"Dramatist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... under his arm. Later, Elsa began to understand that he was a true scholar, not merely an educated man. He was besides a linguist of amazing facility, a pianist who invariably preferred as his audience his own two ears. Arthur would have been a great dramatist or a great poet, if . . . If what? If what? Ah, that had been the crux of it all, of her doubt, of her hesitance. If he had fought for prizes coveted by mankind, if he had thrown aside his dreams and gone into the turmoil, if he had taken up a man's burden and carried it to success. Elsa, daughter ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... wondered how far the researches would profoundly affect the philosophical thoughts. Mr. Balfour, the ex-premier, became enthralled with what he saw. Professor James A. H. Murray, Editor of the 'Oxford New English Dictionary,' and Bernard Shaw, the famous dramatist, felt themselves attracted to the great Indian Scientist and came to pay their homage to him. Even Lord Crewe, the then Secretary of State for India, paid a visit to his laboratory and spoke warmly of the pride which he and the Government of India felt ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... independent of the world and its chances." But he could not manage to get going. For some time he could write nothing at all. Fortunately, after an unprofitable month or two, he fell in with John Howard Payne, now remembered only for his "Home, Sweet Home," but then esteemed as an actor and dramatist. Irving had met him several years before, and now became associated with him in some dramatic translating and adapting. The results were nearly worthless from a literary point of view, but served to keep him busy, and to put him once more in the ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... fragment of your ruined honesty that still stupendously dismisses Beethoven as "some rubbish about a piano" will give way to remarks about "a graceful second subject in the relative minor." Nothing can save you now except a rebirth as a dramatist. I have done my turn; and I now call on you to take yours ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... to the opera-house on Thursday with a somewhat distinguished party, and though a storm of applause greeted the eminent English dramatist, and the play was a popular one, saw very little of him or the first act of it. Then when the glitter of lights filled the building as the curtain went down she looked about her with veiled expectancy. She knew Alton of Somasco, and that if he intended to keep ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... great dramatist well, but what he read was new—a "Song of the Furies" calling a terrific curse upon the betrayer of friendship. "Some of his happiest lines," meditated Democrates, walking away, to be held a moment by the crowd around Lamprus the master-harpist. ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... and, on occasion, by gorgeous receptions offered to visiting rulers and ambassadors, It has already been related that the arrival of Louis XIV and his family at Versailles in the fall of 1663 was celebrated by a fete at which a troupe headed by Moliere was heard in a piece by the great dramatist called Impromptu de Versailles, In the month of May, 1664, Louis commanded a performance of "Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle," in which his favorite actor and playwright furnished the comedy, Lully the music and the ballets, and an Italian mechanician the decorations and illuminations. On the first ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... realising that we cannot fight against Fate, and that Fate is only the inevitable choice of our own natures, we wait for the splendid words which shall render so great a situation; and no splendid words come. The situation, to the dramatist, has been only a dramatic situation. Here is Duse, a chalice for the wine of imagination, but the chalice remains empty. It is almost painful to see her waiting for the words that do not come, offering tragedy to us in her eyes, and with her hands, and in ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... more or less accurately with the details of the tragedy. One of these was published in Italian at Brescia in 1586. A Frenchman, De Rosset, printed the same story in its main outlines at Lyons in 1621. Our own dramatist, John Webster, made it the subject of a tragedy, which he gave to the press in 1612. What were his sources of information we do not know for certain. But it is clear that he was well acquainted with the history. He has changed some of the names and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... watchmaker, a musician, a court official, a speculator, and it was only when he was thirty-five that he turned dramatist. Various French authors, Diderot especially, weary of confinement to tragedy and comedy, the only two forms then admitted on the French stage, were seeking a new dramatic formula in which they ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... knows, even if the full significance of the fact is not always sufficiently estimated, that the tragedians of Athens did not tell their story at all as the telling of a story is conceived by a modern dramatist, whose audience, when the curtain goes up, know nothing which is not ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... dark, as though the scene had been skilfully prepared by some infernal dramatist, just as the cover of night shut down tight and sealed, and suddenly, like a box-lid that had been upheld by the last rays of the setting sun, just as the great stars burst out above as if at the touch of an electric button, ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... opening of "The Primrose Way"; for Fillmore had acceded to his friend Ike's suggestion in the matter of producing it first in Chicago, and he had been called in by a distracted manager to revise the work of a brother dramatist, whose comedy was in difficulties at one of the theatres in that city; and this meant he would have to remain on the spot for some time to come. It was disappointing, for Sally had been looking forward to having him back in New York in a few days; but she refused ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... every stage of its development and every variety of its operation, is as distinctly pronounced on the pages of Scripture as in the scenes of the dramatist. Of Shakespeare it is said, "He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Alfieri for Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia nearly twenty years later. She then spoke of the difficulties inherent in such a subject, "inequality of age adding to the unnatural incest. To shed any interest over such an attachment, the dramatist ought to adorn the father with such youthful attributes as would be by no means contrary to probability."[xvii] This she endeavored to do in Mathilda (aided indeed by the fact that the situation was the reverse of that in Myrrha). Mathilda's father was young: he married before he was ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... establishment has offered GRILLPARZER, the German dramatist, $4,000 for his writings, but he refuses, not because he thinks the price too low, but because he will not take the trouble of preparing and publishing a collected edition of his dramas, the last of which was entitled Maximilian Robespierre, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... have to depend on the early historians of the English drama for certain knowledge that Payne was for a time a dramatist. Though his brief excursion into the theater must later have seemed to him a minor episode in his life, Payne's enemies were aware of the fact that he was a playwright and have written their knowledge into the record of his treasonable activities. For example, the author of a burlesque life ...
— The Fatal Jealousie (1673) • Henry Nevil Payne
... lived up to his reputation as a tea-drinker at all times and places. Cumberland, the dramatist, in his memoirs gives a story illustrative of the doctor's tea-drinking powers: "I remember when Sir Joshua Reynolds, at my home, reminded Dr. Johnson that he had drunk eleven cups of tea. 'Sir,' he replied, 'I did not count your glasses of wine; why ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... remember the duel at Warsaw with Count Branicki in 1766 (vol. x., pp. 274-320), an affair which attracted a good deal of attention at the time, and of which there is an account in a letter from the Abbe Taruffi to the dramatist, Francesco Albergati, dated Warsaw, March 19, 1766, quoted in Ernesto Masi's Life of Albergati, Bologna, 1878. A manuscript at Dux in Casanova's handwriting gives an account of this duel in the third person; ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... no other fount but nature's rill. It dashes not more quickly o'er the rocks than I did, as, with blunderbuss in hand, I brushed away the early morning dew, and shot the partridge, snipe, or antlered deer! Ah! well may England's dramatist remark, "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown!" Why did I steal my nephew's, my young Giglio's—? Steal! said I? no, no, no, not steal, not steal. Let me withdraw that odious expression. I took, and on my manly ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... has drawn it down, has fitted it in its proper place as a branch of physiology. And we are beginning to have a clearer understanding of the thoughts and the thought-producing actions of ourselves and our fellow beings. Soon it will be no longer possible for the historian and the novelist, the dramatist, the poet, the painter or sculptor to present in all seriousness as instances of sane human conduct, the aberrations resulting from various forms of disease ranging from indigestion in its mild, temper-breeding forms to acute homicidal or suicidal mania. In that day of greater enlightenment ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... Denis Von Wisine (1741-92), a favourite Russian dramatist. His first comedy "The Brigadier," procured him the favour of the second Catherine. His best, however, is the "Minor" (Niedorosl). Prince Potemkin, after witnessing it, summoned the author, and greeted him with the exclamation, ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... the artist or sculptor, which he is endeavoring to reproduce in stone or on canvas, seems very real to him. So do the characters in the mind of the author; or dramatist, which he seeks to express so that others may recognize them. And if this be true in the case of our finite minds, what must be the degree of Reality in the Mental Images created in the Mind of the Infinite? ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... seeming ubiquity of the famous quadroon[8] is not more marvellous than the multiplicity of characters he assumes. "Dumas at Home and Abroad" offers an inexhaustible theme and a boundless field for pen and pencil caricaturists. Alternately dramatist, novelist, tourist, ambassador, the companion of princes, the manager of theatres, an authority in courts of justice, a challenger of deputies, and shining with equal lustre in these and fifty other capacities equally diverse, what wonder that the slightest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Timanthes to throw an imaginary one over the face of Agamemnon; neither height nor depth, propriety of expression was his aim.' It is a question whether Timanthes took the idea from the text of Euripides, or whether it is his invention, and was borrowed by the dramatist. The picture must have presented a contrast to that of his rival Parrhasius, which exhibited the fury ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... psychological phenomenon of a dramatist depicting a psychosis correctly in "Concerning Hamlet and Orestes." Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. XIII, ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... having changed my route on account of the yellow fever, I jumped my entire company to Philadelphia, and at once continued on a north-eastern tour, having arranged with the well-known author and dramatist, Colonel Prentiss Ingraham, to write a play ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... been able to consider the case logically and without prejudice, I should probably have scorned this presentation of rigid alternatives as the invention of a romantic mind; I might have recognised in it the familiar device of the dramatist. But I had so far surrendered myself to the charm of Anne's individuality that I accepted her statement without the least shadow of criticism. It was the search to find some mechanical means of influencing the Jervaises' decision that reminded me of Arthur Banks's hint of an advantage ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... with a very slender knowledge of the classics. It would be sufficient to reply, that we are speaking of cases where ignorance of antiquity is not counterbalanced by any very exuberant or profound knowledge of human nature. Possibly posterity may have to deal with another myriad-minded dramatist whose poverty is better than other men's riches; but it must not be rashly presumed that he is likely to appear at all; or, if at all, with the same deficiency of learning which was not unnatural three hundred years back. Meanwhile, it is a perverse ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... Friend, the work which owes its origin to your suggestion. Long since, you urged me to attempt a fiction which might borrow its characters from our own Records, and serve to illustrate some of those truths which History is too often compelled to leave to the Tale-teller, the Dramatist, and the Poet. Unquestionably, Fiction, when aspiring to something higher than mere romance, does not pervert, but elucidate Facts. He who employs it worthily must, like a biographer, study the time and the characters he selects, with a minute and earnest diligence which ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... argument is employed to prove that the drama may be pure in itself, and effectual as a moral educator,—argument which, however excellent it may be in theory, has hitherto proved impotent in fact. But from the beginning it was not so; Ezekiel was a dramatist; he acted his prophecies and his preachings on a stage. The warnings were in this form clearly articulated, and forcefully driven home; if they failed to produce the ultimate result of repentance, the obstacle lay not in the feebleness of the instrument, but in the wilful ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... LEDGER, is, as usual, full of information concerning things theatrical—some of it gay, some of it sad. "Replies to Questions by Actors and Actresses" is the liveliest contribution in the little volume. The Obituary contains the name of "EDWARD LITT LEMAN BLANCHARD," dramatist, novellist, and journalist, who died on the 4th of September, 1889. It is hard to realise the Era Almanack without the excellent contributions of poor "E. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... think. It is generally believed that the purely literary mind scorns the idea of reforming: that art is above moral purpose. I have yet to discover the purely literary mind. Homer and Shakespeare, Goethe and Dante are clearly not of it. Shakespeare, so say the wiseacres, is the strictly impartial dramatist. He depicts the good and the bad, the great and the small, with complete detachment. Naturally, the art is the detachment and the lesson is in the perfect representation. The literary man may indignantly repudiate ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... record of the babe, William. He was baptized on April 26 and as children were usually baptized three days after their birth we infer he was born April 23. We know that he married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior; that in early manhood he went to London; that he became an actor, dramatist, manager of a theater; that in 1597 he bought New Place, the stateliest residence in Stratford; that he lived in Stratford during the last years of his life as a highly esteemed and worthy man, and that he died in 1616 and was buried ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... we daily meet really believe that all who try to the best of their ability, according to their light and circumstances, to do what is right, in the love of God and man, shall be saved. In that moving scene of the great dramatist where the burial of the innocent and hapless Ophelia is represented, and Lacrtes vainly seeks to win from the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... history of genius is the 23rd of April, as being at once the day of the birth and death of Shakspeare; and these events took place on the same spot, for at Stratford-upon-Avon this illustrious dramatist was born, in the year 1564, and here he also died, in 1616. It has been conjectured, that his first dramatic composition was produced when he was but twenty-five years old. He continued to write for the stage for a great number of years; occasionally, also, appearing as a performer: and at ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... question of degree. He was an artist and something of a dramatist; he was not at the Place Vendome at a certain critical moment; he was not at Montmartre at a particular terrible time; he was not a high officer like Mayer; he was young, with the face of a patriot. Well, they sent Mayer to the galleys at Toulon first; then, among ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Homage to the Master Dramatist of his Age and with the Gratitude that is his Due from Every Younger ...
— Oliver Cromwell • John Drinkwater
... course, the fundamental one that the Greek plays were written for performance and that many of them have {245} elaborately contrived "plots." No one supposes that Samson would be effective on the stage; but the modern dramatist who could make his play as exciting to the spectator as the Oedipus Tyrannus or Electra of Sophocles, or the Hippolytus or Medea of Euripides, would assuredly be no ordinary playwright. This Milton did ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... conventional in nature, is omitted here. In it Gally, following Casaubon,[2] theorizes that the character evolved out of Greek Old Comedy. The Augustans saw a close connection between drama and character-writing. Congreve (Dedication to The Way of the World, 1700) thought that the comic dramatist Menander formed his characters on "the observations of Theophrastus, of whom he was a disciple," and Budgell, who termed Theophrastus the father of modern comedy, believed that if some of Theophrastus's characters "were well worked up, and ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... of Sir Walter, despite his high Tory predilections, were more favourable to the people as such than those of Shakespeare. If the station be low among the characters of the dramatist, it is an invariable rule that the style of thinking and ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... that I have duplicate copies of three or four of the Plays. These duplicates I shall ask Mullet to oblige me by accepting. Mullet is not the chap who bored your father so fearfully by endless talk about Shakespeare and Napoleon, but he is a prodigious admirer of the great dramatist. He has the Plays in one huge, unwieldy volume, and for that reason reads them less than he would if they were in a more handy form. Mullet is a great reader of the old English poets (I don't mean so far back as Chaucer and Spenser), ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... American literature that it can boast no name of commanding genius—no dramatist to rank with Shakespeare, no poet to rank with Keats, no novelist to rank with Thackeray, to take names only from our cousins oversea—and yet it displays a high level of talent and a notable richness of achievement. ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... as an Irish novelist and dramatist, should have immediately succeeded him in the tenancy of "13 Brompton Grove," as this house was ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... known collectively as the Elizabethan writers, silence as to the element of childhood is profound. In all the comedies and the tragedies of the greatest dramatist of all, children play but minor parts. In none of them save in King John, where historic necessity precludes the absence of the princes in the Tower, they might be wholly omitted without impairment of the structure. In the Merry Wives of Windsor, Mistress Anne Page's son is briefly introduced, ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... that this solitary chamber is called a study: the word reminds us that hard mental labour must generally be gone through when we are alone. Any interruption by others breaks the train of thought; and the broken end may never be caught again. You remember how Maturin, the dramatist, when he felt himself getting into the full tide of composition, used to stick a wafer on his forehead, to signify to any member of his family who might enter his room, that he must not on any account be spoken to. You remember ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... his speeches, a few of his letters, a few wise or witty sayings, an anecdote or two scattered about in the pages of other authors, and six lines of hexameter verse, containing a critical estimate of the dramatist Terence, are all that remain as specimens of what is probably forever ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... even I, living in his home and seeing him almost every hour of the day, have little chance to talk with him. Last night we met M. Voltaire—dramatist and historian—now in the evening of his days. We were at the Academy, where we had gone to hear an essay by D'Alembert. Franklin and Voltaire—a very thin old gentleman of eighty-four, with piercing black eyes—sat side by side on the platform. The ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... before McQuiston's meaning gaze and turned aside in pained silence. He knew, as a dramatist, that there are dark chapters in all men's lives, and this but too clearly explained why his father had stayed in town all summer ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... Truth is stranger than fiction. No dramatist dare invent a 'poetic justice' more perfect than fell upon the traitor. It is not always so, no doubt. God reserves many a greater sinner for that most awful of all punishments—impunity. But there ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... The same small topics, the same petty interests engage them. They display the same ardent enthusiasm about trifles, and the same thorough indifference to great things, as their grandfathers; and they are marvellously like the dreary puppets that the immortal dramatist has given us ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... in the drama. Kleist, the greatest dramatist of the period, was not primarily a Romantic poet. The Schlegels wrote frosty plays and Tieck attempted dramatic production. It was left for the most bizarre of the Romantic group to write the play of greatest power in it and to set a dramatic fashion which ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... always been badly treated in literature," said Raphael. "We are made either angels or devils. On the one hand, Lessing and George Eliot, on the other, the stock dramatist and novelist ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... enjoyed the greatest social and professional prestige, he received the most verbal abuse and criticism. Perhaps the most damaging and galling satire of the century flowed from the pen of the French dramatist, Moliere, who had a medical student—not completely fictitious—swear always to accept the pronouncements of his oldest physician-colleague, and always to treat by purgation, using clysters (enemas), phlebotomy ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... his genius that is incalculable. It would be hard to define the causes of the difference of impression made upon us respectively by two such men as Aeschylus and Euripides, but we feel profoundly that the latter, though in some respects a better dramatist, was an infinitely lighter weight. Aeschylus stirs something in us far deeper than the sources of mere pleasurable excitement. The man behind the verse is far greater than the verse itself, and the impulse he gives to what is deepest and most sacred in us, though we cannot always ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... had at least one notable son, John Fletcher the dramatist, associate of Francis Beaumont and perhaps of Shakespeare, and author of "The Faithful Shepherdess." Fletcher's father was vicar of Rye. The town also gave birth to a curious father, son, and grandson, all named Samuel Jeake. The first, born in ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... The story of his life, reveal its secret. I know the secrets, but I want the secret. You'd think his spirit out of gratitude Would start me off. It's something, I insist, To find a haven with a dramatist After your bones have crossed the sea, and after Passing from hand to hand they reach ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... of Alcestis is quite untouched by the dramatist's keener analysis. The strong light only increases its effect. Yet she is not by any means a mere blameless ideal heroine; and the character which Euripides gives her makes an admirable foil to that of Admetus. Where he is passionate ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... of Edmond Rostand says that the great dramatist once told him of a curious encounter he had had with a local magistrate in a town not far from ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... it forte and ended it pianissimo—contrary to all the rules of dramatic art. It has turned into a novel. I am rather dissatisfied than satisfied with it, and reading over my new-born play, I am more convinced than ever that I am not a dramatist. The acts are very short. There are four of them. Though it is so far only the skeleton of a play, a plan which will be altered a million times before the coming season, I have ordered two copies to be typed and will send you one, only don't let ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... living! The more intelligent you become, the better read, the greater the interest you take in community and public affairs, the more effectively you become what in reality and jointly you are—the backbone of this and of every nation. Teacher, poet, dramatist, carpenter, ironworker, clerk, college head, Mayor, Governor, President, Ruler—the effectiveness of your work and the satisfaction in your work will be determined by the way in which you relate your thought and your work to the Divine plan, and coordinate your every activity in ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... it is true, profess to find in it a reference to the unfortunate Sicilian Expedition, then in progress, and a prophecy of its failure and the political downfall of Alcibiades. But as a matter of fact, the whole thing seems rather an attempt on the dramatist's part to relieve the overwrought minds of his fellow-citizens, anxious and discouraged at the unsatisfactory reports from before Syracuse, by a work conceived in a lighter vein than usual and mainly unconnected with contemporary realities. The play ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... Bay. All art is a collaboration; and there is little doubt that in the happy ages of literature, striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the story-teller's or the playwright's hand, as the rich cloaks and dresses of his time. It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink-horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children. In Ireland, those of us who know the people have the same privilege. When I was writing "The Shadow of the Glen," some ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... the following from an essay on George Bernard Shaw by Robert Blatchford, the English Socialist: "Shaw is something much better than a wit, much better than an artist, much better than a politician or a dramatist; he is a moralist, a teacher of ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... will ultimately supersede all others. It must certainly be deemed an essential acquisition by every lover of the great dramatist."—N. ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... chance glimpses through the history of the times. For this voluntary oblivion it has been rarely compensated in the immortality it meets with through Hawthorne. Not that he set himself with forethought to the illustration of it; but, in studying as poet and dramatist the past from which he himself had issued, he sought, naturally, to light it up from the interior, to possess himself of the very fire which burned in men's breasts and set their minds in movement at that epoch. In his own person and his own blood ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... heroine Marina, are sketched with a vigorous and flowing pencil. The form of this play is ostensibly Shakspearian; but it appears to us to resemble less the works of Shakspeare himself, than some of the more successful imitations of the great dramatist's manner—as, for instance, some parts of the Wallenstein. As to the language and versification, it is in blank verse, and the style is considered by Russians as admirable for ease and flexibility. At this time ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... the dramatist, has stated that in 1855 he visited the Bicetre and met an old gardener who had known De Sade during his reclusion there. He told that one of the marquis's amusements was to procure baskets of the most beautiful and expensive roses; he would then ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... is illustrated with steel engravings by Rogers, Heath, Finden, and Walker, from designs by Henry Warren, Edward Corbould, and other English artists who are favorably known to the public. It is intended that this edition shall contain all the writings ascribed to the immortal dramatist, without distinction, including not only the Poems and well-authenticated Plays, but also the Plays of doubtful origin, or of which Shakspeare is supposed to have been only in ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... one day talked to Jerrold about the humor of a celebrated novelist, dramatist, and poet, who was ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... was covered, and it was not until the time of Charles II. that women began to make their appearance upon the boards and unite the stage with the second estate. Many writers have emphasised the difficulties besetting the Elizabethan dramatist; Sir Philip Sidney himself has apologised to the spectator for the heavy overdraft on his imagination, and we have but to consider some of the most striking moments in our poet's work to realise what they must have ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... of the eminent services of a personal character which he had rendered to the emperor, in order to make way for the count. The latter's intimacy with his sovereign is largely due to his cleverness as a poet, a dramatist, and a composer, and while he has furnished the words to many of the musical compositions of the kaiser, William has, in turn, had much of his own poetry set ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... themselves in this under-mind, as the novelist and dramatist will testify. The artist finds his picture forming itself before his inner vision, and so the musician hears his composition. "It comes," they say: so does the oak. But like the oak it can only come when conditions ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... a philosophical analysis, and explanation of all the principal 'characters' of our great dramatist, as Othello, Falstaff, Richard the Third, Iago, Hamlet, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... JUAN RUIZ DE, a Spanish dramatist born in Mexico, who, though depreciated by his contemporaries, ranks after 200 years of neglect among the foremost dramatic geniuses of Spain, next even to Cervantes and Lope de Vega; he was a humpback, had an offensive air of conceit, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... having no ground in fact, a mental obsession, then Iago becomes abnormal and consequently more or less irresponsible. But this suggestion of Emilia's faithlessness made in the early part of the play is never followed up by the dramatist, and the spectator is left in complete uncertainty as to whether there be any truth or not in Iago's suspicion. If Othello has played his Ancient false, that is an extenuating circumstance in the otherwise extraordinary guilt of Iago, and would no doubt be accorded to him as such, were he ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... Jewesses and American dollars. In more sober truth, education: Presentation Brothers Schools, Cork School of Art, Cork School of Music, Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin, and Royal College of Art, London. Profession: sculptor and dramatist. Chief interests: literature, art, and music. First magazine to publish his work, The Tatler. Author of "The Whale and the Grasshopper," "Duty, and Other Irish Comedies," and "The Knowledgeable Man." Lives ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... wheresoever I wished that I was happy, and in those moments, Phil, I was full of aspiration to do those things for which nature had not fitted me, and to the extent that I recognized my inability to do those things I failed to be content. I should have liked to be a great writer, a poet, a great dramatist, a novelist—a little of everything in the literary world. I should have liked to know Shakespeare, to have been the friend of Milton; and when I came out of my dreams it made me unhappy to think that such I never could be, until one day this ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... permitted to applaud to their hearts' desire, as no further pretence of a secret existed. Glad acclamations attended the progress of the royal cortege. The people shouted with joy, and all, high and low, sang a song composed for the occasion by Lope de Vega, the famous dramatist, which told how Charles had come, under the guidance of love, to the Spanish sky ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... personal friends) to bear cruelly. This difficulty is not a flattering or gentle discipline, nor are its discriminations always good or always bad. It works almost as crudely as that of the stage works on the theatrical dramatist. A cunning subservience to it covers a multitude of sins, and often achieves for the literary craftsman place and preference over the truer artist, if he overlooks the need of being also a craftsman. Yet it is the hard demand, not ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... nightingale and the musician contending with voice and instrument in alternate melodies, till the sweet songstress of the grove falls and dies upon the lute of her rapt rival. It is something more than a pretty tale. Ford, the dramatist, introduced it briefly in happy lines in "The Lover's Melancholy," but Crashaw's verses inspire the very sweetness and lingering pleasure of the contest. It is high noon when the "sweet lute's master" seeks retirement from the heat, "on the scene of a green plat, under ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... were introduced to Johnson by their common friend, Arthur Murphy, an actor and dramatist, who afterwards became the editor of Johnson's works. One day, when calling upon Johnson, they found him in such a fit of despair that Thrale tried to stop his mouth by placing his hand before it. The pair then joined in begging Johnson to leave his solitary abode, and ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... over three acts of "Wallace," [Footnote: "Wallace: a Historical Tragedy," in five acts, was published in 1820. Joanna Baillie spoke of the author, C.E. Walker, as "a very young and promising dramatist."] and, as far as I could form an opinion, I cannot conceive these acts to be as effective on the stage as you seemed to expect. However, it is impossible to say what a very clever actor like Macready may make of some of the passages. Notwithstanding ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... acquainted with a very gentlemanly and experienced manager who thinks that it can be done for that price with strict economy. Has the young man of pronounced theatrical talent arrived from Keokuk with gold and a thirst for fame? The Jackal knows just the dramatist who will write him the play that he ought to star in. Does the wealthy and important person from Podunk desire to back something absolutely safe and sure in the line of theatrical speculation? The Jackal has the very thing for which he ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... always been a large proprietor in London, and he had come to strike a bargain with them. They could have as many sites as they chose, on one condition. Every year they must send him a dramatist. ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... announcements in the theatrical columns informed an indifferent theater-going world that Miss Marie Courtenay, an actress new to Broadway, was to play the ingenue part in the latest comedy by a highly popular dramatist. Immediately upon the production, the theater-going world ceased to be indifferent to the new actress; in fact, it went into one of its occasional furores about her. Not that she was in any way a great genius, but she had a certain indefinable and winningly individual ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... God" by our American novelist and dramatist, George Henry Miles, is not only a romantic and interesting story, it recalls one of the most striking ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... be explained that Bernard Shaw added to his negative case of a dramatist to be depreciated a corresponding affirmative case of a dramatist to be exalted and advanced. He was not content with so remote a comparison as that between Shakespeare and Bunyan. In his vivacious weekly articles in the Saturday Review, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... intelligent and literary, went in to see the little play which Madeline Ayres had written. It was called "The Animal Fair," and three of the class animals appeared in it. But the mis- en-scene was an artist's studio, the great red lion was a red-faced English dramatist, the chick a modest young lady novelist attired in yellow chiffon, and the dragon a Scotch dialect writer. The repartee was clever, the action absurd, and there were local hits in plenty for those unliterary persons who did ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... good, so we stowed a few in our bags for use on our way towards Oxford. This industry in Banbury is a very old one, for the cakes are known to have been made there as far back as 1602, when the old Cross was pulled down, and are mentioned by Ben Jonson, a great dramatist, and the friend of Shakespeare. He was Poet Laureate from 1619, and had the honour of being buried in Westminster Abbey. In his comedy Bartholomew Fair, published in 1614, he mentions that a Banbury baker, whom he facetiously named Mr. "Zeal-of-the-Lord ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... gatherings," in Greek and in English. Then comes "The Epistle Apologeticall to the lettered Reader," signed "Thine for thy pleasure and profite—Abraham Fleming," which, in excuse for taking up so slight a subject, contains a very singular notice of the celebrated John Heywood, the dramatist of the reign of Henry VIII., and of his remarkable poem The Spider and the Fly. The Pretie Paradoxe, by Synesius, next commences, and extends as far as sign. D. v. b. This portion of the tract is, of course, merely a translation, but it includes a passage or two from Homer, cleverly ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... to representation" in their original state. Does Mr. Crummles know better than Master Shakespeare knew how "Romeo and Juliet" should be ended with the best effect,—not only to the ear in the closet, but theatrically on the stage? The story was not a new one; and the dramatist deliberately followed one of two existing versions rather than the other. In Boisteau's translation of Bandello's novel, Juliet wakes from her trance before Romeo's death; in Brooke's poem, which the great master chose to adopt ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... look into the far future, and although it did not prevail, for certain important reasons, the Chancellor caught the human side of the combination, with the clarity of a dramatist constructing a plot. ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... Dr. Abbott has written on this subject. From your statement of his position, I think he entertains quite a sensible view, and, when we take into consideration that he is a minister, a miraculously sensible view. It is not the business of the dramatist, the actor, the painter or the sculptor to teach what the church calls morality. The dramatist and the actor ought to be truthful, ought to be natural—that is to say, truthfully and naturally artistic. He should present pictures of life properly ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... journalist in The Express, "forget the shudder with which I saw a very well-known dramatist at a garden party eating strawberries with his gloves on." We ourselves sometimes have these sudden sensations, but, unlike the writer, are very prone to let them slip ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... in form, it is not so in spirit. The true dramatist would have put such an incident as the swearing of brotherhood into a scene, instead of into a speech. This effort is, however, the nearest approach to a drama in English founded on saga material. It is curious that our poets have inclined to every form but ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... of Milton and the Macbeth of Shakspeare. Aeschylus is equally artful with Sophocles—it is the criticism of ignorance that has said otherwise. But there is this wide distinction—Aeschylus is artful as a dramatist to be read, Sophocles as a dramatist to be acted. If we get rid of actors, and stage, and audience, Aeschylus will thrill and move us no less than Sophocles, through a more intellectual if less passionate ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tenderness with her husband after the guests have left the banquet indicate her wisdom in dealing with him, or the pathetic weakening of her strong character, or a natural tenderness? Give reasons. What makes the sleep-walking scene so pathetic? How has the dramatist prepared us for her breakdown? What, if anything, do you find ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... bound to be more or less tragic. It is the struggle between two claims, the destruction of either of which would bring ruin to the ethical life. Curiously enough, it is almost exactly this contradiction which is the tragedy set forth by the Greek dramatist, who asserted that the gods who watch over the sanctity of the family bond must yield to the higher claims of the gods of the state. The failure to recognize the social claim as legitimate causes the trouble; the suspicion constantly remains that woman's public efforts are merely selfish ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... who was a great champion of Crabbe and allotted several essays to him, takes delight in analysing the plots or stories of these tales; but it is a little amusing to notice that he does it for the most part exactly as if he were criticising a novelist or a dramatist. "The object," says he, in one place, "is to show that a man's fluency of speech depends very much upon his confidence in the approbation of his auditors": "In Squire Thomas we have the history of a mean, domineering spirit," and so ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... suffering is felt at once to be real where all else had been false; and the historian of the gestures of fever and words of delirium can count on the applause of a gratified audience as surely as the dramatist who introduces on the stage of his flagging action a carriage that can be driven or a fountain that will flow. But the masters of strong imagination disdain such work, and those of deep sensibility shrink ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the plays is another matter; a combination of collation and judicious borrowing, it was provided by George Steevens. Steevens' contributions to the text and annotation of Shakespeare's plays concern students of the dramatist; That Johnson had to say about the plays concerns Johnsonians as veil as Shakespeareans. And it is unfortunately true that too little attention has been paid to what is after all Johnson's final and reconsidered judgment on a number of passages ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... imagination,' Trombin observed, following his own train of thought. 'In me a great romancer has been lost to our age, another Bandello, perhaps a second Boccaccio! An English gentleman of taste once told me that my features resemble those of a dramatist of his country, whose first name was William—I forget the second, which I could not learn to pronounce—but that my cheeks are even rounder than his were, and my mouth smaller. Under other circumstances, who knows but that I might have been the William Something of Italy? My English ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... deceived by the gallant Stanley; the sayings and doings of Mrs. Moneylove, who is "what she ought not to be," and the way she tricks her husband, are very racy, perhaps too much so for the taste of the present times. I do not think any dramatist would now bring upon the stage a young lady like Theodocia, daughter of old Moneylove, reading the list about Squire Careless. Tom Essence is a seller of perfumes, a "jealous coxcomb of his wife;" and Courtly is "a sober gentleman, servant to Theodocia;" these are ...
— Sganarelle - or The Self-Deceived Husband • Moliere
... lifting your eyebrows over the book, as the blue waggon of the Sisters rolled lumberingly into the story? The long arm of coincidence stretched to aching tenuity by the dramatist and the novelist! Nay! but the thing happened, just as ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... occupations, recalled him to Liverpool. To Liverpool accordingly he returned, to work as a draughtsman, and fired withal with a double ambition—for one thing to win fame as a poet, for another to succeed as a dramatist. Already in 1870 he had written a long poem, which was published in 1874 anonymously by an enterprising Liverpool publisher. About this poem George Gilfillan, to whom Hall Caine sent it in 1876, wrote that there was much in it that ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... thought, "that's a bit thick, that is! She's stuck me up with a dramatist I don't believe in, and a play I don't believe in, and an actress I don't ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... inartistic to intervene—to interrupt the action at an inopportune moment—to stultify what promised to be an unusually involved complication. When first I saw and recognized you on the Nevski, it was like one of those divine surprises of the master dramatist, M. Sardou. Really, I was indebted for the thrill of it. Besides, had I spoken, the prince might have tossed you overboard; he is quite capable of doing so. That, too, would have been inartistic, would have turned a comedy of ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... the beginning of a friendship which formed a valuable element in Wordsworth's life. Sir George Beaumont, of Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire, a descendant of the dramatist, and representative of a family long distinguished for talent and culture, was staying with Coleridge at Greta Hall, Keswick, when, hearing of Coleridge's affection for Wordsworth, he was struck with the wish to bring Wordsworth also to Keswick, and bought and presented ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... I sat silent for a moment, and then, with a spontaneous impulse, we both broke out clapping as at the well-wrought crisis of a play. A flush of colour sprang to Holmes's pale cheeks, and he bowed to us like the master dramatist who receives the homage of his audience. It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause. The same singularly proud and reserved nature which turned away with disdain from popular notoriety was capable of being ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... only one word in the passage, so far as its outward form goes, is completely alien to our knowledge. But how different the matter stands when we consider meanings! The words are words of today, but the meanings are the meanings of Shakespeare. We should be baffled and misled as to the dramatist's thought if we had made no ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... self made man—from laboring in a brick-yard to journalism, then a dramatist. He was a noble boy, a manly man. He toiled patiently all the days of his only too brief life ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... Oxford. We have seen (above) that he was barely twenty-one when The Humour of the Age was printed in March of 1701. A Thomas Baker, son of John Baker of Ledbury, Hereford, was entered at Brasenose College, Oxford, on March 18, 1697, aged seventeen.[7] The ages falling so pat, this must be our dramatist. Upon taking his B.A. at Christ Church in 1700 he must immediately have set to scribbling his first play (the Dedication says that it was "writ in two months last summer"). Perhaps at this time he lived in London in some such ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... special point something must be said hereafter. Meanwhile, hear one of the sixteenth century poets; one who cannot be suspected of any leaning toward Puritanism; one who had as high notions of his vocation as any man; and one who so far fulfilled those notions as to become a dramatist inferior only to Shakspeare. Let Ben Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to 'Volpone' tell us in his own noble prose what he thought of the average morality ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... well as the motives which led to their inception, are unique. They are a series of stories based upon historical records, from the pen of Alexandre Dumas, pere, when he was not "the elder," nor yet the author of D'Artagnan or Monte Cristo, but was a rising young dramatist and a lion in the literary ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... chief actor, and the source from which the dramatist must cull his choicest beauties, painting up to nature the varied scenes which mark the changeful courses of her motley groups. Here she opes her volume to the view of contemplative minds, and spreads her treasures forth, decked in all the variegated tints that Flora, goddess of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... whole of the preceding day. I was thus able to discover the origin of the substance of the materialization of the writing, and also its psychic origin.' In other words, he claims that the message was not from the shade of the great dramatist, but was a precipitation of the blood of the psychic and an exercise of her subconscious mind, all of which ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... other feuds. As further proof that the girls were under the guidance of older heads, it is obvious, that there was, in the order of the proceedings, a skilful arrangement of times, sequences, and concurrents, that cannot be ascribed to them. No novelist or dramatist ever laid his plot deeper, distributed his characters more artistically, or conducted more methodically ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Lady Chapel. We were not there for that beauty, however, but for John Harvard's sake; yet no sooner were we fairly inside the church than our thoughts were rapt from him to such clearer fames as those of Philip Massinger, the dramatist; Edmund Shakespeare, the great Shakespeare's younger brother; John Fletcher, of the poetic firm of Beaumont and Fletcher; the poet Edward Dyer; and yet again the poet John Gower, the "moral Gower" who so insufficiently filled the long ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the famous sea song writer, who was also a dramatist, a composer of music, an actor, a scene painter, and a manager, had constructed in Exeter Change what he whimsically called 'The Patagonian Theatre:' in truth, a simple puppet-show, upon the plan of that contrived years before by Mr. Powell, under the Piazza, Covent Garden, and concerning which ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... wherewithal in the least to indulge them, was a less evil for him than seeing us rudely corrected. It was in truth an extraordinary situation and would have offered a splendid subject, as we used to say, to the painter of character, the novelist or the dramatist, with the hand to treat it. After I had read David Copperfield an analogy glimmered—it struck me even in the early time: cousin Henry was more or less another Mr. Dick, just as cousin Helen was in her relation to him more or less another Miss Trotwood. There were disparities indeed: Mr. Dick was ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... conducted us to this pessimistic conclusion Le Roy finds it repugnant, and is unwilling to acquiesce in it. Like an embarrassed dramatist he escapes from the knot which he has tied by introducing the ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... real greatness. Marguerite Claes, the daughter, is a noble heroine; and if one wishes to see how Balzac's characters and ideas suffer when treated by another though an able hand, one has but to read in conjunction with this novel the 'Maitre Guerin' of the distinguished dramatist Emile Augier. A proper pendant to this history of a noble genius perverted is 'La Confidence des Ruggieri,' the second part of that remarkable composite 'Sur Catherine de Medicis,' a book which in spite of its mixture of history, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... books—or let us say twenty—on Mr. Bernard Shaw. They deal with him as a sociologist, a dramatist, or what not, but never as a humorist. There is a mass of books on Oscar Wilde, and they deal with everything concerned with him, except his humour. The great humorists—as such—go unsung to their graves. That is because there is nothing so obvious ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... dramatists, I confess I am not in the position to deny that their wares frequently "sell." [Laughter.] I might, of course, artfully plead in extenuation of this condition of affairs that success in such a shape is the very last reward the dramatist toils for, or desires; that when the theatre in which his work is presented is thronged nightly no one is more surprised, more abashed than himself; that his modesty is so impenetrable, his artistic absorption so profound, that the sound of the voices of public ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... highest excellence and repute in the age of Louis XIV, and we should not be making a very hazardous assertion if we were to say that the literature of that epoch in France attained its height of glory in the drama. No French dramatist has excelled Moliere, Corneille, and Racine; no group of authors in the seventeenth century were more brilliant, more powerful, more originative. When we turn our eyes upon the stage for which these three wrote, we find ourselves ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... to himself, from this "Examination of Shakspeare," more favourable opinion of Sir Thomas than is left upon his mind by the dramatist in the character of Justice Shallow. The knight, indeed, is here exhibited in all his pride of birth and station, in all his pride of theologian and poet; he is led by the nose, while he believes that nobody can move him, and shows ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... learning; all that is required is to prove adherence to common nature and common rationality. This is the ground upon which Anonymous stands, and it is the ground upon which Morgann is to stand when he gives us the "Falstaff of Nature," and Johnson when he presents Shakespeare as the dramatist who is "above all modern writers the poet of nature," whose "persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions by which all minds are agitated," whose "drama is the mirror of life," ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... better in heroic or in ludicrous parts. He was allowed to be both the best Alexander and the best Sir Courtly Nice that ever trod the boards. Queen Mary, whose knowledge was very superficial, but who had naturally a quick perception of what was excellent in art, admired him greatly. He was a dramatist as well as a player, and has left us one comedy which ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his churlish tale in his manner," of which manner the less said the better; while in the "Reeve's Tale," Chaucer even, after the manner of a comic dramatist, gives his Northern undergraduate a vulgar ungrammatical phraseology, probably designedly, since the poet was himself a "Southern man." The "Pardoner" is exuberant in his sample-eloquence; the "Doctor of Physic" is gravely ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... begin his studies (or at least his enjoyment) thereof, not with "Sapho," but with Gauthier de Costes, Seigneur de la Calprenede, himself according to Tallemant almost the proverbial "Gascon et demi"; a tragic dramatist, as well as a romantic writer; a favourite of Mme. de Sevigne, who seldom went wrong in her preferences, except when she preferred her very disagreeable daughter to her very agreeable son; and more than any one else the inventor, or at least perfecter, of the hectoring heroic style which we associate ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... literature of the day. Tottel and The Mirror for Magistrates (which was, considering its constant accretions, a sort of miscellany) have been already noticed. They were followed by not a few others. The first in date was The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), edited by R. Edwards, a dramatist of industry if not of genius, and containing a certain amount of interesting work. It was very popular, going through nine or ten editions in thirty years, but with a few scattered exceptions it does not yield much to the ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... unsuccessful dramatist has his moments. I knew a young man who married somebody else's mother, and was allowed by her fourteen gardeners to amuse himself sometimes by rolling the tennis-court. It was an unsatisfying life; and when rash acquaintances asked ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... British dramatist, wrote in 1630: "A starre? Nay, thou art more than the moone, for thou hast neither changing quarters, nor a man standing in thy circle with a bush of ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... dramatist and poet laureate, and one of the first editors of Shakespeare, was at this time under-secretary to the Duke of Queensberry, Secretary of ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... the present life of Shakespeare endeavours loyally to adhere to the principles that are inherent in the scheme of the 'Dictionary of National Biography.' I have endeavoured to set before my readers a plain and practical narrative of the great dramatist's personal history as concisely as the needs of clearness and completeness would permit. I have sought to provide students of Shakespeare with a full record of the duly attested facts and dates of their master's career. I have avoided merely aesthetic criticism. ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... by him or published as his, must certainly have preceded "Every Man in His Humour" on the stage. The former play may be described as a comedy modelled on the Latin plays of Plautus. (It combines, in fact, situations derived from the "Captivi" and the "Aulularia" of that dramatist). But the pretty story of the beggar-maiden, Rachel, and her suitors, Jonson found, not among the classics, but in the ideals of romantic love which Shakespeare had already popularised on the stage. Jonson never again produced ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... Bjoernson had also made his debut as a dramatist. In the year 1858 he had published two dramas, "Mellem Slagene" (Between the Battles) and "Halte-Hulda" (Limping Hulda) both of which deal with national subjects, taken from the old sagas. As in his tales he had endeavored to concentrate into a few strongly defined types the modern folk-life ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... up Mr. Martin's Privately Printed Books, but neither our dramatist nor his press is there alluded to. Touching the latter, Mr. Wallace ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... What dramatist or novelist has ever yet made a plot which did not consist of events that had already transpired somewhere on earth? He might intensify events, concentrate and combine them, or amplify them; but that is all. Men in all ages have suffered ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... drawers made out of a highly polished outlandish wood, with little devices of gilt rails, and drawer-furnishings, and tiny figures, and little bits of china "let in," which might easily catch a duster, thought Mrs. Dixon, and "mak' trooble." That it had belonged to a French dramatist under Louis Quinze, and then to a French Queen; that the plaques were Sevres, and the table as a whole beyond the purse of any but a South African or American man of money, was of ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... carrying an unsavoury sense. (Act I. Scene 4.) A puzzle, in the usual meaning of the word, the Maid was to the dramatist. I shall not enter into the dispute as to whether Shakespeare was the author, or part author, of this perplexed drama. But certainly the role of the Pucelle is either by two different hands, or the one author was 'in two minds' about the heroine. Now she appears as la ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... face always wore a smile so sweet that I forgot my pain when I gazed upon her. Her voice rings in my ears even now. It was peculiarly soft and musical, and I never heard her speak but I recalled those lines of the great dramatist, 'Her voice was ever low, an excellent thing in woman.' Every sufferer waited to hear her speak and seemed to hang upon her accents. Her words were few, but so kind that we all felt that with such a friend to help us we could ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... some explanation of what had happened to his brother, and sister, and himself. Or, failing to do this, she might accidentally reveal some event in her own experience which, acting as a hint to a competent dramatist, might prove to be the making of a play. The prosperity of his theatre was his one serious object in life. 'I may be on the trace of another "Corsican Brothers,"' he thought. 'A new piece of that sort would be ten thousand pounds ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins |
