is posing, and shuffling and twisting, and talking piously, and exhibiting the intense, unmitigated selfishness which is at the bottom of all religious sentiment. The essence of piety comes out in this tragi-comedy. Personal fear, personal hope, self, self, sell, is the be-all and the end-all of this ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... of 1855 is present, with a touch of humour to guard it from its own excess in the admirable Inapprehensiveness. The speaker who may not liberate his soul can perhaps identify a quotation, and he gallantly accepts his humble role in the tragi-comedy of foiled passion:— ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... fellow Dons, robed in the same garb, seemingly living the same life as himself. Where was fact, where was reality? In yonder phantasmagoric procession of Oxford life, forever repeating itself, or in this strange tragi-comedy of souls, one in two and two in one, passing behind the thick walls of that old house in the street nearby? There he stood among the rest, part and parcel apparently of an existence as ordinary, as peaceful, as monotonous as the Victorian era could produce. Yet if he were to tell any one ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... was not essentially a man of books. He never fell into the characteristic weakness of the follower of letters, by treating books as ends in themselves, or placing literature before life. Character, passion, circumstance, the real tragi-comedy, not its printed shadow and image, engrossed him. He was in this respect more of the temper of Rousseau, than he was like Voltaire or Fontenelle. "Abstraction made," he used to say, "of my existence and of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... a tragi-comedy on the affecting ancient story of Damon and Pithias, besides his comedy of Palamon and Arcite, formerly noticed as having been performed for the entertainment of her majesty at Oxford. In connexion with this latter piece it ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... long Preface ... dated April 25, 1796, Alfieri gives a curious account of the reasons which induced him to call it ... 'Tramelogedy.' He says that Abel is neither a tragedy, a comedy, a drama, a tragi-comedy, nor a Greek tragedy, which last would, he thinks, be correctly described as melo-tragedy. Opera-tragedy would, in his opinion, be a fitting name for it; but he prefers interpolating the word 'melo' into the middle ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... in every other in which he engaged, it was not his natural line, and happily his fame does not rest upon his plays, which are deeply stained with the immorality of the age. His first effort, The Wild Gallant (1663), was a failure; his next, The Rival Ladies, a tragi-comedy, established his reputation, and among his other dramas may be mentioned The Indian Queene, Amboyna (1673), Tyrannic Love (1669), Almanzar and Almahide (ridiculed in Buckingham's Rehearsal) (1670), Arungzebe (1675), All for Love (an ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... ostentatious, and extravagant.... There is a perpetual collision of eccentricities—a tilt and tournament of absurdities; the prejudices and caprices of mankind are let loose, and set together by the ears, as in a bear-garden. Hogarth paints nothing but comedy or tragi-comedy. Wilkie paints neither one nor the other. Hogarth never looks at any object but to find out a moral or a ludicrous effect. Wilkie never looks at any object but to see that it is there.... In looking at Hogarth, you are ready to burst your sides with laughing ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... romance of Colin and Ermine! To live on the verge of such a—a tragi-comedy, is it? and not be aware of it, I ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to have supplied a prologue for the revival of the piece, bore out Beccari's claim when he wrote in his essay on tragi-comedy: 'First among the moderns to possess the happy boldness to make in this kind, namely the pastoral dramatic tale, of which there is no trace among the ancients, was Agostin de' Beccari, a worthy citizen of Ferrara, to whom ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... are only two dramatic types, all others, such as farce, melodrama, tragi-comedy, lyric drama, or opera, and chronicle play, being modifications of comedy or tragedy. The historical play, to which Elizabethans were devoted, aimed to present great scenes or characters from a past age, and were generally made up of both tragic and comic elements. The best of Shakespeare's ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... that when the tragi-comedy I have given you an account of was over, the Queen my mother turned round to the Chevalier de Seurre, whom she recommended to my brother to sleep in his bedchamber, and in whose conversation she sometimes took delight because ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... the tragi-comedy of Martha's outbreak unexpectedly introduced him to the house at Walham Green, he experienced a sudden revival of the emotions of a year ago. After his brief meeting with Bertha, he did not go straight back to the shop, but wandered a little ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... against her that it was her habit to effect these agreeable conclusions to her social histories by tampering with probability or violently wresting events from their proper sequence. Life is neither comedy nor tragedy—it is tragi-comedy, or, if you prefer the graver emphasis, comi-tragedy. Miss Austen, truth-lover, has as good a right to leave her lovers at the juncture when we see them happily mated, as at those more grievous junctures so much ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... arrant nonsense, for what purpose I can hardly conceive," he said, frowning with vexation at the tragi-comedy into which he had been drawn. "Frenchmen, it is true, regard these things from a different standpoint. That which seems rational to you is little else than buffoonery to me. If that is your object in seeking an interview, it has now been accomplished. I absolutely decline to entertain the proposition ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... of literary composition the drama holds the most important position; for it is a picture of real life, and, as such, of national interest. It consists of two principal species, tragedy and comedy; the minor species are tragi-comedy, farce, burlesque and melo-drama. Both tragedy and comedy attained their perfection in Greece long before the Christian era. There it originated in the worship ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... peculiar incidents in this scientific tragi-comedy is the fact that Weismann, the mainstay of contemporary decadent Darwinism, attacks with might and main its fundamental assumption, the transmission of acquired characters, whereas Eimer, who is thoroughly convinced ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... peacock-feather is to a Chinese mandarin, that is a Baedeker star to a hotel-keeper; and the Boy and I were so tickled at the little tragi-comedy that we forgot, as we walked on side by side, that we had been upon official ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... manner of the welcome given by the captain to his aide need not be recorded here. It was curt and lurid; it would serve as a sorry passport if proffered on his entry to another world; but the tragi-comedy of Watts's appearance among the close-packed gathering on the forecastle was forthwith blotted out of existence by a thing so amazing, so utterly unlooked for that during a couple of spellbound seconds not a man moved ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... the critical moment, when the fatal key drops from the trembling hands of the imprudent wife, the gentleman interrupted the awful pause of silence that ensued, and requested permission to relate the remainder of the story. Tragi-comedy does not offend the taste of young, so much as of old critics; the transition from grave to gay was happily managed. Blue-beard's wife afforded much diversion, and lost all sympathy the moment she was represented ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... a series of six lyrics called "The Phases of Love," with this motive from the "Anatomy of Melancholy": "I am resolved, therefore, in this tragi-comedy of love, to act several parts, some satirically, some comically, some in a mixed tone." The poems are all by American poets, and the group, opus 6, is an invaluable addition to our musical literature. The first of the series, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... sheet of paper on the desk. I picked it up and read it. It was a summons from the Lord Mayor, commanding my attendance at the Mansion House on the following Tuesday, to answer a charge of Blasphemy. Strange ending to such a day! What a tragi-comedy life is—how full of contrasts and surprises, of ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... "Plautus's tragi-comedy of 'Amphitryon' has been perhaps more popular on the modern stage than any other ancient play. It is the groundwork of one of the best comedies of the great Moliere, and of a once favourite English drama, which Sir Walter Scott, in an introduction not everywhere distinguished by his usual ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... audience of AEschylus and Aristophanes, of Plautus and Pacuvius, even to the audience of Moliere and Racine. But the vast and final change, the inception of which we have here to record, has made tragedy, tragi-comedy, comedy, and farce pass into one another so gradually, and with so little of a break in the English mind, that Gammer Gurton's Needle and Gorboduc, though they were presented to the same audiences, and in all probability written within ten ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... contained in its Dedication—we select Damon and Pythias (before 1567) by Richard Edwards as an example of native tragedy influenced but not subjugated by classical models. To be exact, it is a tragi-comedy, but it is very improbable that the method of presentment would have been different had it ended tragically; therefore it will suit our purpose. Of importance is the date, some three or four years later than Gorboduc and seventy years earlier than The Misfortunes of Arthur. When we call to mind ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... tragi-comedy must end. It concerns Europe and the world that it should end sooner rather than later, and that it should end with a pacific restoration of France to her proper place in the family of European States. Surely the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... beyond any, grotesque beyond belief; and its development should be stupendously interesting. It attracted him irresistibly. That he should leave it to his own father to say whether a man born as he was born might aspire to marry his father's ward, had in it something that savored of tragi-comedy. It was a pretty problem, that once set could not be left unsolved by a man of Mr. Caryll's temperament. And, indeed, no sooner was the idea conceived than it quickened into a resolve upon which ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... figure of Hercules. Here is the turning-point of the play: which has the peculiarity of combining an element of the Satyric Drama (or Burlesque) with Tragedy, the combination anticipating the 'Action-Drama' (or 'Tragi-Comedy') of modern times. Accordingly the costume and mask of Hercules are compounded, of his conventional appearance in Tragedy, in which he is conceived as the perfection of physical strength toiling and suffering for mankind, ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... Dartie, who sat with her husband in the third row, squeezed his hand more than once during the performance. To her, who knew the plot of this tragi-comedy, its most dramatic moment was well-nigh painful. 'I wonder if Jon knows by instinct,' she thought—Jon, out in British Columbia. She had received a letter from him only that morning which had made her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... man and woman to uphold the torch of the ideal, lest it be reduced to sparks and smoke, to refute the cynic and the pessimist; to hearten a world nauseated and discouraged by the eternal tragi-comedy of marriage, with the spectacle of a human relationship of unsullied beauty: a relationship that passes, by imperceptible degrees, from the first antiphony of passionate hearts to a deep deliberate bliss, "durable from the daily ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... reason will ever bring to a just proportion for me, the first humiliations I was made to suffer, the waste of all the fine irrecoverable loyalties and passions of my youth. The dull base caste of my little personal tragi-comedy—I have ostensibly forgiven, I have for the most part forgotten—and yet when I recall them I hate each actor still. Whenever it comes into my mind—I do my best to prevent it—there it is, and these detestable people blot out the ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... or break clods, either whereof had been to me indifferent, I held it not a little disgraceful to be only an idle spectator of so many valorous, eloquent, and warlike persons, who in the view and sight of all Europe act this notable interlude or tragi-comedy, and not make some effort towards the performance of this, nothing at all remains for me to be done ('And not exert myself, and contribute thereto this nothing, my all, which remained for me to do.'—Ozell.). ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... in his full Business, without his Hammers or Forge.—But the Humourist, as he advances in Years, is apt to grow intolerable to himself and the World; becoming at length, uneasy, and fatigued with the constant View of the same Follies; like a Person who is tir'd with seeing the same Tragi-Comedy continually acted. This sowres his Temper; And unless some favorable Incidents happen to mellow him, he resigns himself wholly to Peevishness.—By which Time he perceives that the World is quite tir'd of him.—After which he drags on ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... THE tragi-comedy of Tsarskoe-Selo was being played with increasing vigour just prior to the war. Berlin, through Rasputin, piped the tune to which the Imperial Court was ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... with his forebears and so throws his more original, independent side into stronger relief. Our author is, not unexpectedly, an invariable moralist; is throughout a stickler for dignity; is sensitive to absurdities, improprieties, and slips in decorum; will have no truck with tragi-comedy in any of its forms. He hates puns and bombast, demands refinement in speech and restraint in manners. He regards Hamlet's speeches to Ophelia in the Player scene as a violation of propriety, is shocked by the lack of decency in the representation of Ophelia's ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... "Tragi-comedy, indeed, you have yourself, in a former speculation, found fault with very justly, because it breaks the tide of the passions, while they are yet flowing; but this is nothing at all to the present case, where they have ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... strange names, like stars, some rising, some in meridian, some declining—Voltaire, Franklin, Washington, Kant, Goethe, Fulton, Napoleon, mark the era. And while so much, and of grandest moment, fit for the trumpet of the world's fame, was being transacted—that little tragi-comedy of R. B,'s life and death was going on in a country by-place ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... or even in middle life by the education of mixing with men who knew more and were more advanced than himself, had he been jostled in the crowd of a great city and been made to feel deeply about the tragi-comedy of human existence, his experiences might have resulted in a deeper and more original note being sounded in his music. But we must take him as he is, reflecting, when the unbroken peacefulness of his music becomes a little tiresome, that ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... "who try to make an art of living. Yes, art, that is the word! To me life appears like a great tragi-comedy. It has its shadows as well as its lights, but we would not lose one of them, for fear of destroying the harmony of the whole. Call it good, or call it bad, no matter, so it is. The villain no less than the hero claims our ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... mind you, I am going to put together a bit of copy that will not deal tenderly with our gentlemen of the robe—the lot of you! No, it is a bad, unlucky business enough, but it is even more funny—it is tragi-comedy!" ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... propose a march to his home in the east. He was not comfortable; probably his reinforcements had still to arrive: his face was calm, as the Eastern's generally is; but his feet trembled, and his toes twitched. I drily told him of our changed plans, and he left us in high dudgeon. The tragi-comedy which followed may be divided into ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... genius. It touched a burning question of the day, and it opened the door for a discussion of the deeper principles of the drama. The Essay itself forms part of a long controversy between Dryden and his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard. The dispute was opened by Dryden's preface to his tragi-comedy, The Rival Ladies, published probably, as it was certainly first acted, in 1664; and in the beginning Dryden, then first rising [Footnote: "To a play at the King's house, The Rival Ladies, a very innocent and most pretty witty play"—is Pepys' entry for August 4, 1664: ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... whose fine head had dropped forward on his breast. He was asleep; and Madame de Ruth realised, with a sigh, that her beloved had grown old; that her youth had vanished too, and even the joy of observing the tragi-comedy of human nature palled for her at that moment, and she felt herself to be old and lonely. At length the music ceased, and was followed by that insolent, half-hearted applause which it is the privilege of the truly cultured audience to offer ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... unexpected! He felt inexpressibly grateful.... They talked for a little sadly and confusedly. When they parted nothing was left of all that had divided them. They had fought: it was inevitable, no doubt: each man must fulfil the law of his nature! But when men see the end of the tragi-comedy coming, they put off the passions that masked them, and meet face to face,—two men, of whom neither is of much greater worth than the other, who, when they have played their parts to the best of their ability, have the right in the end ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... the midst of all this?" thought Birotteau, quite bewildered by the stir of this intellectual kiln, where the daily bread of the opposition was kneaded and baked, and the scenes of the grand tragi-comedy played by the Left were rehearsed. On one side he heard them discussing the question of loans to complete the net-work of canals proposed by the department on highways; and the discussion involved ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... the interest in tragic themes which attracted the London audiences for the half-a-dozen years following 1600, is the shifting of popular approval towards a new form of drama about 1608. This was the romantic tragi-comedy, a type of drama which puts a theme of sentimental interest into events and situations that come close to the tragic. Shakespeare's plays of this type are often called romances, since they tell a story of the same type found in romantic novels of ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... brown Bedouins who use it remain unsearchable in their Oriental languor and pride; Jerusalem becomes to us more and more a symbol and epitome of that which is changeless and transient, capricious and inevitable, necessary and insignificant, interesting and unsatisfying, in the unfinished tragi-comedy of human life. There are times when it fascinates us with its whirling charm. There are other times when we are glad to ride away from it, to seek communion with the great spirit of some antique prophet, or to find the consoling ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... to escape. It was the sort of thing she would do, he could not help recognizing. Another cause celebre, more vulgar than the fight for his brother's title! How Victoria would turn in shocked revulsion from the hero of such a coarse tragi-comedy. But he would never be that hero. He would keep his word and stick to Margot. When he should come to the desert telegraph station between Toudja and Touggourt, he would wire to the Carlton, where she thought of ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... we find in the story, so far as it has proceeded, the promise of an interest as unhackneyed as it will be intense. There is room for the play of all the passions and interests that make up the great tragi-comedy of life, while all the scenery and accessories will be those which familiarity has made dear to us. We are a little afraid of Colonel Burr, to be sure, it is so hard to make a historical personage fulfill the conditions demanded ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... in 1663, and published in the year following, was our author's next dramatic essay. It is a tragi-comedy; and the tragic scenes are executed in rhyme,—a style which Dryden anxiously defended, in a Dedication addressed to the Earl of Orrery, who had himself written several heroic plays. He cites against blank verse ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... alluding to that superiority of mind which leads to the creation of ideal beauty, when life surveyed with a penetrating eye, appears a tragi-comedy, in which little can be seen to satisfy the heart without ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... in the workmanship, and success is attained by honest, straightforward endeavour. It seems to me quite incredible that the author of those two admirable comedies should be responsible for the gloomy, ponderous tragi-comedy here presented to the reader. What share Field had in the "Fatal Dowry" I do not intend to discuss minutely. The chief figure in that play, Charolois, I take to be a study in Massinger's gravest manner; but if we allow that Field ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... may juggle on, For her minions blindly look around,— Man now totter on his staggering throne, And in dreary puddles now be found! Blest art thou, within thy narrow cell! To this stir of tragi-comedy, To these fortune-waves that madly swell, To this vain and childish lottery, To this busy crowd effecting naught, To this rest with labor teeming o'er, Brother!—to this heaven with devils—fraught, Now ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... disunion spelt disaster; and it was evident that Napoleon's delays were prompted solely by the need of equipping and training his new cavalry brigades. As for the Congress, no one took it seriously. Gentz, who was then in close contact with Metternich, saw how this tragi-comedy would end. "We believe that on his return to Dresden, Napoleon will address to this Court a solemn Note in which he will accuse everybody of the delays which he himself has caused, and will end up by proclaiming ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... pulled herself together, and prepared to act, for the second time that day, her part in a tragi-comedy in which where there had been two characters there was now ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... Wild Gallant," was brought on the stage in February 1662-3, and with indifferent success, though he has told us that it was more than once the divertisement of Charles II. by his own command, and a favourite with "the Castlemain." "The Rival Ladies" (a tragi-comedy) was acted and published in the year following, and the serious scenes are executed in rhyme. Of its success we know nothing in particular; but Sir Walter thinks that the flowing verse into which some part of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... held a pen, and in the other—a ham sandwich. It was a big sandwich, and every few moments he took a big bite, as he scratched on. Myra's heart was wrung with love and pity, with remorse and fondness, and mainly with the tragi-comedy of his ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... "Epilogue" in the revised version of the "Marionettes." The piece comprises only a score of measures; yet within it the thought of the composer traverses a world of philosophical meditation: here is reflected the mood of one who looks with grave tenderness across the tragi-comedy of human life, in which, he would say to us, we are no less the playthings of a controlling destiny than are the figures of ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman |
