"Playwright" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... boy. Clarissa is a masterpiece, there are fourteen volumes of her, and the most wooden-headed playwright would give you the whole of Clarissa in a single act. So long as I amuse you, what have you to complain of? That costume was positively lovely. Don't you like camillias? Would you rather have dahlias? No? Very good, chestnuts then, here's for you." (And ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... to Covent Garden Theatre and saw the new play of John Bull: some humour, and some pathos, and one good character of an Irishman, but the contrast between the elegance of the French theatre and the grossierete of the English struck us much. But this is the judgment of a disappointed playwright! ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... the drawing itself. For, obviously, the comic element in a drawing is often a borrowed one, for which the text supplies all the stock-in-trade. I mean that the artist may be his own understudy in the shape of a satirist, or even a playwright, and that then we laugh far less at the drawings themselves than at the satire or comic incident they represent. But if we devote our whole attention to the drawing with the firm resolve to think of nothing else, we ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... the enormous drudgery, of the years put into a book which may be read in an hour. Montesquieu was twenty-five years writing his "Esprit des Lois," yet you can read it in sixty minutes. Adam Smith spent ten years on his "Wealth of Nations." A rival playwright once laughed at Euripides for spending three days on three lines, when he had written five hundred lines. "But your five hundred lines in three days will be dead and forgotten, while my three lines ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Street, and his boy, by a tavern-keeper named Thomas Merry; and the other is founded on a story which bears some resemblance to the well-known ballad of The Babes in the Wood. I have not been able to discover the source from which the playwright drew his account of the Thames Street murder. Holinshed and Stow are silent; and I have consulted without avail Antony Munday's "View of Sundry Examples," 1580, and "Sundry strange and inhumaine Murthers ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... playwright, whose dramas are mere plagiarisms from "the refuse of obscure volumes." He pretends to be rather pleased with criticism, but is sorely irritated thereby. Richard Cumberland (1732-1811), noted for his vanity and irritability, was the model of this character.—Sheridan, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... hero; the shrine of AEsculapius at Epidau'rus was famous throughout the classic world; and the exploits of Hercules were commemorated by the Dorians at the tomb of a Ne'mean king. When the bard and the playwright clothed these tales in verse, all Greece hearkened; and when the painter or the sculptor took these subjects for his skill, all Greece applauded. Thus was strengthened the national sense ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... of course, take their name from the erratic poet and playwright. In one of them he lived and died, just above the rooms tenanted by the learned Blackstone, who, at that time engaged in penning the fourth volume of his "Commentaries," was often grievously annoyed by the dancing- and drinking-parties, the games of blind-man's-buff, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... fifty-five rubles per copy. The royal library, which had been founded by the Jewish court physician Sanchez, contained only eight Russian books during the reign of Alexander I, and not many more were added by his successor. The dramatic art developed by the Jewish playwright Nebakhovich remained for a long time in the same state as when he ceased his work.[23] If Russia was the most powerful, it continued to be the most fanatical and uncivilized country in Europe. All who had occasion to visit and study it during the first ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... excellent mystery stories. The Breaking Point is, from one standpoint, a first class mystery story; and then there is that enormously successful mystery play, written by Mrs. Rinehart in conjunction with Avery Hopwood, The Bat. Nor was this her first success as a playwright for she collaborated with Mr. Hopwood in writing the farce Seven Days. Shall I add that Mrs. Rinehart has lived part of her life in haunted houses? I am under the impression that more than one of her residences has been found ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... playwright, consisting of eight pieces, or nine if we include the later In a Balcony, is sufficiently ample to enable us to form a trustworthy estimate of his genius as seen in drama. Dramatic, in the sense that he created ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... I tell these children a story, which a cunning playwright, whom I once knew in our Queen's court, hath ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... A noted English playwright stated that "the theatre is literally making the minds of our urban population to-day. It is a huge factory of sentiment, of character, of points of honor, of conception, of conduct, of everything that finally determines the ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... playful vanity he gave vent to a torrent of self-appreciation. He then named all the "other notables present"—a poet, a cartoonist, a budding playwright, a distinguished Russian revolutionist, an editor, and another newspaper man—maligning and deriding some of them and grudgingly praising the others. Much of what he said was lost upon me, for, although he knew that I was a rank outsider, he used a jargon of nicknames, catch-phrases, ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... be no doubt at all that if Balzac had lived, he might have turned out a successful playwright. When he began his career as a dramatic writer he was like a musician taking up an unfamiliar instrument, an organist who was trying the violin, or a painter working in an unknown medium. His last written play was his best. Fortunately, the plot did not deal with any of those desperate ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... were, no doubt, nerveless and insipid, deserving the scornful criticism of Tacitus and Persius; but the fragments preserved by Seneca shew that he had some skill in polishing far-fetched conceits. Our playwright has not fallen into the error of making Nero "out-Herod Herod"; through the crazy raptures we see the ruins of a nobler nature. Poppaea's arrowy sarcasms, her contemptuous impatience and adroit tact are admirable. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... of the landowner and thrown into jail. The small town which had been the witness of these humiliations should be witness of the restoration of his honor. Where he had been spoken of as the actor and playwright of doubtful fame, there would he be seen again as the honored possessor of house and land. There and elsewhere should the people, who had counted him among the proletariat, learn to know him as a gentleman, that is as a member ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... let it tell itself. Dramas are made up of incidents that have happened to somebody sometime, but in no instance that I ever heard of have all the situations pictured in a play happened to the persons who played the parts. The business of the playwright is selection and rejection, and usually the dramatic situations revealed have been culled from very many lives over a long course of years. Here the author need but reveal the tangled skein woven by Fate, Meddling Parents, Pride, Prejudice, Caprice, Ambition, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... and completely absorbed him. Douglas had forsaken all traditions. He had been fettered with only a small knowledge of the stage and its workings, and he had escaped the fatal tribute to the conventionalities paid by almost every contemporary playwright. It was a sweet and passionate story which leaped out from the lips of those fashionably dressed but earnest men and women, grandly human, exquisitely told. Here and there the touches were lurid enough, but there was plenty of graceful ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... law. The ancestral home of the Balestiers was near Brattleboro', Vt., and here Mr. Kipling brought his bride. The young Englishman was so impressed by the Vermont scenery that he rented for a time the cottage on the "Bliss Farm," in which Steele Mackaye the playwright wrote the ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... he mused, "is the playwright really so far wrong? Is his stage story very far removed from actuality after all? In Miss Edyth Vale, we have a girl of most unusual character, of splendid education, apparently. And yet in the building of her own drama ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... imitation of GOLDONI, Count ERFITO D'ALUMINIO? And to come nearer home, did not the German—but why pursue the "motive" until you run it to earth, and even then it won't be killed, but will be flourishing thousands of years hence, when the New Zealand playwright among the ruins of London shall take up his note-book and commence a scenario on the old, but to him, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 5, 1892 • Various
... correspondence which I turned over. There were letters from Carlo Angiolini, who was afterwards to bring the manuscript of the Memoirs to Brockhaus; from Balbi, the monk with whom Casanova escaped from the Piombi; from the Marquis Albergati, playwright, actor, and eccentric, of whom there is some account in the Memoirs; from the Marquis Mosca, 'a distinguished man of letters whom I was anxious to see,' Casanova tells us in the same volume in which he describes his visit to the Moscas at Pesaro; from Zulian, brother of the Duchess of Fiano; ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... successful in some other epoch when some other literary form than the novel had happened to be in fashion. In France the novel tempted Victor Hugo, who was essentially a lyric poet, and the elder Dumas, who was essentially a playwright. There are not lacking signs of late that the drama is likely in the immediate future to assert a sharper rivalry with prose-fiction; and novelists like Sir James Barrie and the late Paul Hervieu have relinquished ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... man who had written a play, and who thought, as every playwright thinks, that it was a great addition to the drama, and would bring him fame and fortune. He took this play to a London manager, but heard nothing of it for a long time, and at last it was returned to him. Then, on going to a first night at the theatre ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... of her personal sacrifice to the enamoured Pilate as the price of His freedom, and when at the last she wept at His feet where He lay bound and delivered, and wrapped them, in the agony of her abandonment, in the hair of her head, the priest's lips almost moved in words other than those of the playwright—words that told her he knew the height and the depth of her sacrifice and forgave it, "Neither do I condemn thee...." In his exultation he saw what it was to perform miracles, to remit sins. The spark ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... father and uncle. He was a handsome man in his vigorous years and had married the daughter of Bettine von Arnim, the Bettine of Goethe. It is not strictly right to class him as a historian. He was poet, playwright, critic, and novelist, perhaps mainly these, but soon after, in his position as a professor in the university, he was to produce his well-known Vorlesungen ueber Goethe, a work which though mainly critical, at the present time ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... part of their literature and it made them build small but perfect temples. It found expression in the clothes which the men wore and in the rings and the bracelets of their wives. It followed the crowds that went to the theatre and made them hoot down any playwright who dared to sin against the iron law of good ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... Philadelphia, Pa. Journalist, playwright, novelist. Best works are short stones of New York life, such as Van Bibber and Others, Gallegher and Other Stories. The Bar Sinister, which holds boys spellbound, is an excellent story ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... He complicated the intrigue, he varied the scenes, he shortened the monologues, he suppressed or reduced the chorus—in a word, the drama in his hands ceased to be oratorical or lyrical, and became at length dramatic. The advance was great; and it was achieved by a hack playwright scrambling ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... reaches The playwright's mouthing shams, And the long-winded speeches Grow brisk as epigrams. My heart, in sudden clover, With smiles adorns my face, For, when the Act is over, I need not keep my place. I'll chase my fears, like foxes, When next the curtain falls— I'll then be in the boxes, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... grief and passion; to represent death, not merely as awful, but graceful and pathetic; and never condescended to degrade the majesty of the Tragic Muse by the ludicrous apposition of buffoonery and familiar punning, such as the elder playwright certainly had resort to. Besides, Mr. Home's performance had been admired in quarters so high, and by personages whose taste was known to be as elevated as their rank, that all Britons could not but join in the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... side by side Who said their cute young Souls were pink; I saw a Genius on the Brink (Or so he said) of suicide. I saw a Playwright who had tried But couldn't make the Public think; I saw a novelist who cried, Reading his own Stuff, in his drink; I saw a vapid egg-eyed Gink Who said eight times: "Art is ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... genius to weave into his dramas the whole stirring life of the English people. The plays themselves, with the testimony of contemporaries and his business success, are strong evidence against the tradition that his life in London was wild and dissolute, like that of the typical actor and playwright of his time. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... of the play's success. Moreover, Miss Colgate was as pleased as Punch over this flattering tribute to her magnetism—for the part, as described, was one that would not "get over" unless created by an actress of pronounced magnetic appeal—and lost no time in falling deeply in love with the manly playwright. They were serious-minded, ambitious young people. It is of small consequence that he was an untried, unskilled dramatist, and of equally small moment that she was little more than an amateur. They saw a bright light ahead and trudged steadily toward it, prodding themselves—and each other—with ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... time Bunce had appeared as a playwright. There had been seen, on June 10, 1850, at the New York Bowery Theatre, a tragedy entitled "Marco Bozzaris; or, The Grecian Hero," and in the cast were J. Wallack, Jr., and his wife, together with John Gilbert. It was not based on the poem by Fitz-Greene Halleck, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce
... history of the French theatre so inevitably au courant with human nature. His form is frankly farcical and his plays are so funny, so enjoyable merely as good shows that it seems a pity to raise an obelisk in the playwright's honour, and yet the fact remains that he understands the political, social, domestic, amorous, even cloacal conditions of the French better than any of his contemporaries, always excepting the aforementioned Mirbeau. In On ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... main narrative—i.e., the travel—and give the author an opportunity to use up some spare material which he does not know what to do with. Such are "The Man of the Hill," in Tom Jones; "The History of Melopoyn the Playwright" in Roderick Random; the "Memoirs of a Lady of Quality," occupying fifty-three thousand words, in Peregrine Pickle; "The Philosophic Vagabond," in the Vicar of Wakefield; and "Wandering Willie's Tale," in Redgauntlet. The reason why ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... hurts himself; he never affects the fashion. No woman, whatever her age or position or her opinion about the crinoline fashion, could avoid wearing one. No effort to introduce a fashion of "rational dress" for women has ever yet succeeded. An artist, novelist, poet, or playwright of a school which is out of fashion fails and is lost. An opponent of the notions which are current can get no hearing. The fashion, therefore, operates a selection in which success and merit are often divorced from each other, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... events of this period. It was a charming performance, even if not a great financial success, and little Elsie Leslie, who played the double part of the Prince and Tom Canty, became a great favorite in the Clemens home. She was also a favorite of the actor and playwright, William Gillette, [9] and once when Clemens and Gillette were together they decided to give the little girl a surprise—a pair of slippers, in fact, embroidered by themselves. In his presentation letter to her, ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Comedy of Errors, which has been partly taken by some wretched playwright from the Menaechmi of Plautus, is intolerably stupid: that it may occasionally display the touch of Shakespeare, cannot be denied; but these purpurei panni are lamentably infrequent; and, to adopt the language of Mr. Stevens, "that the entire play was no work of his, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... a day or so later I has the luck to run across Oakley Mills. Something had come up that needed to be passed on by Mr. Robert, and as he was still out lunchin' I scouts over to his club, and finds him stowed away at a corner table with this chatty playwright party. ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... dramatic author must deal with his actors, and with his actors alone. Certain moments of suspense, certain significant dispositions of personages, a certain logical growth of emotion, these are the only means at the disposal of the playwright. It is true that, with the assistance of the scene-painter, the costumier and the conductor of the orchestra, he may add to this something of pageant, something of sound and fury; but these are, for the dramatic writer, beside the mark, and do not come under the vivifying touch of his genius. When ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... charter of their country. Its great power is contested by none; rather, all recognise it, and many and violent are the disputes as to its right use and purpose. I propose to consider two of the disputants—the propagandist playwright and the art-for-art's-sake artist, since they raise issues that are our concern. It is curious that two so violently opposed should be so nearly alike in error: they are both afraid of life. The propagandist is all for one side; the artist afraid of every side. The one lacks imagination; the ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... When a playwright produces a plot whose incidents are just within the possibilities, and far beyond the probabilities, of this life, it is said to be "ingenious," because of the crowd of circumstances that are huddled into ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... The play-writer's or playwright's work, then, supposing that he possesses the requisite knowledge of life as it is lived to go on with, is to select or evolve from that knowledge the basic idea, plot or theme, which, skillfully displayed, ...
— How to Write a Play - Letters from Augier, Banville, Dennery, Dumas, Gondinet, - Labiche, Legouve, Pailleron, Sardou, Zola • Various
... dreaded her mother in such a mood of ruthless gaiety. At the theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the whole first act, appeared, in the entr'acte, to feel no hesitation in condemning it. They spoke of French and Italian actors by name, laughed heartily over the playwright's conception of social usages, and made Mathilde feel as if her own unacknowledged enjoyment of the play was ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... convenient with sepulchral inscriptions or records; but in the matter before us what an editor had principally, if not almost exclusively, to consider, was the preservation in their fullest integrity of the language of the time and the sense of the playwright. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... Hardy, in The Return of the Native, paints Egdon Heath—"Haggard Egdon"—in its shifting moods before he introduces a single human being upon the scene of their coming tragedy, it is quite possible for the modern playwright, with an artist to aid him, to show the audience the scene of his drama, to let its suggestive beauty, its emotional possibilities, charm or fire their fancies before the speech and action begin. So also, as Wagner and Mr. Herne have demonstrated, there can be a ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... he can find at least a small group of patrons who will admire and buy it. The most competent architect can do nothing for himself or for other people unless he attracts clients who will build his paper houses. The playwright needs even a larger following. If his plays are to be produced, he must manage to amuse and to interest thousands of people. And the politician most of all depends upon a numerous and faithful body ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... The playwright does not say so, Mansfield does not say so, but this is the lesson: Hate is a poison—wrath is a toxin—sensuality leads to death—clutching selfishness is a lighting of the fires of hell. It is all a ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... more than mere geometrical expressions. "Pennamite," "Erie," and "Toledo" wars between the States, suggesting a world of bitterness and recrimination, are remembered today, if at all, only by the cartoonist and the playwright. The ancient false pride in mock values, so cherished in Europe, has quite departed from the provincial areas of the United States, and Americans can fly in a day, unwittingly, through many States. Problems that would have cost Europe blood are settled without turmoil in the solemn ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... hurriedly, carelessly, gayly—guiltily. She showed then and there what a surpassing wise young woman she was, for she did not exclaim or remind him of his high resolve to do or die as a playwright. "I'll be ready in a minute," was all ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... impressively informed that Mr. Seven Sachs was the arch-famous American actor-playwright, now nearing the end of a provincial tour, which had surpassed all records of provincial tours, and that he would be at the Theatre Royal, Hanbridge, next week. Edward Henry then remembered that the hoardings had been full of Mr. Seven Sachs for ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... As the play proceeded, his brows grew darker and darker. And the husband, who ought to have been the guardian of his wife's honor? Well, the husband in this rather poor play was a creation that is common in modern English drama. He represented one idea at least that the English playwright has certainly not borrowed from the French stage. Moral worth is best indicated by a sullen demeanor. The man who has a pleasant manner is dangerous and a profligate; the virtuous man—the true-hearted ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... importance. For the church clock had been striking eleven when the mare, four minutes after leaving Dr. Nash, reached Strides Cottage. A great deal of talk may be got through in a very little time, as the playwright knows to his cost. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... and at the same hour at which Dominic Iglesias bound himself to the practical assistance of a personally unsavoury and professionally unsuccessful playwright, a conversation was in progress between two persons of more exalted social station in the drawing-room of a pleasant house in Chester Square. The said drawing-room, mid-Victorian in aspect, was decorated in white and ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... the subsequent history of pastoral reminds us that it is quite possible to underestimate Guarini's merits as a playwright. In the construction of a complicated plot, apart from the dramatic presentation thereof, he achieved a success not to be paralleled by any previous work in Italy, for the difference in the titles ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... who have had some success in other forms of writing—even the successful playwright—and those who never have written even a salable joke, all have to learn the slightly different ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... haughty Kitson on her lap. On the mantelshelf there was a curious collection of photographs—one of Ah Fu, the Chinese cook of South Sea memory, side by side with that of Sir Arthur Pinero, famous playwright—silent witnesses to the wide extent of her acquaintance and the broad ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... Mr. Henshaw scowling upon the playwright and fell again to his envelope, pretending thereafter ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... Garrick said it was good and should make a hit. But Garrick didn't know much about tragedies—law was his bent—he had read law for two years, off and on. They would go to London and seize fortune by the scalp-lock. In London good lawyers were needed, and London was the only place for a playwright. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... you,' she said. 'I should love to. I want to hear all about your play. I write myself, you know, in a very small way, so a successful playwright is Someone to me.' ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... depend too greatly on Mr Luckless for our picture of Fielding as a playwright, we will conclude it with the well-known passage from Murphy: "When he had contracted to bring on a play, or a farce, it is well known, by many of his friends now living, that he would go home rather late from a tavern, and would the next morning deliver a scene to the players, ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... chapel at Dalmatian Heights sat upon a hill, among a grove of pines, the most romantic of all trees. Life, a powerful but clumsy dramatist, does not reject the most claptrap "situations," which a sophisticated playwright would discard as too obvious. For this sandy plateau, strewn with satiny pine-needles, was the very horizon that had looked so blue and beckoning from the little house by the pond. Not far away was the great Airedale estate, which Gissing had known only at an admiring distance—and now he ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... consider De Musset a great dramatist, Sainte-Beuve, singularly enough, does not appreciate him as a playwright. Theophile Gautier says about 'Un Caprice' (1847): "Since the days of Marivaux nothing has been produced in 'La Comedie Francaise' so fine, so delicate, so dainty, than this tender piece, this chef-d'oeuvre, long buried within the pages of a review; and we are greatly ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... anecdotical history of French bibliolatry, beginning, as is courteous, with a lady. "Can a woman be a bibliophile?" is a question which was once discussed at the weekly breakfast party of Guilbert de Pixerecourt, the famous book- lover and playwright, the "Corneille of the Boulevards." The controversy glided into a discussion as to "how many books a man can love at a time;" but historical examples prove that French women (and Italian, witness the Princess d'Este) may be bibliophiles of the true strain. Diane ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... was not yet sufficiently clear in my own mind to be available offhand, nor was it yet backed by so obvious a product of my own peculiar genius that I could venture to quote it. Moreover, my first impulse was only one of pity for the unlucky playwright, which I felt all the more constrained to express, because his burst of fury gave me the inward satisfaction of knowing that he recognised my great success, of which I was not ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... book, as it is only in Ireland, of the countries that retain a Celtic culture, that the movement is the dominating influence in writing in English; and it is with the drama only that I have now to deal, though when a playwright is a poet or a story-teller, too, I have written of his attainment in verse and tale also. Had I been writing five years ago, I should have said that it was in poetry that the Celtic Renaissance had attained most nobly, but since then the drama has had more recruits of ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... estimation. The 'deities' hold that those who run down the institution are all, without exception, poor creatures who cannot get in. For the strong apparent instances to the contrary, there was a reason in each case. I ventured to mention the great name of Balzac, a man from our country. But the playwright Desminieres, who used to manage the amateur theatricals at Compiegne, burst out with 'Balzac! But did you know him? Do you know, sir, the sort of man he was? An utter Bohemian! A man, sir, who never had a guinea in his pocket! I had it from his friend Frederic Lemaitre. Never one guinea! ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... revolution and relieve their feelings in regard to it. There is something still more appealing in the yearning efforts the immigrants sometimes make to formulate their situation in America. I recall a play written by an Italian playwright of our neighborhood, which depicted the insolent break between Americanized sons and old country parents, so touchingly that it moved to tears all the older Italians in the audience. Did the tears of each express relief in finding that others had had the same experience as himself, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... audience voted in favor of woman suffrage. The convention was held at Concord, December 10, 11, with addresses by Mrs. Katherine Houghton Hepburn, president of the Connecticut association; Witter Bynner of Cornish, the poet and playwright, and Senator Helen Ring Robinson of Colorado. Miss Kimball subscribed $600, the largest individual contribution yet received. Mrs. Jenks gave a report of the meeting of the International Suffrage Alliance ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... Grub-street writer; writer for the press, gentleman of the press, representative of the press; adjective jerker[obs3], diaskeaust[obs3], ghost, hack writer, ink slinger; publicist; reporter, penny a liner; editor, subeditor[obs3]; playwright &c. 599; poet &c. 597. bookseller, publisher; bibliopole[obs3], bibliopolist[obs3]; librarian; bookstore, bookshop, bookseller's shop. knowledge of books, bibliography; book learning &c. (knowledge) 490. Phr. "among the giant fossils of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Subsequent editors and critics, notably the Cambridge editors and the Rev. F. G. Fleay, in his "Shakespearian Manual," starting from this view, have gone so far as to say that "Macbeth," as we have it, is not all Shakespeare's, but in part the work of Thomas Middleton, a second or third-rate playwright contemporary with Shakespeare, who wrote a play, called "The Witch," which is plainly an imitation of the supernatural scenes in this tragedy. The Cambridge editors believe that Middleton was permitted to supply certain scenes ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... which have yielded up their secrets to Mr. Wills, it is interesting to note in his poems, here the picturesque vision of the painter, here the psychology of the novelist, and here the playwright's sense of dramatic situation. Yet these things, which are the elements of his work of art though we arbitrarily separate them in criticism, are in the work itself blended and made one by the true imaginative and informing ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... The playwright gave Mainhall a curious look out of his deep-set faded eyes and made a wry face. "And have I done anything so fool as ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... have, as I have said, an exalted and intense inner life. I have known a number of cases where a man who seemed thoroughly commonplace and unemotional has all at once surprised everybody by telling the story of his hidden life far more pointedly and dramatically than any playwright or novelist or poet could have told it for him. I will not insult your intelligence, Beloved, by saying ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Ambassador, of his government's perfect neutrality. Thousands of muskets, hundreds of cannon, and quantities of clothes were thus shipped, and sums of money were also turned over to Franklin. Beaumarchais, the playwright and adventurer, acted with gusto the part of intermediary; and the lords and ladies of the French court, amusing themselves with "philosophy" and speculative liberalism, made a pet of the witty and sagacious Franklin. His popularity actually ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... the last, which Poe either invented, or, in quoting, altered. Some of the works named he apparently had not read, since their character is not suited to his purpose. Jean Baptiste Louis Gresset (1709-1777) was a French poet and playwright; the two works mentioned are poems,—the first, a tale of an escaped parrot who stopped at a convent and shocked the nuns by his profanity. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) was a famous Italian historian and ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... existence perpetuated in gymnasiums, and your immortality laboriously dragged about in a schoolboy's satchel. A precious recompense for your lavished blood to be wrapped round gingerbread by some Nuremberg chandler, or, if you have great luck, to be screwed upon stilts by a French playwright, and be made to move on ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... artist like yourself I need hardly suggest that The Nights still offers many a virgin mine to the Playwright; and I inscribe this volume to you, not only in admiration of your genius but in the hope that you will find means of exploiting the hidden wealth which ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... night of the play justified all that Marion and Wimpole had claimed for it, and was a great personal triumph for the new playwright. The audience was the typical first-night audience of the class which Charles Wimpole always commanded. It was brilliant, intelligent, and smart, and it came prepared ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... matter for surprise. No one, indeed, would seriously think of attempting to do so. Gordon was a mounted policeman, a horse-breaker, a steeplechase-rider—anything but a professional man of letters; Marcus Clarke was a journalist and playwright, and wrote only two novels in fourteen years; Rolf Boldrewood's books were written in spare hours before and after his daily duties as a country magistrate; Henry Kingsley returned to England before publishing anything; Kendall held a Government clerkship ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... in 1361 and following years was John Wickliffe, who has too often been confused with his great contemporary and namesake, the reformer. And the village claims as a son Thomas May (1595-1650), playwright, translator of Lucan's "Pharsalia," secretary to Parliament and friend of ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... influence on the story. Aeschylus' skill in this branch of his art is really extraordinary; the Chorus does take a part, and a vital part too, in the play. Again, the number of Greek actors was limited, whereas in a modern play their number is just as great as suits playwright's convenience or his capacity. The impression then of a Greek play is that it is a somewhat thin performance compared with the vivacity and complexity of the great Elizabethans. The plot, where it exists, seems very ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... say whether or not Chesterton is a playwright. His one play was a fine one about a fine subject, but I do not think it had the qualities that would be popular in an ordinary theatre in London. There is a certain suggestion of a problem about it which is a little obscure. We are ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... these pictures of Palestine might have been photographed. But none of these aspects has anything to do with the photoplay. If we follow the play in a genuine attitude of theatrical interest, we must accept those cues for our attention which the playwright and the producers have prepared for us. But there is surely no lack of means by which our mind can be influenced and directed in the rapid play ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... of our subject expands before us, and we must stay our hand. We merely offer these hints as our modest contribution to the attempts to decide from phrases used in Shakespeare's works what were his avocations before he became a playwright, and return to Lord Campbell ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... attacks on Canning his contempt for George IV. his attack on Gifford on the spy system his defence of Caroline of Brunswick epigram on Lord Byron writes for Merchant Taylors' boys burlesque of "Angel Help" his "Satan in Search of a Wife" as a writer of prologues and epilogues as a playwright ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... it's had already," he said. "Shaw is the only playwright clever enough to write dialogue that will hold any number of people in the theatre. The motion picture has made the public demand action. It has changed the plot and progress of ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... face showed a bit of interest. "Playwright, eh? Anderson! Anderson!" he mused. "Don't recall ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... be here at five o'clock, sir," answers Mary, who, according to the playwright, then goes out. But Mary ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... to the last step in the evolution of a perfect hypocrite out of a simple formalist. The perfect and finished hypocrite is not your commonplace and vulgar scoundrel of the playwright and the penny-novelist type; the finest hypocrite is a character their art cannot touch. 'The worst of hypocrites,' Rutherford goes on to say, 'is he who whitens himself till he deceives himself. It is strange that a man hath such power over himself. But a man's ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... for," said the playwright. "They were not broken purposely. In her anger, because we remonstrated with her for spoiling ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... Brutus, Edwin Forrest (though he drops the Forrest for professional considerations), John Wilkes, Joseph, and the girls. All of the boys are known to more or less of fame; none of them in his art has reached the renown of the father; but one has sent his name as far as that of the great playwright to whom they were pupils; wherever Shakspeare is quoted, John Wilkes Booth will be named, and infamously, like that Hubert in "King John," who would have murdered the ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... to be more or less gaily patterned). Anei 4th year (1775), entering at the Kanai Sansho[u] no Mon he (Yo[u]myo[u]) took the name of Katsu Byo[u]zo[u]. Later he received the name of Nan Tsuruya Boku. When he became a playwright he was about fifty years old. His plays are most ingenious, and are very numerous. Among them are the "Osome Hisomatsu," "Iro-yomi-uri," "Sumidagawa Hana Gosho[u]," "Yotsuya Kwaidan." In the playhouse they are known (collectively) ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... attitudinisings of a Garibaldi or Cavor, are foredoomed to the failure which its inherent oldmaidishness must always win for the Liberal Party in all undertakings whatsoever. Snt George is, of course, myself. But here my very aptitude in controversy tripped me up as playwright. Owing to my nack of going straight to the root of the matter in hand and substituting, before you can say Jack Robinson, a truth for every fallacy and a natural law for every convention, the scene of Snt ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... countries the actual record of events is confused, and how quickly any tomb, or any monument becomes a shrine before which "the faithful" will bow and make their prayer. But that here of all places, and before this tomb of all tombs, the God of the Mahommedans should be invoked—this was life turning playwright with a vengeance. It needed just one more detail to complete the picture and the next moment that detail was provided. ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... wished to be a fault-finder I should say that the piece is too long, and seems all the longer because some of the characters are supposed to represent schoolboys, and a girl of thirteen. The adapter is Mr. BUCHANAN—a poet and a playwright. This gentleman, I believe, has made many other pieces (more or less) his own, with (more or less) success. He seems to have a knack of turning old plays into new ones. I live in hope that when I next visit this great Metropolis I shall find that he has re-written ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... Mayor of London had wandered out into the night, so had his client, Mr. Learned Bore. This gentleman, a playwright, journalist and writer, had wandered forth in order, no doubt, to get inspiration. The source of any such inspiration as he might have derived from the calm night had been utterly destroyed by the ridiculous antics of the Lord Mayor of London; inspiration had ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... soon broken off, and her subsequent appearances as an actress in her comedy of "A Wife to be Lett" (1723) and in Hatchett's "Rival Father" (1730) were due in the one case to an accident and in the other to her friendship for the playwright. ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... T.W. Robertson, the playwright, and his friend and companion, E.P. Hingston. His literary executors were Horace Greeley and Richard H. Stoddard. In his will, he bequeathed among other things a large sum of money to his little valet, a bright little ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... at Skagen—the extreme northern point of Jutland—where he spent most of his summers. His painting was his favourite pastime, but poetry the serious work of his life. He was a very prolific writer, not only of verse and lyrical poems, but of plays and prose works, and was a very successful playwright. Drachmann's personality was a strong one, though not always agreeable to his countrymen. He had a freedom-loving spirit, and lived every moment of his life. Some of his best poems are about the Skaw ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... that it was difficult to imagine the soul stirred to the same high passion by the botanist, the astronomer, the geologist, the electrician, or even the entomologist as in former times by the poet, the humorist, the novelist, or the playwright. If the fictionist of whatever sort had succeeded in identifying himself with the scientist, he must leave the enjoyment of divine honors to the pianist, the farce-comedian, the portrait-painter, the emotional ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... art by that time, and the townsmen of Mark Twain saw the play and the actor at their best. Kate Field played the part of Laura Hawkins, and there was a Hartford girl in the company; also a Hartford young man, who would one day be about as well known to playgoers as any playwright or actor that America has produced. His name was William Gillette, and it was largely due to Mark Twain that the author of Secret Service and of the dramatic "Sherlock Holmes" got a fair public start. Clemens and his wife loaned Gillette the three thousand dollars which tided him through ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... seek real generalities, we must not consult the playwright. Perhaps we may find the best conditions for general statement where we do not even have to deal with an individual, but can listen to the mind of the race and can absorb its wisdom from its proverbs. Let us take the word ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... tyranny could extort this service. No wealth could pay for this golden secret. Sometimes a character appears but once in the course of a great drama. The man or woman, comes on the stage to deliver one message, and then disappears. But that one brief word has its place in the playwright's scheme, and its effect on the action of the piece. This child was sent to Syria to utter one speech, to speak one name, and because she spoke her little speech, kindly and clearly, things went better with ever ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... "and had never met him. He wrote and asked if we would let him read a play to us. As a rule we never do that; but, remembering that Pinero was himself a player, we made an exception. So it came about that one day, after a rehearsal, the actor playwright read his piece to us in the foyer of the St. James's. We never expected anything at first, but the reading ended in our taking the play immediately, though we scarcely knew what we should do with it, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... turned playwright wishes to make you see that "the Earth's forgotten it's a Star." In plainer words he wants to present you with a cure for "wumbledness." People who look at the black side of things, who think chiefly of themselves—these are the wumbled. The cure is star-dust—which is sympathy. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... attempts to stimulate the reluctant playwright. Two years after drafting the scenario, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... patron of art and literature that Louis XIV gained much of his celebrity. Molire, who was at once a playwright and an actor, delighted the court with comedies in which he delicately satirized the foibles of his time. Corneille, who had gained renown by the great tragedy of The Cid in Richelieu's time, found a ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... The playwright has always been a formidable rival to the novelist, insomuch that in a period of dramatic activity the novel, as our author remarks, can hardly maintain itself. But from the middle of the seventeenth century the stage had fallen low, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the case of a young newspaper man and author, who came to me for the loan of five dollars. I had never seen him before, but I knew his brother, a brilliant playwright, in a ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... tongue tastes and the skin touches—is a cause or an effect of human conduct. Naught can be ruled out as negligible, as not forming part of the equation. Hence he who would beyond all others see life for himself—I naturally mean the novelist and playwright—ought to embrace all phenomena in his curiosity. Being finite, he cannot. Of course he cannot! But he can, by obtaining a broad notion of the whole, determine with some accuracy the position and relative importance of the particular series of phenomena to ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... MacCarthy's translation of 'The Secret in Words.' 'The Secret in Words' is light comedy of intricate plot. Fabio is an example of the attendant gracioso, half servant, half confidant, who appears often in the Spanish drama. The Spanish playwright did not confine himself to one form of verse; and Mr. MacCarthy, in his adequate translation, has followed the various forms of Calderon, only not attempting the assonant vowel, so hard to escape in Spanish, and still harder to reproduce in English. These selections give no impression of the amazing ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... curiously feminine. Intercourse with Beardsley, for example, had backed his humorous gentleness with a sort of challenging courage; his new intimacy with Lord Alfred Douglas, coming on the top of his triumph as a playwright, was lending him aggressive self-confidence. There was in him that [Greek: hubris] (insolent self-assurance) which the Greek feared, the pride which goeth before destruction. I regretted the change in him and ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... development of what was ill-matched in their union; but still with mutual loyalty. A far-reaching acquaintance with, and reflection upon, the world and its ways, especially the Parisian world, has gone into the apparently slight texture of these pages. The accomplished playwright may be recognised in the skilful touches with which M. Feuillet, unrivalled, as his regular readers know, in his power of breathing higher notes into the frivolous prattle of fashionable French life, develops the tragic germ in the elegant, youthful household. Amid the ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater |
