"Comedy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been pointed out by many authorities as prevalent in Greek art.[110] The whole composition exhibits Page 55 freedom and elasticity, not so indulged in as to produce discord, but peculiarly appropriate to the element of mirth and comedy which characterizes the story, and upon which the sculptor ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... FARCE AND COMEDY.—It is regretted that, in view of the situation, no allowances of limelight can at present ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... it is none the worse for that. Those who share Mr. Hardcastle's tastes for old wine and old books will not like Theodore Hook any the less, because he does not happen to be at all "Fin de Siecle". He is like Berowne in the comedy, the merriest man—perhaps not always within the limits of becoming mirth—to spend an hour's talk withal. There is no better key to the age in which Hook glittered, than Hook's own stories. The London of that day—the London which is as ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... man, a good soldier, fond of wine and women, and, though he was not learned, he knew the whole of Dante's Divine Comedy by heart. This was his hobby-horse, and he was always quoting it, making the passage square with his momentary feelings. This made him insufferable in society, but he was an amusing companion for anyone who knew the sublime poet, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... tragic comedy they play at home and which they repeat abroad? The piece abroad is the same as that played in Paris for the past eight years,[51120] an absurd, hasty translation in Flemish, Dutch, German, and Italian, a local adaptation, just as it ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Tragedy and comedy both are forced to observe these nominal proprieties. Who was it that illuminated his house, and had the church bells rung, on finding a name for his hero? We should never have believed in Iago's treacheries if he had appeared before us ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... comments of German critics, which run riot in elaborate analyses of plot and character and inform us that we are reading Meisterwerke of comic drama.[3] Our perplexity has perhaps become focused upon two leading questions; first: "What manner of drama is this after all? Is it comedy, farce, opera bouffe or mere extravaganza?" Second: "How was it done? What was the technique of acting employed to represent in particular the ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... the makings of a farce and all the elements of a tragedy. There were endless complications and daily developments, all deepening the dramatic intensity without disturbing the unity. We watch with breathless interest, dumbly wondering what the end will be. It is tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... scene, beginning in tragedy and ending in comedy, the king, still angry, went to his room, followed by Chicot, who asked for ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... SECOND (WYNDHAM) is following in the footsteps of CHARLES THE FIRST (MATHEWS) and beginning to play several short pieces as one entertainment, instead of giving a three-act farce or comedy, and one brief and unimportant curtain-raiser. At least, he is Trying It On. How far preferable, in the summer and autumn season, would be an evening bill of fare consisting of three entrees, each of a different character, and all of first-rate quality. The patron of the drama could ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various
... Sons, To-day is a prodigious coxcomb, but To-morrow is a very poltroon, taking fright at the big words of his predecessor. To-day is the truculent captain of old world comedy, To-morrow the ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... was framed at Monrepos, a country-house at the end of a suburb; dresses and scenes were provided at the expense of the actors; and the author directed the rehearsals with the zeal and attention of paternal love. In two successive winters his tragedies of Zayre, Alzire, Zulime, and his sentimental comedy of the Enfant Prodigue, were played at the theatre of Monrepos. Voltaire represented the characters best adapted to his years, Lusignan, Alvarez, Benassar, Euphemon. His declamation was fashioned ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... rise at ten;[545] and at eleven He goes to Gill's, where he doth eat till one; Then sees a play till six;[546] and sups at seven; And, after supper, straight to bed is gone; And there till ten next day he doth remain; And then he dines; then sees a comedy; 10 And then he sups, and goes to bed again: Thus round he runs without variety, Save that sometimes he comes not to the play, But falls into a whore-house ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... fairly. For, to take only modern instances, Italy, on whose congenial soil 'Cavalleria Rusticana' and the productions it suggested met with such extraordinary success, saw also in 'Falstaff' the wittiest and most brilliant musical comedy since 'Die Meistersinger', and in 'Madama Butterfly' a lyric of infinite delicacy, free from any suggestion of unworthy emotion. Among recent French operas, works of tragic import, treated with all ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... like Glenbuckie's Stewarts after the mysterious death of their chief in Amprior's house of Leny before Prestonpans (1745). Glenbuckie was mysteriously pistolled in the night. "The style and tone is unlike that of the Iliad ... It is rather akin to comedy of a rough farcical kind." But it was time for "comic relief." If the story of Dolon be comic, it is comic with the practical humour of the sagas. In an isolated nocturnal adventure and massacre we cannot expect the style of an heroic battle ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... was Romance in its highest office, as Manzoni, Grossi, and D'Azeglio conceived it. Aesthetically, the new school struggled to overthrow the classic traditions; to liberate tragedy from the bondage of the unities, and let it concern itself with any tragical incident of life; to give comedy the generous scope of English and Spanish comedy; to seek poetry in the common experiences of men and to find beauty in any theme; to be utterly free, untrammeled, and abundant; to be in literature what the Gothic is in architecture. It perished because it came to look ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... it to her, placed both pillows upright behind her, stepped back gaily to admire the effect. Eve, with her parcel in her hands, laughed shyly at his comedy. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... was a mask of quiet dignity. The tragedy in the woman's heart made the more pathetic the comedy of the half-drunken husband. Besides, he was philosopher enough to know that more than half the drunkenness of the world was the pitiful ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... was a postal order for four and sixpence. The whole incident struck me as so whimsical that I laughed until I was tired. You'll find there's so much tragedy in a doctor's life, my boy, that he would not be able to stand it if it were not for the strain of comedy which comes every now and then to ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to the theatre to-night—that is to say, if my husband has been able to get seats. It's the first night of a new comedy. I meant to ask you to come with us, only it was an uncertainty. If the box is not forthcoming, you must come when we do go. Only, of course, it will not be ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... you expect from sending a man made of our common, tormented clay on a voyage of discovery? What else could he find? What else could you understand or care for, or feel the existence of even? There was comedy ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... canonical part of the story by the time Euripides wrote. Every one who knew the story of Orestes' return at all, knew of the hair and the footprint. Aristophanes in the Clouds (534 ff.) uses them proverbially, when he speaks of his comedy "recognising its brother's tress." It would have been frivolous to invent new ones. As a matter of fact, it seems probable that the signs are older than Aeschylus; neither they nor the word [Greek: homopteros] particularly suit Aeschylus' purpose. (Cf. Dr. ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... irony of it all. Until she had quarrelled with her maid, Alice Deringham had apparently been incapable of putting on her own dresses unassisted, and it seemed that the grim, mysterious destiny which treated men as puppets and traversed all their schemes was the one factor to reckon with in that comedy. Deringham, however, found little solace in such reflections, and could not lie still, and rising, strained his ears to listen. There was nothing but the moaning of the wind, the ranch was very still, and the sound of his watch grew maddening. If Alton was sleeping now, Deringham knew it was ticking ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... impressed itself as an unconscious performance during sleep, had been earlier done consciously, almost I might say as "a studied action." Only in special cases is there any need for playing such a comedy, for the direct demand of a beloved individual—"You must tell everything," "You must learn diligently," "Repeat the sermon accurately,"—when the eroticism is well concealed, permits of open action without more hindrance. It may be noted further that the patient never betrayed in the least ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... first to see a comedy greatly in vogue, and the author thoroughly understands the French stage of our day. The acting was excellent in its way. The next night we went to the Odeon, a romantic melodrama in six acts, and I know not how many tableaux. I found no ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Saturn, Juno and Hercules were in the past; with perhaps dreadful and bloody rites like those of the Carthaginians and ancient Mexicans. And so, step by step, mankind will re-enact the great human drama, which begins always with a tragedy, runs through a comedy, and ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... Strong at his heels; and the two principals being both incensed, and Strong seriously alarmed for his friend's safety, there began among them a scene of great intemperance. At one point, when Strong suddenly disclosed his acquaintance with German, it attained a high style of comedy; at another, when a pistol was most foolishly drawn, it bordered on drama; and it may be said to have ended in a mixed genus, when Poor was finally packed into the corrugated iron gaol along with the forfeited ministers. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the name that shone in gilt letters on a mazarine ground over the doorplace of the new shop—a generous-sounding name, that might have belonged to the open-hearted, improvident hero of an old comedy, who would have delighted in raining sugared almonds, like a new manna-gift, among that small generation outside the windows. But Mr. Edward Freely was a man whose impulses were kept in due subordination: he held that the desire ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... order. Conceive the irritation they must have produced on Monsieur Janin! But when he once got fairly into the story he forgot all his delicacy, and when Henry Murger returned, two days afterwards, he said to him,—"Sir, go home and write us a comedy with Rodolphe and Schaunard and Nini and Musette.[D] It shall be played as soon as you have written it; in four-and-twenty hours it will be celebrated, and the dramatic reporters will see to the rest." The magnificent promises to the poverty-racked man fevered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... so shy, and if he had possessed beak and claw instead of clumsy fingers. He would sit near a beehive for hours without moving, or lie prone in the sandy road, under the full glare of the sun, watching the ants acting out their human comedy; sometimes surrounding a favourite hill with stones, that the comedy might not be turned into tragedy by a careless footfall. The cottage on the river road grew more and more to resemble a museum and herbarium as the years went by, and the Widow Croft's ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... against green masses of leafage, and Grecian temples, halls, and even a theatre, rapidly constructed in the noblest forms from light material, invited the people to devotion, to the enjoyment of the most exquisite music, and to witness the perfect performance of many a tragedy and comedy. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... tabulated and read, yielded two small volumes of excellent tales, all unpublished, the published material being all but uniformly worthless. There was also the attempt at a popular comedy, previously mentioned, a sad affair, and a volume of essays, as well as a very, very slender but charming volume of verse, in case a publisher could ever be found for them—a most agreeable little group, showing a pleasing sense of ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... his hand and stroked it thoughtfully. There were moments when she hungered for a bit of the comedy of life: laughter and other youthful noises. The Mexican bailes and their humble feasts were delightful; and the song of the violins, and the odor of smoke, and the innocent rivalries, and the night ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... for love and marriage begins to emerge, however, at a much earlier period, with Menander and the New Comedy. E.F.M. Benecke, in his interesting little book on Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry, believes that the romantic idea (that is to say, the idea that a woman is a worthy object for a man's love, and that such love may well be the ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... addressing so composite an audience are enormous: cuteness, coyness, archness and condescension are only the most obvious ones. Some great writers of children's verse—Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear—have successfully hedged themselves against these dangers by insistent comedy and parody (Carroll's "serious" children's verse is maudlin and embarrassing). By this means they have contrived what the child will take as lovely, unintimidating, mysterious, rational nonsense, and what the adult will recognize as a travesty or burlesque of something ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... 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 Busy," had given up the making of these cakes "because they were served at bridals and other profane feasts." This baker, we imagined, must have been a Puritan, for from the reign ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... of her clutches and jammed her against the wall with a table so tightly, that she roared "Murder!" The report of the pistol ringing through the house brought all its inmates to the spot; and there the cries of murder from the old lady led them to suppose some awful tragedy, instead of a comedy, was enacting inside; the door was locked, too, which increased the alarm, and was forced in the moment of terror from the outside. When the crowd rushed in, Master Ratty rushed out, and left the astonished family to gather up the bits ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... surroundings.[495] Apollonius describes the same incident[496] with the quiet humour that so strangely tinges the works of the pedants of Alexandria. Valerius, on the other hand, has lost touch with the broad comedy of these traditions, and his attempt to be humorous only succeeds in ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... the Irish,'" said Nora with a grin, quoting from a popular song she had heard in a recent musical comedy. "But stop teasing me, and let Mrs. Gray ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... enemies, like the leopard and the kid in the vision of the prophet. This dogma is a little startling, but it is not altogether without precedent. It is borrowed from a character in a play, which is, I dare say, as great a favorite with my learned friend as it is with me,—I mean the comedy of the Rivals; in which Mrs. Malaprop, giving a lecture on the subject of marriage to her niece (who is unreasonable enough to talk of liking, as a necessary preliminary to such a union), says, "What have you to do with your likings and your preferences, child? ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... of ennui, with anecdotes of distinguished visitors, out of which the screaming fun has quite evaporated, make up the staple of these faded mementos of an ancient watering-place. Yet how much superior is our comedy of to-day? The beauty and the charms of the women of two generations ago exist only in tradition; perhaps we should give to the wit of that time equal admiration if none of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... delicate, of their famous English rival. Of Clairon, in Iphigenie, he says "she is extremely great. Would to God you had one or two like her. What a luxury to see you with one of such power in the same interesting scene! But 'tis too much." Again he writes: "The French comedy I seldom visit; they act scarce anything but tragedies; and the Clairon is great, and Mdlle. Dumesmil in some parts still greater than her. Yet I cannot bear preaching—I fancy I got a surfeit of it in my younger days." And ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... unnecessary to say, that the ghost was some one placed there by order of these ladies, in order to frighten Carrat; and certainly the comedy succeeded marvelously well, for as soon as Carrat perceived the ghost, he was very much frightened, and clutching Madame Bonaparte, said to her in a tremor, "Madame, Madame, do you see that ghost? It is the spirit of the lady who died lately at Plombieres."—"Be quiet, Carrat, you are a coward."—"Ah, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Indian jugglers are practising upon us, I suspect. You are no more like the same person who played sparkling comedy and sang passionate tragedy than this bamboo stick ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... Byron may possibly allude to "Matthew Mug," a character in Foote's 'Mayor of Garratt', said to be intended for the Duke of Newcastle. In act ii. sc. 2 of the comedy occurs ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... old chap says in Byron's comedy, 'I'm doomed—I'm doomed!' and the other fellow says, 'Don't go on like that; it sounds like ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... English stage had the approval of virtually all the people. There were few voices raised against the dramas of Shakespeare. But the cleavage between the Puritans and the stage grew greater as the years went on. There were riotous excesses. The later comedy after Shakespeare was incredibly gross. The tragedies were shallow, they turned not on grave scenes of conscience, but on common and cheap intrigues of incest and murder. In the mean time, "the hatred of the Puritans for the stage was only the honest hatred of God-fearing ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... cousin. "I've been reading about him. Seems to have been a poor hack writer 'who threw away his life in handfuls.' He wrote the finest poem, the best novel, the most charming comedy of his day. He knew how to give, but he didn't know how to take. So he died alone in a garret. ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... sure, but it was also well meant, and therefore we will not stop to quarrel with men who were equal to the perpetration of a legal fiction so full of the comedy and tragedy of civilized society. But enough—the municipal wiseacres having put their heads together and evolved the brilliant plan of committing the prophet as a disturber of the peace, immediately set about its execution, which developed in the sequence into a bird of altogether another color. ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... tub," replied he, "that whilst everybody is busy around me, I may not be the only idle person in the kingdom." In like manner, I, my dear Philo, being very loath in this noisy age to make no noise at all, or to act the part of a mute in the comedy, think it highly proper that I should roll my tub also; not that I mean to write history myself, or be a narrator of facts; you need not fear me, I am not so rash, knowing the danger too well if ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... sad; his friends were departing, departing without him, with their gauze dresses, their scarfs fringed with gold, their silver lace, their silk breeches, and their jokes.—"Those people are truly happy," said he, "they are going to wander gayly about the world, to play comedy wherever they may be, without cares and without tears!"—Watteau, with his twelve-year-old eyes, saw only the fair side of life. He did not guess, be it understood, that beneath every smile of Margot there was a stifled ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... evening Nancy left the store and turned across Sixth Avenue westward to the laundry. She was expected to go with Lou and Dan to a musical comedy. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... in action, the term "dramatic" has come to be applied to any poetry having this quality. Many of Browning's poems are dramatic in this sense. In the first sense of the word, dramatic poetry includes tragedy and comedy. ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... Scott's "Le Balafre") the chateau of Blois, the execution of the Bourbon Duc d'Enghien the palace of Vincennes, or the murder of the boy princes the Tower of London. But bloodless tragedy, and exquisite comedy, and farce too, have doubtless had their hour within the walls. One such incident of the politico-tragic kind was that which passed only two years ago between the Emperor and his Imperial Chancellor, when Prince von Buelow went as deputy from the ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... realize how interesting the larger and higher world of activity is. Do not imagine that in becoming a woman, earnest and thoughtful, you are entering on an era of solemn platitudes. You are rather passing from a theatre of light comedy to a stage from which Shakespeare borrowed the whole gamut of human feeling, passion, and experience. I also wished to satisfy you that you have mind enough to become absorbed as soon as you begin to understand the ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... play. It seemed to be something of great moment to the American. It was only a bundle of leaves printed in red and black inks and bound in brown paper covers. There were two of them, and the American called them by different names: one was his comedy and one was ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... but a few of the many interesting cases that have come within the experience of this great detective. But they give a fair portrayal of Muller's peculiar method of working, his looking on himself as merely an humble member of the Department, and the comedy of his acting under "official orders" when the Department is in reality following out ...
— The Case of The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... though the stage is no longer a public offender, and Shakespeare has been revived on it, to give it nobility, we have not yet entirely raised it above the contention of these two parties. Our speaking on the theme of Comedy will appear almost a libertine proceeding to one, while the other will think that the speaking of it seriously brings us into ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... defense." Braddock was ready to advance in April, if only he had "horses and carriages"; which by Franklin's exertions were supplied. The bits of dialogue and comment in which this grizzled nincompoop was an interlocutor, or of which he was the theme, are as amusing as a page from a comedy of Shakespeare. Braddock has been called brave; but the term is inappropriate; he could fly into a rage when his brutal or tyrannical instincts were questioned or thwarted, and become insensible, for a time, even to physical danger. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... to the Hall of the Muses, and spoke of Thalia, whose sweet and noble face, with its deep, far-looking eyes, bears such a weary sadness, Comedy? Yes; comedy itself, when ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... Madame Doulce. "Comedy is an imitative art; and you imitate an art all the better for ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... your wits, Mr. Smilk. You appear to be a most ingenuous rogue. Have you ever tried writing the book for a musical comedy?" ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... still with her. He was there by no will of hers, but by some essence of his own, some quality that linked him, as it linked her, to the passionate subtleties of life. He seemed to her the eager spirit that was prompting and putting forward this comedy and tragedy playing on before her. She heard him reasserted, vigorous, lawless, wandering, in the voice of the mimic strolling player addressing his mimic audience. The appeal of the tenor to the ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... much the same. Many of these courses deal with one particular author and his works, such as Sophocles, Plato, Plautus, or Horace. Others deal with some particular kind of literature, such as Greek tragedy or oratory, Latin comedy, etc., or with a group of authors of different types combined for ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... no more. He, for his part, was amazed at her being so little disturbed, so rational. He had expected pretty little flirting ways, refusals which meant yes, a whole coquettish comedy of love chequered by prawn-fishing in the splashing water. And it was all over; he was pledged, married with twenty words. They had no more to say about it since they were agreed, and they now sat, both somewhat embarrassed by what had so swiftly passed between them; a little perplexed, indeed, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... moment, when I would pass on to review the achievements of Koerner and Kleist in the field of comedy, I remember that I was not sufficiently definite, above, when developing my conception of the drama. I should have added that I cannot, strictly speaking, count comedy as a form of drama, but must include it in the category of dialogue narrative. If one recalls to mind the purpose of high-class ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... impatient, but I made up my mind that I would continue silent and see how long a time she would consider necessary to give due effect to her little pantomime. Comedy? Or was it tragedy? I suppose full five minutes passed thus in our double silence; and that is a long time when two persons are sitting opposite each other alone in a small ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... in much the same relation as Shakespeare stands to English literature. Moliere's plays are constantly acted in French theatres with a scenic austerity which is unknown to the humblest of our theatres. A French audience would regard it as sacrilege to convert a comedy of Moliere into a spectacle. The French people are commonly credited with a love of ornament and display to which the English people are assumed to be strangers, but their treatment of Moliere is convincing proof that their artistic sense is ultimately ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... from orthodox abstractions to the solid earth. "Have you forgot," he asked his followers, "the close, the milk-house, the stable, the barn, and the like, where God did visit your souls?" He himself could never be indifferent to the place or setting of the great tragi-comedy of salvation. When he relates how he gave up swearing as a result of a reproof from a "loose and ungodly" woman, he begins the story: "One day, as I was standing at a neighbour's shop-window, and there cursing and ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... part of literature is more or less distinctly penetrated by erotic and auto-erotic conceptions and impulses; nearly all imaginative literature proceeds from the root of sex to flower in visions of beauty and ecstasy. The Divine Comedy of Dante is herein the immortal type of the poet's evolution. The youth becomes acquainted with the imaginative representations of love before he becomes acquainted with the reality of love, so that, as Leo Berg puts it, "the way to love among civilized peoples passes through ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... manuscripts of former poets and of the works of the sages, scattered throughout Greece, and the ways and means of obtaining them or of acquiring exact transcripts of them for the library of the Museum. Hierax was telling Eulaeus of the last Dionysiac festival, and of the representation of the newest comedy in Alexandria, and Eulaeus assumed the appearance—not unsuccessfully—of listening with both ears, interrupting him several times with intelligent questions, bearing directly on what he had said, while ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... throws out some unmannerly reflexions against Sir Richard, who was at that time in Scotland, as one of the commissioners on the forfeited estates. Upon Sir Richard's return to London, he dedicates to Mr. Congreve, Addison's Comedy, called the Drummer, in which he takes occasion very smartly to retort upon Tickell, and clears himself of the imputation laid to his charge, namely that of valuing himself upon Mr. Addison's ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... being angry, he had been delighted with the way in which Christophe had trounced Hecht: it had been a treat to him. It really mattered nothing to him whether Christophe or Hecht was right: he only regarded people as source of entertainment: and he saw in Christophe a spring of high comedy, which he intended to ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... she might not consider them at all; if she pledged her word, it might not always be profitable to keep it; but she liked to be on pleasant terms with everyone, and would be amiable to the last, no matter what happened. Comedy was her forte, rather than tragedy. If tragedy entered her life she would probably turn it into ridicule. Wholly without care, whimsical and generous to a degree, if it suited her mood, Louise Merrick possessed a nature capable of great things, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... the comic comes nearest; because in moving the minds of men, and stirring of affections (in which oratory shows, and especially approves her eminence), he chiefly excels. What figure of a body was Lysippus ever able to form with his graver, or Apelles to paint with his pencil, as the comedy to life expresseth so many and various affections of the mind? There shall the spectator see some insulting with joy, others fretting with melancholy, raging with anger, mad with love, boiling with avarice, undone with ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... was that Stumm and his doings seemed to have been shot back into a lumber-room of my brain and the door locked. He didn't seem to be a creature of the living present, but a distant memory on which I could look calmly. I thought a good deal about my battalion and the comedy of my present position. You see I was getting better, for I called it comedy now, ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... her bosom, where it seemed as much out of place "as a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear," and hastily walked off with the prize before I could recover from my astonishment! I was a stranger to the ways of the world, and it did not occur to me, until years afterwards, that this was an IMPROMPTU comedy, ingeniously devised and skilfully performed by two capital actresses, for the purpose of swindling me ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... of May the Queen and the Prince were at Devonshire House, when Lord Lytton's comedy of "Not so Bad as we Seem" was played by Dickens, Foster, Douglas Jerrold, on behalf of the new "Guild of Literature and Art," in which hopes for poor ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... want of tact Carlyle further aggravated when he insisted on his wife accepting the invitations of his hostess. These visits, always against the grain, were rendered more irritating from a half-conscious antagonism between the chief female actors in the tragi-comedy; the one sometimes innocently unobservant of the wants of her guest, the other turning every accidental neglect into a slight, and receiving every jest as an affront. Carlyle's "Gloriana" was to the mind of his wife a "heathen goddess," while Mrs. Carlyle, with reference to her favourite ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... chief reasons why Mr. Allen seems to me one of the first of our novelists to day. He is most exquisitely alive to the fine spirit of comedy. He has a prose style of wonderful beauty, conscientiousness and simplicity.... He has the inexorable conscience of the artist, he always gives us his best; and that best is a style of great purity and felicity and sweetness, a style without strain and yet with an enviable aptness ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... "The Mother of the Dead,"—a powerful story in bronze of the burden which the war has brought to woman. (See p. 120.) Pietro's modeling is worthy of an older artist. Another human tragedy is well told in "The Outcast," a graphic figure by Attilio Piccirilli. (p. 136.) Charming bits of comedy are the whimsical little fountain pieces by Janet Scudder and Anna Coleman Ladd. The honor-winners in sculpture are ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... While this comedy went on the farmhouse and its happy life were keenly and bitterly watched by the wretched wife of Curran. It was her luck, like Sonia's, to spoil her own feast in defiling her enemy's banquet. Having been routed at all points and all but sent to Jezebel's fate ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... subject matter of the novel became more intimate and personal; that of the imitators of Homer necessarily too heavy. Perhaps here also Lessing's sense of style might have furnished a model of permanent worth, in the same way that he furnished one for the comedy and the didactic drama, for the polemic treatise and the work of scientific research. For is not the tale of the three rings, which forms the kernel of Nathan the Wise, numbered among the great standard pieces of German elocution, in spite of all the contradictions and obscurities which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Zeus by the Curetes. In the chorus sung in honour of Dionysus the ancient Greek drama had its birth. From that of the winter festival, consisting of the [Greek komos] or band of revellers, chanting the "phallic songs," with ribald dialogue between the leader and his band, sprang "comedy," while from the dithyrambic chorus of the spring festival came "tragedy." For the history of the chorus in Greek drama, with the gradual subordination of the lyrical to the dramatic side in tragedy and its total disappearance ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... obstinate intolerance compelled me to dismiss you from the command of my army, I could not but admire your sturdy honesty. Had I been able to graft your love of truth upon some of my councillors, what a valuable group of advisers might I have gathered round me. But we have had enough of comedy and now tragedy sets in. Those who are traitors to their ruler must not be surprised if a double traitor is one of their number. Why am I here? Why do two hundred mounted and armed men surround this doomed chalet? Miserable wretches, what have you to say that ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... viewed ab extra. He could not draw a saint.[47] Significant, therefore, is his indifference to Dante, the poet par excellence of the Catholic Middle Age, the epitomizer of mediaeval thought. "The plan" of the "Divine Comedy," "appeared to him unhappy; the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting." Scott's genius was antipathetic to Dante's; and he was as incapable of taking a lasting imprint from his intense, austere, and mystical ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... feet, and pressed his lips to the slipper she wore. Suddenly she turned, and stared at him in astonishment. "Is it comedy or romance, Boris Pavlovich," she asked brusquely, turned in annoyance, and hid her foot under the skirt which she ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... unlike the printed tales, her romance never culminated in marriage. Poor brainless, silly, pitiful Miss Greeb; she would have made a good wife and a fond mother, but by some irony of fate she was destined to be neither; and the comedy of her husband-hunting youth was now changing into the lonely tragedy of disappointed spinsterhood. She was one of the world's unknown martyrs, and her fate ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... looked so well as at this particular moment. It might have been that if her hour had struck I just happened to be present at the striking. What had occurred, all the same, was at the worst a notable comedy. ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... evil brought about by myself, a renunciation for life of my liberty, my peace of mind, the very thought of it is maddening—I expiate my privilege indeed. My privilege is to be spectator of my life drama, to be fully conscious of the tragi-comedy of my own destiny, and, more than that, to be in the secret of the tragi-comic itself, that is to say, to be unable to take my illusions seriously, to see myself, so to speak, from the theater on the stage, or to be like a man looking from beyond the tomb into existence. I ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... began with some pictures of great allied leaders which excited a mild interest and drew some perfunctory applause. Then came the tragic comedy of John Bull's experiences as an immigrant, when just as the interest began to deepen, the machine blew up, and the pictures were off for ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... an able and popular writer[2] of the present day, that the following proposition, though very generally received, is far from being a true one: "Tragedy improves and exalts the nature of man, while Comedy has a tendency to lower it." Now I profess also to believe rather in the converse of this proposition, and shall endeavour in this essay to establish that belief in the minds of my readers, by the same ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... talk changes from tragedy to comedy. He begins to recount odd adventures of his own with strangers. He tells me of a huge fat woman who was got up to the top of Asparagus Island, by the easiest path, and by the exertions of several guides; who, left to herself, gasped, reeled, and fell down ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... idol, in matters dramatic, is Colley Cibber, who, however, deserves the laurel he wears, not for The Careless Husband, his best comedy, but for ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... You just now said that Aristophanes wanted wit. What foolish fellows then the Athenians must have been, in the very meridian of their literature, to be so delighted with what they mistook for wit as to decree him a crown of olive! He has been styled the Prince of Old Comedy too. How do you ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... example, sitting on the critical front bench of the pit, in my study here in Jaalam, the advent of my weekly journal is as that of a strolling theater, or rather of a puppet-show, on whose stage, narrow as it is, the tragedy, comedy, and farce of life are played in little. Behold the huge earth sent to me hebdomidally in a ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... matter of course. Yet Hermann labours to prove how much softer the dialect of High Germany is than that of High Saxony. There have lately appeared several small brochures in the common language of the town—such, of course, as is ordinarily spoken in the shops and streets: and among others, a comedy called; Der Pfingst-Montag, written (says Hermann) with much spirit; but the author of this latter work has been obliged to mark the pronunciation, which renders the perusal of it somewhat puzzling. It is also accompanied with a glossary. But that you, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... interviews with Mr. Monk concerning the wrong delivery of cheese and bacon. I was aware of the means by which news of the outer world got to Clayton. It came in a popular halfpenny paper, and that outer world must therefore have seemed to Clayton to be all aeroplanes, musical-comedy girls, dog shows, and Mr. Lloyd George. The grocer's boy got his tongue free at last, and talked. He was halt and obscure, but I thought I saw a mind beating against the elms and stones of the village, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... possessed no drama at all—perhaps I say we may grant in a spirit of charity that these reproaches ought not to be wholly laid at the door of the native playwright. If it be true that he has been in the habit of producing plays invariably conventional in sentiment, trite in comedy, wrought on traditional lines, inculcating no philosophy, making no intellectual appeal whatever, may it not be that the attitude of the frequenters of the theatre has made it hard for him to do anything else? If he has until lately evaded in his theatrical ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... others' arms at the end of every dozen pages or so. As a matter of fact, the incident that is to my mind the best of the bunch is an exception to this rule of osculation—a happily imagined little comedy of a young wife who thought to avoid the visit of a tiresome sister-in-law by betaking herself for the night to the branches of a spreading beech. Whether in actual life this is a probable course of ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... farmer must have often really occurred in the Middle Ages when famine was the rule rather than the exception; and the decision to "expose" the children recalls the general practice in ancient Greece and Rome and in Arabia. A touch of comedy, however, is given to this grim beginning of our tale by the house made of cookies and sweetmeats, probably derived from the myth of a Schlarafenland of the Germans and similar imaginations of the Celts ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... all need study and comment, and at times help from a good teacher, before they yield up their secret. And the Poetics cannot be accounted an exception. For one thing the treatise is fragmentary. It originally consisted of two books, one dealing with Tragedy and Epic, the other with Comedy and other subjects. We possess only the first. For another, even the book we have seems to be unrevised and unfinished. The style, though luminous, vivid, and in its broader division systematic, is not that of a book intended for publication. Like most of Aristotle's ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... of this story there are several strong characters. Typical New England folk and an especially sturdy one, old Cy Walker, through whose instrumentality Chip comes to happiness and fortune. There is a chain of comedy, tragedy, pathos and love, which makes ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... the bill of the play. I knew only a few of its waltzes and I drank in the comedy and the pretty music like one desperately athirst. Kyril's girl, the Dolores, was very chic and looked ravishingly pretty, and brother-in-law Max isn't the ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... in most bombastic style. In the preamble he stated, besides his military and other distinctions, that he was "author of a celebrated tragic comedy called the 'Blockade of Boston.'" He accused the patriots of enormities "unprecedented in the inquisitions of the Romish Church," and offered to give encouragement, employment and assistance to all who would aid the ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... scintillating eyes and flushed cheeks—"to find you have put on a mask to deceive me! Have you not succeeded in inspiring me with esteem for you by your proud and dignified behaviour, and the elevated sentiments you professed? And do you think I can be happy to find that all this was but a comedy? Could a gentleman have treated me so? But you have deceived yourself, Jonker van Zonshoven. I gave my heart to a young man without fortune, whose upright and noble character I admired, and in whom I had more confidence than in ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... fascinating. At Valley House one duchess and several countesses were assembled for the Easter party, and they were women whose jewels were famous. Most of these were family heirlooms, but their present owners had had the things reset, and no queen of fairyland or musical comedy could have owned more becoming or exquisitely designed tiaras, crowns, necklaces, earrings, dog-collars, brooches, bracelets, and rings than ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... in the east, and in these latitudes day comes and goes upon winged feet. Before the beds were taken to pieces and Salam had the porridge and his "marmalade" ready, with steaming coffee, for early breakfast, we heard the mules clattering down the stony street. Within half an hour the packing comedy had commenced. The Susi muleteer, who was accompanied by a boy and four men, one a slave, and all quite as frowzy, unwashed, and picturesque as himself, swore that we did not need four pack-mules but eight. Salam, his eyes flaming, ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... second act, even though I realized that it was one of the best comedy scenes I had ever seen, both in its lines and its acting; but I had a problem to settle, and I longed for the quiet hour in my own room which my mother had trained me to ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... After the bedroom comedy, which much amused me and out of which my aunt got great comfort, she was inclined to be on better terms with the officers so abruptly thrust upon her. For a while, however, she declined to eat her meals with them, and when told that they had had Colonel Montresor ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... path in his boyish days, and, if he was an early student of the drama, must often have thought of those two airy characters of the "Beaux' Stratagem," Archer and Aimwell, who, on this very ground, after attending service at the cathedral, contrive to make acquaintance with the ladies of the comedy. These creatures of mere fiction have as positive a substance now as the sturdy old figure of Johnson himself. They live, while realities have died. The shadowy walk still glistens with ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Lear. Old Johnson far more natural in everything he attempted. Mrs. Porter and your Dumesnil surpassed him in passionate tragedy; Cibber and O'Brien were what Garrick could never reach, coxcombs, and men of fashion. Mrs. Clive is at least as perfect in low comedy—and yet to me, Ranger was the part that suited Garrick the best of all he ever performed. He was a poor Lothario, a ridiculous Othello, inferior to Quin in Sir John Brute and Macbeth, and to Cibber in Bayes, and a woful Lord ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... requires FLAIR, instinct, insight or whatever you like to call it, but the qualities that go to make a business man are grotesquely unlike those which make a statesman; and, when you have pretensions to both, the result is the present comedy and confusion. ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... actor, on a certain evening, was hissed by the audience, who had always before applauded him. He burst into tears. He had been watching his dying wife, and had left her dead, as be came upon the stage. This was his apology for imperfection in his part. Poor Hood had also to unite comedy with tragedy,—not for a night, or a day, or a week, but for months and years. He had to give the comedy to the public, and keep the tragedy to himself; nor could he, if comedy failed him, plead with the public the tragedy of his circumstances. That was nothing to the public. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... "Cut the comedy, Peachy. There's a neat free ward waiting for her just the other direction from the city than Newton Heights. ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... in New York—even through the things one dislikes. But I don't expect you to answer that, because I don't believe you dislike anything thoroughly characteristic of New York; I remember you once took me to a Broadway musical comedy and said you ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... comedy in the big towns and tragedy in the little ones," he says. "But like a fool I booked it for two weeks of middle-sized ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... For if there was occasion for him to deliver his sentiments in that language, he always expressed what he had to say in Latin, and gave it another to translate. He was evidently not unacquainted with the poetry of the Greeks, and had a great taste for the ancient comedy, which he often brought upon the stage, in his public spectacles. In reading the Greek and Latin authors, he paid particular attention to precepts and examples which might be useful in public or private life. Those he used to extract verbatim, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... and calls ugly things by their right names. Men, he tells us over and over again, are wretched, and there is no use in denying it. This doctrine appears in his familiar talk, and even in the papers which he meant to be light reading. He begins the prologue to a comedy ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Potter spoke of? What's the grazing master got to do, in folding up a ranch? Why would your grandfather get all het up if he heard about it? Where is this Bar-O property? Maybe in this tragic drama, there is a comedy part ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... have a comedy for you, in a season or two at farthest, that I believe will be worth your acceptance."—Goldsmith. Bettered: "In a season or two at farthest, I shall have a comedy for you that I believe ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... I saw in a London Book Catalogue 'Smiles and Tears—a Comedy by Mrs. C. Kemble'—I had a curiosity to see this: and so bought it. Do you know it?—Would you like to have it? It seems to be ingeniously contrived, and of easy and natural Dialogue: of the half sentimental kind of Comedy, as Comedies ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... Thanks partly to wise treatment, more to new faces, and most to a plucky determination to employ himself usefully with his pen and his pencil, he gradually freed himself from the spell, and fifty years afterwards could look back upon the story as a pretty comedy of his ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... feelings give to the commonest situations in life. The events and the ideas which led to the marriage of Paul with Natalie Evangelista are an introduction to our real subject, which is to sketch the great comedy that precedes, in France, all conjugal pairing. This Scene, until now singularly neglected by our dramatic authors, although it offers novel resources to their wit, controlled Paul's future life and was now awaited by Madame ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... continued "This is the only means of restoring the girl to peace of mind, and your majesty owes her this reparation. The poor thing has been rudely precipitated from the clouds; and as the comedy is over, the best thing we can do for her is to convince her that it as a comedy, and that the curtain has fallen. Your majesty, however, must not again lay your imperial hand upon the simple web of her destiny: leave it to your inferiors to gather up its broken threads. Go away ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... to sacrifice to the Graces, so one might recommend a good and modest woman to sacrifice to Love, that her husband might be a mild and agreeable partner, and not run after any other woman, so as to be compelled to say like the fellow in the comedy, 'What a wretch I am to ill-treat such a woman!' For to love in marriage is far better than to be loved, for it prevents many, nay all, of those offences which spoil and ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... degree of M.A. At college, Smart began to display that reckless dissipation which led afterwards to such melancholy consequences. He studied hard, however, at intervals; wrote poetry both in Latin and English; produced a comedy called a 'Trip to Cambridge; or, The Grateful Fair,' which was acted in the hall of Pembroke College; and, in spite of his vices and follies, was popular on account of his agreeable manners and amiable dispositions. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... that many doctors prescribed always an odd pill, an odd draught, or drop to be taken by their patients. For the perfection thereof they allege these following numbers: as 7 Planets, 7 wonders of the World, 9 Muses, 3 Graces, God is 3 in 1, &c." Ravenscroft, in his comedy of "Mammamouchi or the Citizen Turned Gentleman," makes Trickmore as a physician say: "Let the number of his bleedings and purgations be odd, numero Deus impare gaudet" [God delights in ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... contemporary London and all subsequent readers with a notable example of the novel of mingled character and incident, entertaining alike for its lively episodes and its broadly genial delineation of types of the time. And so he soon had the town laughing with him at his broad comedy. ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... of comedy describing an interchange of personalities between a celebrated author and a bicycle salesman. It is the purest, keenest fun—and ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... theater Hargraves was known as an all-round dialect comedian, having a large repertoire of German, Irish, Swede, and black-face specialties. But Mr. Hargraves was ambitious, and often spoke of his great desire to succeed in legitimate comedy. ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... belong to the realm of comedy, and it is high time to replace the Kantian question, "How are synthetic judgments a PRIORI possible?" by another question, "Why is belief in such judgments necessary?"—in effect, it is high time that we should ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... stage (and here I come at last to my own particular function in the matter), Comedy, as a destructive, derisory, critical, negative art, kept the theatre open when sublime tragedy perished. From Moliere to Oscar Wilde we had a line of comedic playwrights who, if they had nothing fundamentally positive to say, were at least ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... recognition of him as a dramatic author. I take the criticism of Mr. Greenwood (who is not a Baconian). One John Manningham, Barrister-at-Law, "a well-educated and cultured man," notes in his Diary (February 2, 1601) that "at our feast we had a play called Twelve Night or What you Will, much like the Comedy of Errors, or Menaechmi in Plautus, but most like and near to that in Italian called Inganni." He confides to his Diary the tricks played on Malvolio as "a good practice." {0c} ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... expression to this opinion he would most certainly be at once told, with that mixture of asperity and contempt so properly reserved for those who take cheerful views of anything, that without well-defined types of character there can be neither national comedy nor whimsical novel; and as it is impossible to imagine any person sufficiently cheerful to carry the argument further by inquiring ingenuously, 'And how would that matter?' the position of things becomes serious, and demands a ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... fashion; east, in a word, of Fifth Avenue—a great square brick building smoke-grimed, cobwebbed, and having the look of a cold-storage plant or a car barn fallen into disuse; dusty, neglected, almost eerie. Yet within it lurks Romance, and her sombre sister Tragedy, and their antic brother Comedy, the cut-up. ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... he growled. "The law could have compelled you to pay some such munificent sum as four dollars a week for his maintenance. You're safe from that now. And I congratulate you. It'll mean an extra weekly quart of champagne or a brace of musical comedy seats for you. The law is stringent and I was going to invoke it in your case. You smashed a decent girl's life. You helped bring a nameless boy into a world that would have made his life a hell as long as he lived. Just because his father happened to be a yellow cur. And, ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... awkward corner caused by the enforced resignation of President Grevy had indeed been turned, because the Constitution of the Third Republic provides for the election of the President by the Assembly. But it is one thing to play a successful comedy in the Assembly with the help of what in America is called 'the cohesive power of the public plunder,' and quite another thing to get a satisfactory Chamber of Deputies re-elected by the people of France after four years of irritating and exasperating misrule. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... days since the funeral and two days since Mike Prim bent listening with such furious excitement at the keyhole of Judge Regis's office. Jordantown had become the stage upon which a mystery play was being enacted with all the farcical features of a comedy. Every man, especially, was doing exactly what he would have done and said if there had been footlights and an audience in front, only not one of them knew that this was so. Providence is the Great Dramatist, and secures perfectly ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... had insisted upon being dressed, adorned and painted, and seeing the ambassadors. Like Augustus, he no doubt considered the world a great stage, and was desirous of playing out the last act of the comedy. Anne of Austria reappeared no more in the cardinal's apartments; she had nothing more to do there. Propriety was the pretext for her absence. On his part, the cardinal did not ask for her: the advice the queen had given her son ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... "adapted" sometimes almost beyond recognition. They show interesting likeness to the miracle and mystery plays of the Middle Ages. There is the same naive presentation; the same introduction of the buffoon to offset tragedy with comedy; the same tendency to overemphasize the comic parts until all sense of reverence is lost. In some respects India and Mediaeval Europe ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... that I should care for it to come out at the Lyceum, but of course if the terms were very—oh, they're beginning at last! I hope this light comedy scene will go well. (Curtain rises: Comic dialogue—nothing whatever to do with the plot—between a Footman and a Matinee Maidservant in short sleeves, a lace tucker, and a diamond necklace; depression of audience. Serious characters enter and tell one another long and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... in the history of freedom than the songs of Burns. His satire has lost none of its edge. His musical arrows yet sing through the air. He is so substantially a reformer, that I find his grand, plain sense in close chain with the greatest masters—Rabelais, Shakespeare in comedy, Cervantes, Butler, and Burns. If I should add another name, I find it only in a living countryman of Burns. He is an exceptional genius. The people who care nothing for literature and poetry care for Burns. It was indifferent—they thought who saw him—whether he wrote ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... helplessly around but there was no hope of diverting Enderby's attention; he must go through with it and only trust that he might be believed, and once again that slight sense of the ludicrous came upon him. Tragedy was in the air; yet, as often happens in real life, it was being pushed to comedy point, and he grudged even the shadow of a jest at this important crisis in his dealings with Miss Clairville, who was now sitting at supper with the ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... fellow was killed—a wonder there were not more—and all hands were sorry for him; but tragedy and comedy so often bunk together, and men who adventure are more apt to dwell on the humorous than the tragic side of things. There was that about the code-books. The instructions to all ships are to get rid of the code-books ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... James has given me a horror of things of the sort. I don't believe he meant it. I think he felt snappish and thought he would relieve his feelings that way. But there it is. He has made it all rather disgusting. It's become like a kind of intrigue of vulgar people, in a comedy." ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... a bluebird, or an oriole, or a robin, or a jay, fighting for hours at a time its own image as reflected in a pane of glass; quite exhausting itself in its fury to demolish its supposed rival! Yet I have often witnessed this little comedy. It is another instance of how the arts of our civilization corrupt and confuse the birds. It may be that in the course of many generations the knowledge of glass will get into their blood, and they will cease to be fooled by it, as they may also in time learn what a poor foundation ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... provide himself with a good counsel, "By St. Bride"—his favourite oath—said he, "I know well the fellow I would have, yea, and the best in England, too!" Asked who that might be. "Marry, the king himself." The note of comedy struck at the beginning of the trial lasted to the end. The earl's ready wit seems to have dumbfounded his accusers, who were not unnaturally indignant at so unlocked for a result. "All Ireland," they swore, solemnly, ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless |
