"Playhouse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... young men of position would not form a playhouse acquaintanceship with an amusing and interesting actor seems to me to show misunderstanding of human nature. The players were, when unprotected by men of rank, "vagabonds." The citizens of London, mainly ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... inspire them, madam. For this, among the rest, were you ordained. But the boon I crave is that you do endow a great playhouse, or, if I may make bold to coin a scholarly name for it, a National Theatre, for the better instruction and gracing of ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... young and venturesome spirits had invaded its silent precincts, there to dream in safety and seclusion, unhaunted by its spectres, undisturbed by its secret. In one of its darkened rooms they had set up a "workshop," a "playhouse." A glaze came over his eyes as he wondered what had transpired in that room during the surreptitious six weeks' tenancy. Had David Strong kissed her? Had she kissed David Strong? Were promises made and futures planned? His throat was tight ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... agreeable in the world, the Athenians passed the greatest part of their time in the open air; and their theatres, like those in the rest of Greece and in ancient Rome, had no other covering than the sky. Their structure accordingly differed greatly from that of a modern playhouse, and the representation in many respects was executed in a different manner. But we will mention those peculiarities only which are necessary to render our ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... he had the shrewdness to eschew the mere meaningless blague that no one could better employ with the creatures of Versailles, who liked their olives well oiled, or the Jeannetons and Mimis of the Italian comedy and the playhouse. Under his genial and shining influence Olivia soon forgot the ignominy of these recent days, and it was something gained in that direction that already she looked ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... deceive by whitening the sepulchre? Is it yourselves? The devil has blinded you already. Is it God? Who shall hide anything from Him? I tell you that he who makes the pursuit of virtue a luxury, and takes refuge from sin, not before the altar, but in the playhouse, is casting out devils by Beelzebub, ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... his connection with a rival company; a fact of grave importance till now unverified. The epithet "dearest," like so much else in the Sonnets, was evidently susceptible of a double interpretation. The first and most natural explanation of the term would at once suggest itself; the playhouse would of necessity be dearest to the actor dependent on it for subsistence, as the means of getting his bread; but he thought it not unreasonable to infer from this unmistakable allusion that the entrance fee charged at the Fortune may probably have been higher than the price of seats in any ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... playhouse like to row, Some with the Watch to battle, Exchanging many a midnight blow To Music of the Rattle. Some folks like rowing on the Thames, Some rowing in an Alley, But all the Row my fancy claims Is rowing—of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... liked—dhrinkin', an' singin', an' playin' ov music, and dancin' like mad! I wint on, on, on, out ov one room an' into another, till my head was fairly addled, an' I thought I'd never come to the ind. And sich grandeur!—why, the playhouse was nothin' to id. At last I come to a beautiful big stairs, an' up I wint; an' sure enough there was the drawin'-room door, reachin' up to the ceilin' almost, an' as big as the gate ov a coach-house, an' wrote on a board over the door, 'No admittance for strangers, only on business.'—'Sure,' ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... over, the boys lounged about the hut, and Dan Sullivan brought a lot of things from his sister's playhouse with which to furnish it more suitably. Archie Dunn brought a lot of hay from the loft in his mother's barn, and when a piece of old carpet was spread upon it it made an acceptable couch. A piece of old carpet was laid in front ...
— The Adventures of a Boy Reporter • Harry Steele Morrison
... Castle."—Pepys, in his Diary, 14th September, 1667, says, "To the King's playhouse, to see The Northerne Castle, which I think I never did see before." Is anything known of this play and its authorship? or was it The Northern Lass, by Richard Brome, first published in 1632? Perhaps Pepys has quoted the ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... Home, suitable for a girl's playhouse, on Public Square—this playhouse may be given as first prize to the girl of school age writing the best essay on "Why You Should ...
— Better Homes in America • Mrs W.B. Meloney
... preach to me for two hours, I would not be able when you finished to {p.031} remember a word you had been saying." My memory was precisely of the same kind: it seldom failed to preserve most tenaciously a favorite passage of poetry, a playhouse ditty, or, above all, a Border-raid ballad; but names, dates, and the other technicalities of history, escaped me in a most melancholy degree. The philosophy of history, a much more important subject, was also a sealed book at this period of my life; but I gradually ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... and together should aloud the applause, greeting that which caricatures religion, sneers at virtue, or hints at indecency." Not only the actors and the onlookers of the average theater are vile, but all of the immediate associations of the playhouse must correspond with it. If not in the same building with the theater, in adjoining ones, at least, are found the wine-parlor and the brothel. It is generally conceded that no theater can be prosperous if it is wholly separated from these ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... magnificent Duke Eberhard Ludwig of Wirtemberg, who had commanded a brilliant ball as commencement of a series of festivities. There was to be a grand hunt in the Red Wood, and finally court theatricals in his Highness's own playhouse. The beautiful castle gardens were illuminated with a myriad coloured lamps in the trees; the rose-garden had become an enchanted bower, with little lanterns twinkling in each rose-bush, and the fountain in the centre was so lit up with varied lights that the spray assumed a thousand hues. ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... its pecuniary failure has not been put in satisfactory conditions to any practical test. The last time that it was put to a sound practical test it did not fail. While Irving was a boy, Phelps at Sadler's Wells Theatre gave, in well-considered conditions, the simple method a trial. Phelps's playhouse was situated in the unfashionable neighbourhood of Islington. But the prophets of evil, who were no greater strangers to Phelps's generation than they are to our own, were ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... much prefer putting in the hours talking over old times. With all due respect to your sister, old boy, I confess I have n't very much heart for the stage. I 've grown away from it; have n't even looked into a playhouse for years." ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... probably to these later years that his attempt at pastoral belongs, but the actual date of composition must rest upon conjecture. It was, we are informed on the title-page, performed before their majesties (at Whitehall, the prologue adds), and also publicly at Salisbury Court, the playhouse in the Strand, opened in 1629. Consequently the 'praeludium,' the scene of which is laid in the new theatre, must belong to the last months of the author's life[325]. The question of the date is interesting principally ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... or gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are apt not only to sink the play-writer in the consideration which we pay to the actor, but even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner, the actor with the character which he represents. ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... balls, &c., the people of no fashion, besides one royal place, called his Majesty's Bear-garden, have been in constant possession of all hops, fairs, revels, &c. Two places have been agreed to be divided between them, namely, the church and the playhouse, where they segregate themselves from each other in a remarkable manner; for, as the people of fashion exalt themselves at church over the heads of the people of no fashion, so in the playhouse they abase themselves in the ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... Peninnah Penelope Anne were on the floor before a playhouse, outlined by stones and sticks, and with rapt faces and competent fancies, saw whatsoever they would. In these riches of imagination a little brother also partook. A stick, accoutred in such wise with scraps of buckskin as to imitate ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... need be no question that Shakespeare held at first a subordinate rank in the theatre. Dowdal, writing in 1693, tells us "he was received into the playhouse as a servitor"; which probably means that he started as an apprentice to some actor of standing,—a thing not unusual at the time. It will readily be believed that he could not be in such a place long without recommending himself to a higher one. As for ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... just turned of nineteen, when happening to pass by the playhouse one evening, he took it into his head to go in, and see the last act of a very celebrated tragedy acted that night.—But it was not the poet's or the player's art which so much engaged his attention, as the numerous and gay assembly which filled every part of the ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... John Cennick, like Joseph Hart, was led to Christ after a reckless boyhood and youth, by the work of the Divine Spirit in his soul, independent of any direct outward influence. Sickened of his cards, novels, and playhouse pleasures, he had begun a sort of mechanical reform, when one day, walking in the streets of London, he suddenly seemed to hear the text spoken "I am thy salvation!" His ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... second visit to London, his lodgings were first in Woodstock-street, near Hanover Square, and then in Castle-street, near Cavendish Square. His tragedy, which was brought on the stage twelve years after by Garrick, having been at this time rejected by the manager of the playhouse, he was forced to relinquish his hopes of becoming a dramatic writer, and engaged himself to write for the Gentleman's Magazine. The debates in Parliament were not then allowed to be given to the public with the same unrestricted and generous freedom with which it is now permitted to report them. ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... thing but make an exact copy of my playhouse under the biggest maiden's-blush in our orchard. He used the immense beech for one corner, where I had the apple tree. His Magic Carpet was woolly-dog moss, and all the magic about it, was that on the damp woods floor, in the deep shade, the moss had taken root ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... insistent that I went further and began to wonder whether I was not in fact reading a "story-form" of some already triumphant film. Certainly the resemblance is almost too pronounced to be fortuitous; from the sensational branding scene, through cowboy stunts, to the up-town playhouse, where a repentant and wife-seeking hero recognises his mark upon the shoulder of the leading lady—and so to reconciliation, slow fade-out, and the announcement of Next Week's Pictures. But though it is impossible not to suspect Miss BURT of having an ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... kennel of Catherine-street, like guilty things upon a fearful summons. At the pipe-shop in Great Russell-street, the Death's-head pipes were like theatrical memento mori, admonishing beholders of the decline of the playhouse as an Institution. I walked up Bow-street, disposed to be angry with the shops there, that were letting out theatrical secrets by exhibiting to work-a-day humanity the stuff of which diadems and robes of kings are made. I noticed that some shops which had once been in the ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... said. So Pierre Radisson and I escorted Lady Kirke and her daughter to the play, riding in one of those ponderous coaches, with four belaced footmen clinging behind and postillions before. At the entrance to the playhouse was a great concourse of crowding people, masked ladies, courtiers with pages carrying torches for the return after dark, merchants with linkmen, work folk with lanterns, noblemen elbowing tradesmen from ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... satisfactory understanding of it would come slowly; but walking here in the winter sunshine along the village street, she had that sensation of strangeness which the child has on coming from the lighted playhouse into the street.... The set vision that tormented her within—that, too, ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... publication of the first Quarto of Bussy D'Ambois Chapman issued a sequel, The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, which, as we learn from the title-page, had been "often presented at the private Playhouse in the White-Fryers." But in the interval he had written two other plays based on recent French history, Byrons Conspiracie and The Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron, and in certain aspects The Revenge is more closely ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... or two to let you know how deeply I appreciate the honor which the children who are the actors and frequenters of this cozy playhouse have conferred upon me. They have asked me to be their ambassador to invite the hearts and brains of New York to come down here and see the work they are doing. I consider it a grand distinction to be chosen as their intermediary. Between ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... missus be gone, I go an' kick ovah her playhouse an' upset her toys. When she come back, she be hoppin' mad, an ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... that the theatre in which the plays of Shakespeare were represented could or should be called a "low play house." The fact that "Othello," "Lear," "Hamlet," "Julius Caesar," and the other great dramas were first played in that playhouse made it the greatest building in the world. The gods themselves should have occupied seats in that theatre, where for the first time the greatest productions of the human mind were put ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... they met Uncle and Aunt, also entirely out of breath with the chase, Aunt declared that this was only another case of Chicago's base deceptions. It could joke with dead people and jest with fires and make a playhouse exhibition costing many millions of dollars, and fool old people and the young alike and with ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... I now have the honour to be By 'Man'ging' a 'Playhouse' a double M.P., In this my address I think fit to complain Of certain encroachments on great ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... chemical laboratory will excite more wonder or be carried on with more interest, than those which the boy performs with his pipe and basin of soapy water. The little girl's mud pies and other sham confectionery furnish her first lessons in the art of preparing food. Her toy dinners and playhouse teas offer her the first experiences in the entertainment of guests. With her dolls, the domestic relations ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... Weak, short-lived issues of a feeble age; Scarce living to be christen'd on the stage! For humour farce, for love they rhyme dispense, That tolls the knell for their departed sense. Dulness, that in a playhouse meets disgrace, Might meet with reverence in its proper place. The fulsome clench that nauseates the town, Would from a judge or alderman go down— Such virtue is there in a robe and gown! And that insipid stuff which here you hate, Might ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... we will just keep our Christmas where we are! We won't deprive Ishmael of his grand Christmas dinner with his grand friends; but we will ax him to come over and go to the playhouse with us and see the play, and then we'll all come back and have a nice supper all on us together. We'll have a roast turkey and mince pie and egg-nog and apple toddy, my dear, and make a night of it, once in a ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... really cultivating affection, of its superiority to books, and on the pleasure and profit of self-denial. I do not mean to accuse Clem of downright hypocrisy. I have known many persons come up from the country and go into raptures over a playhouse sun and moon who have never bestowed a glance or a thought on the real sun and moon to be seen from their own doors; and we are all aware it by no means follows because we are moved to our very depths by the spectacle of unrecognised, uncomplaining ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... Palliser, that I never knew a house so warm as this,—or, I'm sorry to say,"—and here the emphasis was very strong on the word sorry,—"so cold as Longroyston." And the tone in which Longroyston was uttered would almost have drawn tears from a critical audience in the pit of a playhouse. The Duchess was a woman of about forty, very handsome, but with no meaning in her beauty, carrying a good fixed colour in her face, which did not look like paint, but which probably had received some little assistance from art. She was a well-built, sizeable woman, with good ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... only bent upon restoring the fortunes of his family, and attaining a solid municipal position. He buys the biggest house in his native place; from the proceeds of his writings, his professional income as an actor, and from his share in the playhouse of which he is part owner, he purchases lands and houses, he engages in lawsuits, he concerns himself with grants of arms. Still the flood of stupendous literature flows out; he seems to be under a contract to produce plays, for which he receives the ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... nights of this sublime Playhouse thunder (with real bullets in it, which killed some men, and burnt considerable property), the Neisse Commandant (not Roth this time, Roth is now in Brunn),—his "fortnight of siege," October 17th to October 31st, being accomplished or nearly so,—beat chamade; and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... happily miss'd fire, and the villain made off, when the honour of knighthood was conferred on him to the great joy of that noble family." "Escaped from the New Gaol, Terence M'Dermot. If he will return, he will be kindly received." "Colds caught at this season are The Companion to the Playhouse." "Ready to sail to the West Indies, the Canterbury Flying Machine in one day." "To be sold to the best Bidder, My Seat in Parliament being vacated." "I have long laboured under a complaint For ready money only," "Notice is hereby given, and no ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... John Chamberlaine to Sir Ralph Winwood, dated July 8, 1613, in which this accident is likewise mentioned, we learn that the theatre had only two doors.[4] "The burning of the Globe or playhouse on the Bankside on St. Peter's day cannot escape you; which fell out by a peal of chambers, (that I know not upon what occasion were to be used in the play,) the tampin or stopple of one of them lighting in the thatch that covered the house, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... the theatre introduced movable scenery. There is an attempt toward elaboration of stage effect. "To the King's playhouse—" says Pepys, "a good scene of a town on fire." Women take parts. An avalanche of new plays descends on it. Even the old plays that have survived are garbled to suit ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... This was the playhouse in which Mlle. Clairville acted. This was the clever company which, secure in New France from blase critics, produced the comedies and tragedies of Moliere, Corneille, Dumas, Halevy, Mme. de Genlis, as well as serving up ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... fellow," cries one, "has no soul: where is his shoulder-knot?" {75} Our three brethren soon discovered their want by sad experience, meeting in their walks with forty mortifications and indignities. If they went to the playhouse, the doorkeeper showed them into the twelve-penny gallery. If they called a boat, says a waterman, "I am first sculler." If they stepped into the "Rose" to take a bottle, the drawer would cry, "Friend, we sell no ale." If they went to visit a lady, a footman met ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... machines thumped and creaked, and where the long rubber sheets were cut and sewed, and the clanking rolls of tin and zinc curled into strips, and Daddy Mason made her a little set of dishes and all the things she needed in her playhouse from the scraps of tin and rubber, and she learned to twist the little tin strips on a stick and make the prettiest bright shiny tin curls for her dolls that a little girl ever saw in all the world. ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... rich. The man who could love her as she once believed men could love, and who could give her something else besides approval of her beauty and her mind, had not disclosed himself. She had begun to think that he never would, that he did not exist, that he was an imagination of the playhouse and the novel. The men whom she knew were careful to show her that they appreciated how distinguished was her position, and how inaccessible she was to them. They seemed to think that by so humbling ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... profession, and jack of all trades through necessity. He could play any part from Macbeth to the hind leg of an elephant, equally well or bad, as the case might be. What he did not know about a theatre was not worth knowing; what he could not do about a playhouse was not worth doing—provided you took his word for it. From this it might be inferred he was a useful man, but he was not. He had a queer way of doing things he ought not to do, and of leaving undone things he should have done. Good nature, however, was his chief ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... be an assiduous frequenter of the playhouse, for the drama will also open the world's heart to him, and that by a plainer and less elusive speech. Seated in the theatre among his kind, he knows a deeper pleasure than other men; for while to these the changing scene brings remembrance or anticipation of familiar things, ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... excitement. The descendants of the men and women who had gone out to welcome the poetry of Shakespeare and the wit of Congreve were now rather readers than play-goers, and were most ready to enjoy an appeal to their feelings when that appeal reached them in book form. In the playhouse they came to expect bustle and pantomime rather than literature. This decline in theatrical habits prepared a domestic audience for the novelists, and accounts for that feverish and apparently excessive anxiety with which the earliest great novels ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... stand together, and what an awful wreck when they disintegrate, quarreling about a father's will and making the surrogate's office horrible with their wrangle. Better when you were little children in the nursery that with your playhouse mallets you had accidentally killed each other fighting across your cradle, than that, having come to the age of maturity, and having in your veins and arteries the blood of the same father and mother, you fight each other across the parental grave ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... everything we want. Oh, honey, we chillun never been harness up in no little bit of place to play like dese chillun bout here dese days. We had all de big fields en de pretty woods to wander round en bout en make us playhouse in. Seems like de Lord had made de little streams just right for we chillun to play in en all kind of de prettiest flowers to come up right down side de paths us little feet had made dere, but dat wasn' nothin. Dere was flowers scatter ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... a bark hut, handsomely reinforced and embowered with fresh spruce boughs. The women were out at the side of a stream, washing their many bits of calico. A little girl, six or seven years old, was sitting on the gravelly beach, building a playhouse of white quartz pebbles, scarcely caring to stop her work to gaze at us. Toyatte found a friend among the men, and wished to encamp beside them for the night, assuring us that this was the only safe harbor to be found within a good many miles. But we resolved ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... "movements" he was too late for: weren't they, with the fun of them, already spent? There were sequences he had missed and great gaps in the procession: he might have been watching it all recede in a golden cloud of dust. If the playhouse wasn't closed his seat had at least fallen to somebody else. He had had an uneasy feeling the night before that if he was at the theatre at all—though he indeed justified the theatre, in the specific sense, and with a grotesqueness to which his imagination ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... sir, really; for, when we have a great deal of company, I have often observed that they never talked about anything but eating or dressing, or men and women that are paid to make faces at the playhouse, or a great room called Ranelagh, where everybody goes to meet ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... highest splendour, and dispensing hospitalities more than regal in magnificence;—these are the spectacles which make the masquerade a tiresome mockery; and it is exactly because we get the veritable article for nothing that we neither seek playhouse nor ballroom, but go out into the streets and highways for our drama, and take our Kembles and Macreadys as we find them at taverns, at railway-stations, on the grassy slopes of Malvern, or the breezy cliffs of Brighton. Once admit that the wild-flower plucked at random has more true delicacy ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... child, "was himself and the childe both burned to death with a sudden lightning, no fire appearing outwardly upon him, and yet lay burning for the space of almost three days till he was quite consumed to ashes." This year the Globe playhouse, on the Bankside, was burned, and the year following the new playhouse, the Fortune, in Golding Lane, "was by negligence of a candle, clean burned down to the ground." In this year also, 1614, the town of Stratford-on-Avon ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... was confidently affirmed, and is still believed, by many in both galleries, that there would be a tame lion sent from the tower every opera night in order to be killed by Hydaspes. This report, though altogether groundless, so universally prevailed in the upper regions of the playhouse, that some of the most refined politicians in those parts of the audience gave it out in whisper that the lion was a cousin-german of the tiger who made his appearance in King William's days, and that the stage ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... the ox-bow, and for years this hovel had sheltered the cattle. But the fall before he died the pioneer had erected a new and better stable and shed, quite handy to the house. The children, therefore, had long considered this hovel their own especial playhouse. At spare moments Enoch and Bryce built a stone and clay chimney and laid a good hearth in the old structure, and now they planned to have the party here, where they could do quite as ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... of fairies than the girls had dared dream. Rustic benches and porch chairs were scattered about under the trees, two immense hammocks hung on the wide veranda, and a strong swing had been fastened among the branches of the tallest oak. The barn chamber, which Peace had planned on having for a playhouse, was swept and scrubbed, furbished up with old furniture from the garret, and stocked with toys of all sorts, that the children who might not care for games all day could find other amusement to fill the hours. The boat-house, ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... will remain transfixed until you know what's behind it." Bernard Sobel, Daily Mirror. "Double Door is a thriller of a new kind, beautifully written, superbly played, clean as a whistle, and arousing in its spectators a tenseness of interest I have rarely seen equaled in a playhouse." E. Jordan, America. Leading part acted by Mary Morris in America and by Sybil Thorndike in London. A play that will challenge the best acting talent of ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... times are, and so thin the Town, Though but one Playhouse, that must too lie down; And when we fail, what will the Poets do? They live by us as we are kept by you: When we disband, they no more Plays will write, But make Lampoons, and libel ye in spite; Discover each false Heart that lies within, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... Barrett made cuts in the play, preparatory to giving it, Boker, even, revising it in part. The American premiere was reserved for James E. Murdoch, at the Philadelphia Walnut Street Theater, January 20, 1851, and it was revived at the same playhouse in April, 1855, by E.L. Davenport. As Stoddard says of it, one "should know something—the more the better—about the plays that Dr. Bird and Judge Conrad wrote for Forrest and his successors, about Poe's 'Politian', Sargent's ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... was a brilliantly illumined palace on F Street, once a choice little playhouse, now given over to screen productions. The house was packed, and Jean and her father, following the flashlight of the usher, found harbor finally in a box to the left of the stage. Derry settled himself behind them. He was an eavesdropper and he knew it, but he was loath ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... their fleshly minds, and with their polluted, and defiled, and vile affections. They can relish and taste that which delighteth them; yea, they can find soul-delight in an alehouse, a whorehouse, a playhouse. Ay, they find pleasure in the vilest things, in the things most offensive to God, and that are most destructive to themselves. This is evident to sense, and is proved by the daily practice of sinners. Nor is the Word barren ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... insulted with all kinds of scorn. I cannot give my reader a more adequate idea of this scene than by comparing it to an English mob conducting a pickpocket to the water; or by supposing that an incensed audience at a playhouse had unhappily possessed themselves of the miserable damned poet. Some laughed, some hissed, some squalled, some groaned, some bawled, some spit at him, some threw dirt at him. It was impossible not to ask who or what the wretched spirit was whom they treated in this barbarous manner; when, to ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... desired addition to his court a sound thrashing, he felt it must be modified somewhat to help him in his present conquest. He tied her hair to the back of her desk; he snowballed her and his sister Gladys home from school. He raided her playhouse and broke her dishes and—she giving desperate battle—fled with only the parents of her doll family. With Gladys shrieking for their mother, he shook her out of a tree in their yard, and it sprained her ankle so severely that she had to stay away from school ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... triple-starred scientist man who can bring down the highest flying scientific fact and tame it so that any of us can live with it and sometimes even love it. He can make a fairy tale out of coal-tar dyes and a laboratory into a joyful playhouse while it continues functioning gloriously as a laboratory. But to readers of "Creative Chemistry" it is wasting time to talk about Dr. ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... with these two good-looking eyes of mine. This fog opens and shuts like a playhouse-curtain, and I got a peep at the chap, about ten minutes since. It was a short look, but it was a sure one; I would swear to the fellow in ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... Court, in joints from the gibbet, at four hundred crowns. Neither indeed can I deny, that if the same use were made of several plump young girls in this town, who, without one single groat to their fortunes, cannot stir abroad without a chair, and appear at the playhouse, and assemblies in foreign fineries, which they never will pay for, the kingdom would not ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... season are The Companion to the Playhouse. or To be sold to the best Bidder, My seat in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... little crestfallen. Instead of being glad at the unexpected value ascribed to her gift, she seemed decidedly put out about it. She strolled round by Patty's booth. That enterprising young matron had caused to be built for her use a little child's playhouse. It was just large enough for half a dozen children, and would perhaps hold nearly as many grown people. But it had a good-sized verandah and on this were tables piled with the loveliest fairy-like gossamer garments and comforts for tiny mites of humanity. Such exquisite blankets and ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... glade not much larger than a good-sized room and walled on all sides by tall trees and thick underbrush. It had a flooring of soft green turf, and about in the middle lay a great rock as large as a playhouse. This rock was all covered over with moss and lichens, and the strange thing about it was that a neat door had been cut in its side. Before this door, talking and waving his hands to the crowd that thronged about him, stood a man—the queerest little man the children had ever ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... Burton scene and partly with that, of slightly subsequent creation, which, after flourishing awhile slightly further up Broadway under the charmlessly commercial name of Brougham's Lyceum (we had almost only Lyceums and Museums and Lecture Rooms and Academies of Music for playhouse and opera then,) entered upon a long career and a migratory life as Wallack's Theatre. I fail doubtless to keep all my associations clear, but what is important, or what I desire at least to make pass for such, is that when we most admired Mr. Blake we also ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... get dinner over and be fully dressed and down to the box-office before even the doors were opened, so that they could get first choice of the unreserved seats which sold at twenty-five cents. Then there would ensue the long, tedious wait in the dimly lighted cavern of the playhouse, smelling with a curious fascination of stale cigars and staler beer, and the thrill that the appearance of the orchestra produced, followed by the arrival of all the important personages fortunate ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... are so universal, that they absorb all variation of pleasures. The operas, indeed, are much frequented three times a week; but to me they would be a greater penance than eating maigre: their music resembles a gooseberry tart as much as it does harmony. We have not yet been at the Italian playhouse; scarce any one goes there. Their best amusement, and which in some parts, beats ours, is the comedy three or four of the actors excel any we have: but then to this nobody goes, if it is not one of the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... will be done. In the mane time, here's both your healths, your honors; an' may you both be spared on the property, as a pair of blessins to the estate!" Then, running over to Phil, he whispered in a playhouse voice—"Square Phil, I daren't let his honor hear me now, but—here's black confusion ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... sublime the page of Accius glows; Menander's comic robe Afranius wears, Plautus as rapid in his plots appears, As Epicharmus; Terence charms with art And grave Coecilius sinks into the heart. These are the plays to which our people crowd, 'Till the throng'd playhouse crack with the dull load. These are esteemed the glories of the stage From the first drama ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... Lilian awhile," besought Claire. "I want her to inspect my playhouse, while you and mother put ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... and presented his own production of a farce, "She's In Again," at Gaiety Theatre, New York City; also put on his own $150,000 production of "Town Topics," with Will Rogers, at the Century Theatre, New York, for which playhouse he created a Continental ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... conditions, customs, and social peculiarities of the provincial actors and audiences. For that reason, it would be well for the general reader beforehand to obtain a bird's-eye view of the history of the American theatre—a view which will comprise some consideration of the first playhouse in this country, of the conditions which confronted Hallam, Henry, and Douglass, the first actors to be at the head of what, in Williamsburg, Virginia, was known as the Virginia Comedians, and in New York and Philadelphia, as ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists - 1765-1819 • Various
... discoursing in his head Than Jove when Pallas issu'd from his brain; And still he strives to be delivered Of all his thoughts at once; but all in vain; For, as we see at all the playhouse-doors, When ended is the play, the dance, and song, A thousand townsmen, gentlemen, and whores, Porters, and serving-men, together throng,— So thoughts of drinking, thriving, wenching, war, And borrowing money, ranging in his mind, 10 To issue ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... friend! Kind friend! Instruct another man the way To win thy mistress! Thou'lt not break my heart? Take my advice, thou shalt not be in love A month! Frequent the playhouse!—walk the Park! I'll think of fifty ladies that I know, Yet can't remember now—enchanting ones! And then there's Lancashire!—and I have friends In Berkshire and in Wiltshire, that have swarms Of daughters! Then my shooting-lodge and stud! I'll cure thee in a fortnight of ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles
... and hear that my Lord Buckhurst and Nelly are lodged at the next house, and Sir Charles Sedley with them; and keep a merry house." Lord Buckhurst had just persuaded Nell Gwynne to leave the King's playhouse for a hundred pounds a year and his company: she was to act no more, which saddened Pepys. However, she was back at the playhouse next month, jeered at by the graceful Buckhurst and as poor as ever. She was less exacting than ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... introduction; prologue, epilogue; libretto. performance, representation, mise en scene [Fr.], stagery^, jeu de theatre [Fr.]; acting; gesture &c 550; impersonation &c 554; stage business, gag, buffoonery. light comedy, genteel comedy, low comedy. theater; playhouse, opera house; house; music hall; amphitheater, circus, hippodrome, theater in the round; puppet show, fantoccini^; marionettes, Punch and Judy. auditory, auditorium, front of the house, stalls, boxes, pit, gallery, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... often thought, and sometimes taken occasion to observe, it would be well for us all to profit by experience—"burned bairns should dread the fire," as the proverb goes. After the miserable catastrophe of the playhouse, for instance—which I shall afterwards have occasion to commemorate in due time, and in a subsequent chapter of my eventful life—I would have been worse than mad, had I persisted, night after ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... There is some error here. The city had no jurisdiction over Whitefriars, or Blackfriars either; but there was a playhouse in Blackfriars at the time, and it was suppressed in 1584, though not by the city authorities. Possibly Reulidge should ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... invention of devils. D'Alembert paid a compliment to his patriarch and master at Ferney, as well as shot a bolt at his ecclesiastical foes in Paris, by urging the people of Geneva to shake off irrational prejudices and straightway to set up a playhouse. Rousseau had long been brooding over certain private grievances of his own against Diderot; the dreary story has been told by me before, and happily need not be repeated.[146] He took the occasion of D'Alembert's mischievous suggestion to his native Geneva, not merely to denounce ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... drank her water with a downcast air. She was not thinking about the scolding and her punishment. She was troubled because Miss Farlow had forbidden her to go off the 'Home' grounds again. Must she give up her dear secret playhouse? She and Honey-Sweet had had such a good time! And they were planning to spend all their Saturday afternoons there. Finally she asked Emma what would be done if she disobeyed Miss Farlow and went ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... when the highest nobility and the first statesmen in the land were present at a banquet in honor of Charles Kean, is evidence enough that no puerile or uncultivated taste is this which relishes the theatre. Goethe presiding over the playhouse at Weimar, Euripides and Sophocles writing tragedies, the greatest genius of the English language acting in his own productions at the Globe Theatre, people like Siddons and Kean and Cushman and Macready illustrating this art with the resources ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... brave general never thought of his retreat till he was defeated. I see two females in the old garden-house yonder—but how to address them? Stay—Will Shakespeare, be my friend in need. I will give them a taste of Autolycus." He then sung, with a good voice, and becoming audacity, the popular playhouse ditty,— ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... he but the means of securing access, would have walked in every night to the city to attend the playhouse; and it quite astonished him, he used to say, that I, who really knew something of the drama, and had four shillings a day, did not nightly at least devote one of the four to purchase perfect happiness and a seat ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... everything she saw, she was once more sitting with affectionate reverence at his feet. When he left her in a great low house that fronted on the majestic Hudson, June clung to him with tears and of her own accord kissed him for the first time since she had torn her little playhouse to pieces at the foot of the beech down in the mountains far away. And Hale went back with peace in his heart, but to trouble ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... dedicated to the reading public only, and no performance, representation, production, recitation, or public reading, or radio broadcasting may be given except by special arrangement with Walter H. Baker Company, 41 Winter Street, Boston, Mass., or Playhouse Plays, 14 East 38th Street, ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... ninth hour, that it abounds in errors; and I would furnish a copious list of errata from each sheet, if I thought you would find patience to compare them. But you also know how my time has been employed since my return to you. Whilst you have nightly laughed with me at the playhouse, I have nightly had the devil[1] waiting for a contribution at home, and he is an imp importunate and insatiable. To soothe him, I have worked ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse;[161] independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... family to the pit of Drury Lane Theatre, at about half-past five in the evening, leaving a small spaniel, of King Charles's breed, locked up in the dining-room, to prevent the dog from being lost in his absence. At eight o'clock his son opened the door, and the dog immediately went to the playhouse and found out his master, though the pit was unusually thronged, and his master seated ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... aplauxdego. Plausible versxajna, aprobebla. Play (a game) ludi. Play (piano, etc.) ludi. Play about ludeti, petoli. Play (joke) sxerci. Play (theatrical) teatrajxo. Player ludanto. Playful petola. Playhouse (theatre) teatro. Plaything ludilo. Playtime ludtempo. Plead procesi, proparoladi. Pleasant placxa. Pleasant (manner) dolcxega. Please placxi. Please, if you se vi bonvolas, se placxos al vi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes |
