"Dramatist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... He speaks amid the incantations of Balaam, raises Samuel's spirit in the witch's cavern, prophesies of the Messias by the tongue of the Sibyl, forces Python to recognize His ministers, and baptizes by the hand of the misbeliever. He is with the heathen dramatist in his denunciations of injustice and tyranny, and his auguries of divine vengeance upon crime. Even on the unseemly legends of a popular mythology He casts His shadow, and is dimly discerned in the ode or the epic, as in troubled water or in fantastic dreams. All that is good, all ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... stories high, and of lying in it all night ready for some visit or spectacle next day. I think I also recollect seeing Wilkes himself in an old-fashioned flap-waistcoated suit of scarlet and gold; and I am sure I have seen Murphy, the dramatist, a good deal later, in a suit of a like fashion, though soberer, and a large cocked-hat. The cocked-hat in general survived till nearly the present century. It was superseded by the round one during the French Revolution. I remember our steward at school, a very solemn personage, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... Carraroe, or Dingle Bay. All art is a collaboration; and there is little doubt that in the happy ages of literature, striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the story-teller's or the playwright's hand, as the rich cloaks and dresses of his time. It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink-horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children. In Ireland, those of us who know the people have the same privilege. When I was writing "The Shadow of the Glen," some years ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... "Dramatist,"(324) written with that species of humour in caricature that resembles O'Keefe's performances; full of absurdities, yet laughable in the extreme. We heard very ill, and, missing the beginning, we understood still worse: ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... the man she has no hope of gaining, the man whom she has every good reason to hate and despise. This is a drama of passion pitted against reason—against everything excepting passion, and Wagner loses no chance of making the situation clear. Here, as in every other opera, he is, if not first a dramatist, yet always a dramatist. "Never!" screams Isolda, and curses the vessel and all that it holds. Astounded, Brangaena tries to comfort her; but Isolda is a woman, and means to have her way. There must be plenty of air in such a deck-tent, but Wagner, with a spite that is itself somewhat feminine, ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... dramatist, must have been indebted to this faculty of observation, far more than to books and human teachers, for his inimitable power of delineating human nature. He was the son of a poor man, who could not read nor write, according to reports, and he went to London to live, where he held ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... Detached poems or dramas have been translated at various times since the first publication of the original works; and in several instances these versions have been incorporated into this collection. Schiller was not less efficiently qualified by nature for an historian than for a dramatist. He was formed to excel in all departments of literature, and the admirable lucidity of style and soundness and impartiality of judgment displayed in his historical writings will not easily be surpassed, and will always recommend them ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... convenient sentence of an adroit but reckless ignorance. The merits of St. Real are undoubtedly great; but Otway's indebtedness to him is exceedingly slight; and it is remarkable to see how ingeniously, from a few meagre historical details, the great dramatist has constructed one of the noblest imaginative works of which literature can boast. The names of nearly all the dramatis personae with the exception of Belvidera, are taken from St. Real; but their characters are Otway's, and his plot is almost wholly ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Thomas Otway
... Louis Dot, it certainly held rank as the first of all, both for cooking and for wine, and Emile Ollivier, Dot's successor, is doing his best to sustain the reputation. Neatly framed and hung on one of the walls is still to be seen the card signed by the late Henry Pettitt, the dramatist, attesting to the fact that he had just eaten the best lunch of his life. This card some years later was countersigned by a Lord Mayor of London; and a Lord Mayor surely should be a good judge of a lunch. Whatever place is visited in Brussels, L'Etoile ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... negative, that a passage treating of a wide question put into the mouth of a person despised and rebuked by the best characters in the play, is not likely to contain any cautiously formed and cherished opinion of the dramatist. At first sight this may seem almost a truism; but we have only to remind our readers that one of the passages oftenest quoted with admiration, and indeed separately printed and illuminated, is "The Seven Ages of Man," a passage full of inhuman contempt ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... and whose honour, impugned after his death, in 1857, was defended many years later by his son in "The Book of the Dead," reflective of Tennyson's "In Memoriam," and marked by a triteness of phrase which was always Boker's chief limitation, both as a poet and as a dramatist. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... Georgia, having changed my route on account of the yellow fever, I jumped my entire company to Philadelphia, and at once continued on a north-eastern tour, having arranged with the well-known author and dramatist, Colonel Prentiss Ingraham, to ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... is that of Kossor, the well-known dramatist, an Austrian Croat. In the Austrian style he received a State subsidy of three hundred crowns in encouragement of his talent. The Serbs have continued that, and given him the equivalent in dinars. But he is attached to the Art Department ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... privileges. The bait proved tempting, and, as a consequence, some prominent Maskilim, too weak to resist the allurements, precipitated themselves into the Greek Catholic fold. Abraham Peretz, financier and champion of Jews' rights, consented to be converted, as also Loeb Nebakhovich, the dramatist, whose plays were produced in the Imperial theatre of St. Petersburg and performed in the presence of the emperor.[30] Equally bad, if not worse, for the cause of Haskalah was the conduct of those who, disdaining, or unable, to profess ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... of Alfieri for Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia nearly twenty years later. She then spoke of the difficulties inherent in such a subject, "inequality of age adding to the unnatural incest. To shed any interest over such an attachment, the dramatist ought to adorn the father with such youthful attributes as would be by no means contrary to probability."[xvii] This she endeavored to do in Mathilda (aided indeed by the fact that the situation was the reverse of that in Myrrha). Mathilda's father ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... meet with all sorts of picturesque opportunities. The story is told without any straining after climaxes, but with many felicitous touches that enhance the effect of every picture and incident. In scene, characters, and plot, "At the Red Glove" offers a brilliant opportunity to the dramatist, and one is tempted to think that the story must have been originally conceived and planned with reference to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... that inflammability of mind which, untempered by a solid understanding, made his plays a strange mixture of vivid expression, incoherent declamation, dramatic intensity, and extravagant conception of character. He was not, in the highest sense of the word, a great dramatist. Shakspeare is the only one of that age. Marlowe had a rare imagination, a delicacy of sense that made him the teacher of Shakspeare and Milton in versification, and was, perhaps, as purely a poet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... 'presents'). I doubt if five per cent of the public know who wrote 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,' 'In Mizzoura,' or 'Richelieu,' but they know their stage favourites. I wonder how many mantels are adorned with pictures of the successful dramatist and those who 'present' and how many there are on which appear Maude Adams, Dave Warfield, Billie Burke, John Drew, Bernhardt, Duse, and ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... serves as an authority to all the Foreign Offices in Europe. Among the remaining guests were a bishop, the editor-in-chief of a London daily newspaper, a man who knew the interior of China as well as most men know their own club, a Russian revolutionist just escaped from Siberia, a leading dramatist, a Cabinet Minister, and a poet whose name is a household word wherever the English tongue is spoken. And for two hours we sat and listened to a wicked-looking little woman who from the boards of a Bowery music-hall had worked her way up to the position ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... out of account, in an elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable in himself. Now our modern politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness; forgetfulness that the production of this happy and conscious life is after all the aim of ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... speeches, a few of his letters, a few wise or witty sayings, an anecdote or two scattered about in the pages of other authors, and six lines of hexameter verse, containing a critical estimate of the dramatist Terence, are all that remain as specimens of what is probably forever lost ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... What the artist fixes on his canvas is something he has seen at a certain spot, on a certain day, at a certain hour, with a colouring that will never be seen again. What the poet sings of is a certain mood which was his, and his alone, and which will never return. What the dramatist unfolds before us is the life-history of a soul, a living tissue of feelings and events—something, in short, which has once happened and can never be repeated. We may, indeed, give general names to these feelings, but they cannot be the same thing in another soul. They are INDIVIDUALISED. ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... has seldom drawn a tear, and millions of radiant eyes have been witnesses for Otway, by those drops of pity which they have shed. Otway might be no scholar, but that, methinks, does not detract from the merit of a dramatist, nor much assist him in succeeding. For the truth of this we may appeal to experience. No poets in our language, who were what we call scholars, have ever written plays which delight or affect the audience. Shakespear, Otway and Southern were no scholars; ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... school. They drew their ideas of the drama from Shakspeare, rather than from Corneille. Among these writers were Alexandre Dumas, a most prolific novelist as well as writer of plays; and the celebrated poet and dramatist, Victor Hugo. The romances of Dumas comprise more than a hundred volumes. In his historical novels, incidents and characters without number crowd upon the scene, but without confusion, while the narrative maintains an unfailing vivacity. Of the authors of light and witty comedies, Scribe ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... helped him with the cry of blood." This line is from The Battle of Bosworth Field by Sir John Beaumont (Brother to the Dramatist), whose poems are written with so much spirit, elegance, and harmony, that it is supposed, as the Book is very scarce, a new edition of it would be acceptable to Scholars and Men of taste, and, accordingly, it is in contemplation to ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... easy to understand how some of these come into existence, e.g. that Pierce. Pennilesse was the opposite of Thomas Thousandpound, whose name occurs c. 1300. With the latter we may compare Fr. Centlivre, the name of an English lady dramatist of the eighteenth century. Moneypenny is found in 1273 as Manipeni, and a Londoner named Manypeny died in 1348. The Money- is partly ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... LYLY, JOHN, English dramatist, born in Kent; was the author of nine plays on classical subjects, written for the court, which were preceded in 1579 by his once famous "Euphues, or Anatomy of Wit," followed by a second part next year, and entitled ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... character is placed in the play. See yourself looking, moving, acting as he would. Then talk as that character would in those circumstances. Make him react as he would naturally in the situations in which the dramatist has placed him. ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... produced at different times and places, and one man finally harmonized the wandering strains into a complete tune. It is now generally conceded that the man was Henry Carey, a popular English composer and dramatist of the first half of the 18th century, who sang the melody as it now is, in 1740, at a public dinner given in honor of Admiral Vernon after his capture of Porto Bello (Brazil). This antedates any authenticated use of the tune ipsissima forma in ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... encouraged his dramatic ambitions and to have given him the benefit of his own experience as a playwright. Early in 1850 Ayala removed his name from the university books, and settled in Madrid with the purpose of becoming a professional dramatist. Though he had no friends and no influence, he speedily found an opening. A four-act play in verse, Un Hombre de Estado, was accepted by the managers of the Teatro Espanol, was given on the 25th of January 1851, and proved ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... MISS FERRIER—I should not have been so long in thanking you for your kind present, had I not wished to subject Destiny to a severer test than that chosen by the French dramatist. His old woman probably partook of the vivacity of her nation, but my old aunt, as Mary will tell you, is sick and often very sorrowful, and yet Destiny has made her laugh heartily, and cheated ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... nightingale and the musician contending with voice and instrument in alternate melodies, till the sweet songstress of the grove falls and dies upon the lute of her rapt rival. It is something more than a pretty tale. Ford, the dramatist, introduced it briefly in happy lines in "The Lover's Melancholy," but Crashaw's verses inspire the very sweetness and lingering pleasure of the contest. It is high noon when the "sweet lute's master" seeks retirement from the heat, "on the scene of a green plat, under protection ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... workable rules for play-writing to be found here—nor, indeed, any particular light of any kind on the subject, so the letters may be approacht with a mind arranged for enjoyment. I would be sorry indeed for the trying-to-be dramatist who flew to this volume for consolation and guidance. I'm sorry for him any way, but this additional catastrophe would accelerate my sympathy, making it fast and furious. Any one sufficiently inexperienced to consult books in order to find out how ...
— How to Write a Play - Letters from Augier, Banville, Dennery, Dumas, Gondinet, - Labiche, Legouve, Pailleron, Sardou, Zola • Various
... interest at, or near, Salisbury, without naming George Herbert's church, Bemerton, and Stonehenge; two places which attract pilgrims from all parts of the world. Yet no space is left to describe them, or to refer to Henry Lawes, musician, and Philip Massinger, dramatist, two of the many famous men who had the city for their birthplace. The cathedral has been the main object of this volume, and other matters, interesting though they may be, must ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... dramatist Md. Mahomet, De Soto, Mary's Birthday, Aladdin's Palace, Senor Valiente, Cromwell, Seven Sisters, Abou Hassan the Wag, Landing of the Pilgrims of Maryland, Christine (story in verse), Inkerman (lyric), ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... conducted us to this pessimistic conclusion Le Roy finds it repugnant, and is unwilling to acquiesce in it. Like an embarrassed dramatist he escapes from the knot which he has tied by introducing the ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... his death in 1616 in the sixteens. Is not this a vivid collocation of figures? Can we forget it as applied to the great dramatist? Now if we double the last 16, it gives us the date of the second Folio in [16]32 and 32 reversed gives us the date of the first Folio. Again, seven years after his death ["seven ages of man"] his first Folio was published in 1623. The ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... to her, unless indeed by Schiller. Fourthly, we are not entitled to view as an attack upon Joanna, what, in the worst construction, is but an unexamining adoption of the contemporary historical accounts. A poet or a dramatist is not responsible for the accuracy of chronicles. But what is an attack upon Joan, being briefly the foulest and obscenest attempt ever made to stifle the grandeur of a great human struggle, viz., the French burlesque poem of La Pucelle—what memorable man was it that wrote that? Was ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... With him, to write was to live. To be a great writer was the dream of his life. He strove to realise his dream with that dogged pertinacity which is only to be seen in the case of a master passion. When they first were married, he was struggling to be a dramatist. He was quite conscious that, in the trade of the writer, wealth was only to be achieved by the successful playwright. He believed that his was essentially the playwright's instinct. Although his plays met with abundance of good words, they did not attain production. It seemed as if they ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... bachelor's one little companion and only pure friend was taken away from him. His love for the child was well known in London society; and of it did Sheridan's friends take advantage, when they wanted to get Selwyn out of Brookes', to prevent his black-balling the dramatist. The anecdote is given ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... young lady eight years older than himself. Before he was twenty-one he had three children to maintain, and went up to London to find employment. He remained in obscurity for some years; but at last appears, about 1590, the finest poet and dramatist of ...
— Harper's Young People, October 12, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... laugh all round, and a blush on both sides, but the lady was on firm earth again, and in a minute or two the drawling call of the conductor brought the party back to the train. The journey was renewed, and the incident forgotten by everybody save the dramatist, who sat coiled in his corner, with his eyes fixed upon a book which he might as well have held upside-down. The women of the company, five in number, were chattering like a nest of starlings, shrilling high against the slow rumble of the wheels. Miss Hampton alone was silent ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... la naturaleza!' sings a Spanish dramatist. Nature is, indeed, much to be admired, especially when you are viewing her in orange groves, where oranges, for the trouble of picking them, hang invitingly over your very mouth, seeming to say, 'Eat me, stranger.' Some are small and green as gooseberries; others are big ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... dramatist, wrote in 1630: "A starre? Nay, thou art more than the moone, for thou hast neither changing quarters, nor a man standing in thy circle with ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... invitations must be limited to a dozen or so, or else Diana must resign herself to a fashionable wedding in town, with all the world and his wife as guests at the subsequent reception. No middle course is possible when a well-known dramatist elects to marry the latest sensation ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... Monsieur Moliere had a most lugubrious countenance—a thing not always inconsistent with a merry humour: but Monsieur Moliere's heart was believed never to have laughed, any more than his face. He answered, as if announcing a misfortune, that he claimed no connection with the dramatist, though he believed some of his family had attempted to ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... immediate predecessors) first appeared in his Apology, 4to. 1740, and were transferred verbatim, as far as I have been able to consult them, to the subsequent editions of that very entertaining and excellent work. If Colley Cibber were not a first-rate dramatist, he was a first-rate critic upon performers; and I am disposed to place his abilities as a play-wright much higher than the ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.01 • Various
... of divine astrology, &c.— In THE HISTORY OF DR. FAUSTUS, there are several tedious pages on the subject; but our dramatist, in the dialogue which follows, has no particular obligations ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... to give the stay-at-home Englishman a strange conception of his American kinsman the press is ably assisted by the stage. In London I went to see a comedy written by a deservedly successful dramatist, and staged, I think, under his personal direction. The English characters in the play were whimsical and, as nearly as I might judge, true to the classes they purported to represent. There was an American character in this piece too—a multimillionaire, of course, and a collector ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... stowed a few in our bags for use on our way towards Oxford. This industry in Banbury is a very old one, for the cakes are known to have been made there as far back as 1602, when the old Cross was pulled down, and are mentioned by Ben Jonson, a great dramatist, and the friend of Shakespeare. He was Poet Laureate from 1619, and had the honour of being buried in Westminster Abbey. In his comedy Bartholomew Fair, published in 1614, he mentions that a Banbury baker, whom he facetiously ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... who had introduced me to the editor of Punch was a prominent city official, and entertainer in chief of all men of talent from London, and was also, like Tom Taylor, an author and dramatist; and when I was a boy I illustrated one of his first stories. He also introduced me behind the scenes at the old Theatre Royal. I recollect my boyish delight when one day I was on the stage during the rehearsal of the Italian ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... low gear and started to think idle thoughts, letting myself sort of daydream. I was convincing to myself; it's hard to explain exactly, but I was play-thinking like a dramatist. I fell into it; it seemed almost truth to me as I roamed on and on. I'd been trapped and Catherine had come here to hand herself over as a hostage against my good behavior. She'd escaped the Highways bunch or maybe she just left them quietly. Somehow Phelps ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... letter was written, recently, in reply to a dramatist who proposed the matter of ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... three acts of "Wallace," [Footnote: "Wallace: a Historical Tragedy," in five acts, was published in 1820. Joanna Baillie spoke of the author, C.E. Walker, as "a very young and promising dramatist."] and, as far as I could form an opinion, I cannot conceive these acts to be as effective on the stage as you seemed to expect. However, it is impossible to say what a very clever actor like Macready may ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... Corner at Westminster. The "Beaumont" window was presented by Mr. W.H. Francis, in memory of his father. The "Fletcher" window, in the next bay, came from Mr. T.F. Rider, whose firm were the builders of the nave. The subject chosen for illustration was suggested by the dramatist's "Knight of Malta." St. John the Baptist stands in the lower compartment, as Patron of the Knights of St. John, holding a standard displaying the suitable word "Concordia." The ceremony of Investiture, with attendant figures, fills the space above, surmounted by the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... pere, the great French novelist and dramatist, who here tells the story of his youth, was born on July 24, 1802, and died on December 5, 1870. He was a man of prodigious vitality, virility, and invention; abounding in enjoyment, gaiety, vanity, and kindness; the richness, force, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... present issue, in addition to the careful revision of Mrs Cowden Clarke, has had the benefit of the labours of Mr Charles Cowden Clarke, one of the most zealous and successful illustrators of the great Dramatist now living, they believe they are presenting Editions of Shakespeare's Works distinguished by an amount of mature judgment in collating the earlier copies which will vindicate their claim to the ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... I had always looked upon Corneille as the greatest tragic dramatist in the world, and as the foremost of our poets and men of letters. The King saved me ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... as these critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less, we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good a dramatist he was,—and he is the best in the world. But it turns out that what he has to say is of that weight as to withdraw some attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... in stating that the name of the father of Massinger, the dramatist, was Arthur, according to Oldys, and not Philip, according to Wood and Davies. Arthur Massinger (as he himself spelt the name, although others have spelt it Messenger, from its supposed etymology) was ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various
... the great dramatist well, but what he read was new—a "Song of the Furies" calling a terrific curse upon the betrayer of friendship. "Some of his happiest lines," meditated Democrates, walking away, to be held a moment by the crowd around Lamprus the master-harpist. ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... thousand. Editions of good books are now issued by a hundred thousand at a time. The Professions are still the avenues to honours. Still, as before, the men whom the people respect are the followers of science, the great Advocate the great Preacher, the great Engineer, the great Surgeon, the great Dramatist, the great Novelist, the great Poet. That the national honours no longer take the form of the Peerage will not, I think, at this hour, be admitted to be a subject for regret by ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... the unsuccessful dramatist has his moments. I knew a young man who married somebody else's mother, and was allowed by her fourteen gardeners to amuse himself sometimes by rolling the tennis-court. It was an unsatisfying life; and when rash acquaintances asked him what he did he used to say that he was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... of masculine selfishness the Greek dramatist doubles the force of all his fine talk about the "virtuous acts" of wives by representing the women themselves as uttering these maxims and admitting that their function is self-denial—that woman is altogether an inferior and contemptible ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... darker, highly-burnished hair, bright colour, a flashing vivacious smile, a fine figure, a general air of sprightliness and glowing health—this was certainly the sort of personality that would recommend itself to a considerable mass of theatre-goers, and Copplestone, as a budding dramatist, immediately began to cast Addie Chatfield for ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... of the American war, expending, according to his own statement, 150,000 francs in the purchase of arms and stores, which he sent out, when the President of Congress contented himself with thanking him for his liberality, but refused to pay his bill. He resolved to try his skill as a dramatist. His earlier plays were not particularly successful, but in 1781 he produced "The Marriage of Figaro," a sort of sequel to one of its predecessors, "The Barber of Seville." During the progress of its composition he had shown some of the scenes to his critical ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... ardent of all of those who paid their homage to Anna Seward. Mr. Lucas informs us that David Garrick appears also in the list. To the foregoing names may be added Edward Jerningham, the friend of Chesterfield and Horace Walpole, a dramatist as well as a poet; George Butt, the divine, and chaplain to George III.; William Crowe, “the new star,” as Anna Seward calls him, a divine and public orator at Oxford; and Richard Graves, a poet and novelist, the Rector of Claverton, who wrote “Recollections of Shenstone” ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... important weeklies maintained that The Churls was a very good, original, and superbly realistic play; that with Glogowski there had, at last, appeared a real dramatist who had let a current of fresh air into the stagnant and anaemic atmosphere of our dramatic creativity, and had given us real people and real life. The only cause for regret was that the staging of the play was ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... of an amassing power in the author, and not of a growth from within. Indeed a large proportion of Ben Jonson's thoughts may be traced to classic or obscure modern writers, by those who are learned and curious enough to follow the steps of this robust, surly, and observing dramatist. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... that I was happy, and in those moments, Phil, I was full of aspiration to do those things for which nature had not fitted me, and to the extent that I recognized my inability to do those things I failed to be content. I should have liked to be a great writer, a poet, a great dramatist, a novelist—a little of everything in the literary world. I should have liked to know Shakespeare, to have been the friend of Milton; and when I came out of my dreams it made me unhappy to think that such I never could be, until one day this idea came ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... him, while he felt in all his pockets for the letter. One can bow quite easily while feeling in one's pockets, and it is much more natural than stopping in the middle of an important speech in order to acknowledge any cheers. The realisation of this, by a dramatist, is what is called "stagecraft." In this case the audience could tell at once that the "technique" of the author (whose name unfortunately I forget) was going ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... be a great poet and dramatist, or a literary fraud, there are one or two things which he says which strike men with the force of a revelation; and when he speaks of the love-life which is given to every man and woman, and calls him and her a murderer who kills it, ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... the Nail" (Vol. ix., p. 196.).—Your correspondent ABHBA mentions Limerick, on the authority of O'Keefe the dramatist, as the place where this saying originated; from the fact of a pillar, with a circular plate of copper upon it, having stood in a piazza under the Exchange in this ancient city: which pillar was called "the nail." Permit me to remark, Bristol also claims the origin of this saying: vide ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... senses only, but with mind and spirit.' And after he was converted he saw and painted supernatural things with the same carnal and robust incisiveness. The half-lights of Symbolist mysticism are remote from his hard glare. As a dramatist he drew upon and exaggerated that which in Aeschylus and Shakespeare seems to the countrymen of Racine nearest to the limit of the terrible and the brutal permissible in art: a princess nailed by the hands like a sparrow-hawk to a pine by a brutal peasant; the daughter of a noble ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... acted at the Vaudeville, and was a great success. During his lifetime Balzac's plays received little applause —in fact, were generally greeted with obloquy; but when it was too late for praise or blame to matter, his apotheosis as a dramatist took place; and on this occasion his bust was brought to the stage, and crowned ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... Hindu legend as the Raja Bikram, to whom India owes her golden age. It was his court at Ujjain which is believed to have been adorned by the "Nine Gems" of Sanskrit literature, amongst whom the favourite is Kalidasa, the poet and dramatist. Amidst much that is speculative, one thing is certain. The age of Vikramadytia was an age of Brahmanical ascendancy. As has so often happened, and is still happening in India to-day in the struggle between ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... possible on the whole. What play of the ancients, with reference to their ideal, does not hold out more glaring absurdities than any in Shakspeare? On the Greek plan a man could more easily be a poet than a dramatist; upon our plan more easily a dramatist ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... had an expressive countenance; understood our language so as to read Shakespeare with facility, and even with rapture: and to a question of mine, whether he was not much gratified with Schlegel's critical remarks upon that dramatist, he replied, that "he did not admire them so much, as, from the Edinburgh Review, the English appeared to do." To another question—"which of Shakspeare's plays pleased him most?" he replied, unhesitatingly, "Romeo and Juliet." I own, I should have thought that the mystical, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... man, "known to the world as the author of the plays of Shakespeare"? No! for Mr. Greenwood writes, "nobody, outside a very small circle, troubled his head as to who the dramatist or dramatists might be." {0e} To that "very small circle" we have no reason to suppose that Manningham belonged, despite his remarkable opinion that Twelfth Night resembles the Menaechmi. Consequently, it is NOT "extremely ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... necessary to say here that the slight sketches of Marplay and Sparkish given in the first edition, were presumably intended for Cibber and Wilks, with whom, notwithstanding the "civil and kind Behaviour" for which he had thanked them in the "Preface" to Love in Several Masques, the young dramatist was now, it seems, at war. In the introduction to the Miscellanies, he refers to "a slight Pique" with Wilks; and it is not impossible that the key to the difference may be found in ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... bought it as a present for you. Corneille is not an author to compromise any one, even in these times. Don't you remember saying the other day that you felt ashamed of knowing but little of our greatest dramatist?" Rose remembered well, and smiled almost as happily as in the old times over her present. "There are some good engravings at the beginning of each act," continued Trudaine, directing her attention rather earnestly to the illustrations, and then suddenly ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... original emotional element as at first motor, then attached to various aspects of creation, as an accompaniment. But, in addition, affective states become material for the creative activity. It is a well-known fact, almost a rule, that the poet, the novelist, the dramatist, and the musician—often, indeed, even the sculptor and the painter—experience the thoughts and feeling of their characters, become identified with them. There are, then, in this second instance, two currents of feeling—the one, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... by one or two critics, it is respectfully stated that the translation has not been made by a resident dramatist, as inferred, but by the celebrated European scholar and linguist, Jonathan Birch, whose translation has been recognized by Frederick William, of Prussia, as the best rendition of the original of Goethe's Faust ever given in English to ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce
... What dramatist or novelist has ever yet made a plot which did not consist of events that had already transpired somewhere on earth? He might intensify events, concentrate and combine them, or amplify them; but that is all. Men in all ages have suffered from jealousy,—like Othello; have committed ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... things are made for the plain man; his applause, in the long run and duly tested by time, is the main reward of the dramatist as of the painter or the sculptor. But if he is sensible he knows that his immediate judgment will be crude. However, ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... and high-minded man. If it be a morbid suspicion, having no ground in fact, a mental obsession, then Iago becomes abnormal and consequently more or less irresponsible. But this suggestion of Emilia's faithlessness made in the early part of the play is never followed up by the dramatist, and the spectator is left in complete uncertainty as to whether there be any truth or not in Iago's suspicion. If Othello has played his Ancient false, that is an extenuating circumstance in the otherwise ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... year of James I., where in due course he numbered, amongst his literary contemporaries,—William Browne, Croke, Oulde, Thomas Gardiner, Dynne, Edward Heywood, John Morgan, Augustus Caesar, Thomas Heygate, Thomas May, dramatist and translator of Lucan's 'Pharsalia,' William Rough and Rymer were members of Gray's Inn. Sir John David and Sir Simonds D'Ewes belonged to the Middle Temple. Massinger's dearest friends lived in ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... human heart in particular is a phrase which covers very different states of mind. It may mean that power by which the novelist or dramatist identifies himself with his characters; sees through their eyes and feels with their senses; it is the product of a rich nature, a vivid imagination, and great powers of sympathy, and draws a comparatively small part of its resources from external ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... has distilled the significance of the situation and communicates it to him as emotion. The man's reaction is not limited to the exercise of his intellect,—he gives himself. In the experience which the dramatist conveys to him beautifully, shaping discords into harmony and disclosing their meaning for the ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... years passed before the poet-journalist became the novelist; at one time he dreamed of being a great dramatist, and before he was five-and-twenty several of his plays had been produced at leading Paris theatres. Fortune smiled upon him, and he was appointed to be one of the Duc de Morny's secretaries, a post he held four years, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... brought to a standstill; there a child being spared by her lifting the wheel of a heavy truck about to crush it. It would be hard to imagine anything more crude either in conception or execution than these signs of gratitude. To judge by them the Virgin would make a dramatist of the first rank; there was not a picture in which the miraculous assistance came a moment too soon, never & hero of our ancient, pre-Edison melodramas appeared more exactly "in the nick of time." The famous portrait of the miraculous being herself, over the high altar, is dimly ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... he would cut the matter short and wave me to the door without the grace of a word—I saw it in his uncompromising eye; if I said I was a lecturer, he would despise me, and dismiss me with opprobrious words; if I said I was a dramatist, he would throw me out of the window. I saw that my case was hopeless, so I chose the course which seemed least humiliating: I would pocket my shame and glide out without answering. The silence was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... words of Peter to Simon Magus: "Thy money perish with thee!" But I arraign the newspapers that give their columns to corrupt advertising for the nefarious work they are doing. The most polluted plays that ever oozed from the poisonous pen of leprous dramatist have won their deathful power through the medium of ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... notwithstanding the alluring advertisements which periodically appear during the holiday season. Climatically the journey is a delightful one in winter time, for Siberia is then at its best—not the Siberia of the English dramatist: howling blizzards, chained convicts, wolves and the knout, but a smiling land of promise and plenty even under its limitless mantle of snow. The landscape is dreary, of course, but most days you have the ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... a question of degree. He was an artist and something of a dramatist; he was not at the Place Vendome at a certain critical moment; he was not at Montmartre at a particular terrible time; he was not a high officer like Mayer; he was young, with the face of a patriot. Well, they sent ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of Albany, widow of no less a person than Charles Edward Stuart, the second pretender to the British crown. Surely no woman ever was associated senti- mentally with three figures more diverse, - a disqualified sovereign, an Italian dramatist, and a bad French painter. The productions of M. Fabre, who followed in the steps of David, bear the stamp of a cold me- diocrity; there is not much to be said even for the portrait of the genial countess (her life has been written by M. Saint-Rene-Taillandier, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... 'Celebrated Crimes', as well as the motives which led to their inception, are unique. They are a series of stories based upon historical records, from the pen of Alexandre Dumas, pere, when he was not "the elder," nor yet the author of D'Artagnan or Monte Cristo, but was a rising young dramatist and a lion in the literary ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the banquet indicate her wisdom in dealing with him, or the pathetic weakening of her strong character, or a natural tenderness? Give reasons. What makes the sleep-walking scene so pathetic? How has the dramatist prepared us for her breakdown? What, if anything, do you find in ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... afterwards Queen Anne presented the victorious general with a "grant of the honour of Woodstock," this being followed by a vote of L500,000 for the erection of the palace and the laying out of the grounds. The building was erected from the designs of Sir John Vanbrugh, the great architect and dramatist. It is of enormous size, the frontage being 350 feet from wing to wing, and the entire structure covers about 7 acres. The gateway to the park on the Woodstock side is a fine Corinthian triumphal arch, giving access to a magnificent avenue more than ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... dramatist of the passions at their stormiest outstretch, though ranking high, Shakspere (spanning the arch wide enough) is equaled by several, and excelled by the best old Greeks, (as Eschylus.) But in portraying mediaeval European lords and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... a dozen shires, a general notion of the shape of old Scotland, and a hazy outline of the sister kingdom, made up all he had attained to. Had you laid before him a chart of the sea coast of Bohemia, first discovered by our great dramatist, it would not have startled him in the least, and he was ready to look for Africa at ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... seems to indicate some first-hand knowledge and very definite opinions. He quotes Moliere frequently throughout his writings, and always speaks of him with admiration; but with no other French dramatist does he seem to have been familiar to such a degree. Judging French tragic poets too much from the Shaksperian point of view, he was not prepared to do them justice.[138] On the dramatic unities, of which he remarked, "Aristotle says so little and his commentators ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... in the history of the theatre. The work of Greban was rehandled and enlarged by Jean Michel, and great was the triumph when it was given at Angers in 1486. Greban was not to be outdone either by his former self or by another dramatist; in collaboration with his brother Simon, he composed the yet more enormous Actes des Apotres, in sixty-two thousand lines, demanding the services of five hundred performers. When presented at Bourges ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... and quaint sagacity, began with two hundred pounds, and lived to view his mortgages, his statutes, and his judgments so numerous, that it was observed his papers would have made a good map of England. A contemporary dramatist, who copied from life, has opened the chamber of such ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... permitted to remain until the close of his season, he would have earned enough, with what he had already, to attain the independence which was his aim and hope. His best friends in London were Charles Reade, Tom Hood, Tom Robertson, the dramatist, Charles Mathews, the comedian, Tom Taylor and Arthur Sketchley. He did not meet Mr. Dickens, though Mr. Andrew Haliday, Dickens' familiar, was also his intimate. He was much persecuted by lion hunters, and therefore had to keep his lodgings ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... to depend on the early historians of the English drama for certain knowledge that Payne was for a time a dramatist. Though his brief excursion into the theater must later have seemed to him a minor episode in his life, Payne's enemies were aware of the fact that he was a playwright and have written their knowledge into the record of his ...
— The Fatal Jealousie (1673) • Henry Nevil Payne
... lightly on the literary aspects of the play. Its plot, like that of the modern novel, was of so subtile a nature as not to be visible to the naked eye. I doubt if the dramatist himself could have explained it, even if he had been so condescending as to attempt to do so. There was a bold young prince—Prince Rupert, of course—who went into Wonderland in search of adventures. He reached ...
— The Little Violinist • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... critics, that had appeared in Dr. Johnson's 1765 edition. The actual text of the plays is another matter; a combination of collation and judicious borrowing, it was provided by George Steevens. Steevens' contributions to the text and annotation of Shakespeare's plays concern students of the dramatist; That Johnson had to say about the plays concerns Johnsonians as veil as Shakespeareans. And it is unfortunately true that too little attention has been paid to what is after all Johnson's final and reconsidered judgment on a number of passages in ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... scarlet on her hat and a most tantalizing flash of scarlet ankle. It was Flora Desimone, fresh from her morning bath and a substantial breakfast. The errand that had brought her from Aix-les-Bains was confessedly a merciful one. But she possessed the dramatist's instinct to prolong a situation. Thus, to make her act of mercy seem infinitely larger than it was, she was determined first to cast the Apple of Discord into this charming corner of Eden. The Apple of Discord, as every man knows, is the only thing a woman can throw ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... know how you produced your marvellous effects on the door of Billy Button, the tailor of Brentford. The Vizier's knocker was a caricature; but it showed your style. So, read the love-scenes of any dramatist during Shakspeare's period—or the heroic passages of any poetaster copying his manner;—isn't that Bedlam, my dear Smith? isn't that Hanwell? Read the rhapsodies of Nat Lee—(by a stretch of truth-speaking which it would be wise to make more common)—called mad Nat Lee. What do you ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... Denison Cumberland, Bishop of Clonfert and of Kilmore. This last named married a daughter of Dr Bentley, the famous Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and one of their sons was Richard Cumberland, the dramatist. Bishop Richard Cumberland is buried in the Cathedral, and a tablet to his memory remains in ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... bragging "tobacconist" is pictured for us in Ben Jonson's "Bobadil." Bobadil may perhaps be somewhat of an exaggerated caricature, but it is probable that the dramatist in drawing him simply exaggerated the characteristic traits of many smokers of the day. This hero, drawing tobacco from his pocket, declares that it is all that is left of seven pounds which he had bought only "yesterday was seven-night." A consumption of seven ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... *Vpres Siciliennes*. A play by Casimir Delavigne, a French dramatist and poet, and published in 1819. The subject of the play is the massacre of the French in Sicily by the Sicilians in 1282, and which began at vespers ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... that I am the dramatist in real life," said he. "Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-staged performance. Surely our profession, Mr. Mac, would be a drab and sordid one if we did not sometimes set ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... applaud to their hearts' desire, as no further pretence of a secret existed. Glad acclamations attended the progress of the royal cortege. The people shouted with joy, and all, high and low, sang a song composed for the occasion by Lope de Vega, the famous dramatist, which told how Charles had come, under the guidance of love, to the Spanish sky to ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... such a great success in your profession!" she observed. "You carry the melodramatic instinct with you, day by day. You see everything through the dramatist's spectacles." ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... God" by our American novelist and dramatist, George Henry Miles, is not only a romantic and interesting story, it recalls one of the most striking ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... from a man's perception of his place in the great hierarchy of privilege and obligation, from the lowest human being up to the Olympian gods, so copiously and magnificently set forth as in Pindar's Odes of Victory. And AEschylus was the first dramatist to see with clear vision the primacy of the intellect in the law of orderly development, seemingly at variance with the divine immutable will of Fate, yet finally in mysterious accord with it. When the philosophers of the later period ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... meanwhile, Bjoernson had also made his debut as a dramatist. In the year 1858 he had published two dramas, "Mellem Slagene" (Between the Battles) and "Halte-Hulda" (Limping Hulda) both of which deal with national subjects, taken from the old sagas. As in his tales he had endeavored to concentrate into a few strongly defined ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... been more prominent than I could have wished, and no word of his prompted or suggested it. From its inception to the present time he has remained silent in his chamber of pain, waiting to bequeath, like the testator of the dramatist, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... themselves least over his dramatic lapses. For let it be whispered at once, without further scruple. As far as the art of the drama is concerned, Shakespeare is shameless. The poetic instinct—one might call it "epical" or "lyrical," for it is both these—is far more dominant in our "greatest dramatist" than any dramatic conscience. That is precisely why those among us who love "poetry," but find "drama," especially "drama since Ibsen," intolerably tiresome, revert again and again to Shakespeare. Only absurd groups of Culture-Philistines can read these "powerful ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... of the hearer is increasingly aroused until, at the entrance of the second theme, he is in the highest state of expectancy.[97] A bridge-passage of this kind often has a subsidiary theme of its own, or even several melodic phrases, and is planned as carefully as the action by which a dramatist leads up to the entrance of his heroine. After the second theme we generally find a closing theme to round out the Exposition as a whole. This practice dates from Haydn and has been much expanded by modern composers. Witness the glorious ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... sixteenth century poets; one who cannot be suspected of any leaning toward Puritanism; one who had as high notions of his vocation as any man; and one who so far fulfilled those notions as to become a dramatist inferior only to Shakspeare. Let Ben Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to 'Volpone' tell us in his own noble prose what he thought of the average ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... an instantaneous look into the far future, and although it did not prevail, for certain important reasons, the Chancellor caught the human side of the combination, with the clarity of a dramatist constructing ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... is that not of the historian but of the dramatist. The historical presentation of my hero has been faithfully made in many volumes; notably, in England, by Lord Charnwood in a monograph that gives a masterly analysis of Lincoln's career and character and is, it seems to me, a model of what the historian's work should be. ...
— Abraham Lincoln • John Drinkwater
... their quarters out in the yard. The doors of the house were locked. There would be no more intrusion now, no possible interruption; all the years were to meet him and her—alone. For Life is the master dramatist: when its hidden tragedies are ready to utter themselves, everything superfluous quits the stage; it is the essential two who fill it! And how little the rest of the world ever hears of what takes place ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... said Hildegarde. "Poor Kit! he was a great dramatist; the next greatest after Shakspeare, I think,—at least, well, leaving out the Greeks, you know. He was a year younger than Shakspeare, and died when he was only twenty-eight, killed in ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... this climax was the best the young dramatist had yet constructed. A critic who had been invited to a reading had declared that it lacked little of being great. And at this late hour the star wanted it changed in order to bring her alone in the lime-light! It was preposterous. As Warrington was on the first wave of popularity, the business ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... forgetfulness of their personal lives, and absorption in the impersonal harmony, the spiritual receptivity, from which the grand truths are visible. The actors' masks allowed only the facial expression of a single mood; and it was a single mood the dramatist aimed to produce: a unity; one great word. There could be no grave-diggers; no quizzing of Polonious; no clouds very like a whale. The whole drama is the unfoldment of a single moment: that, say, in which Hamlet turns on Caudius and kills him—rather, leads him out to ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... that he was barely twenty-one when The Humour of the Age was printed in March of 1701. A Thomas Baker, son of John Baker of Ledbury, Hereford, was entered at Brasenose College, Oxford, on March 18, 1697, aged seventeen.[7] The ages falling so pat, this must be our dramatist. Upon taking his B.A. at Christ Church in 1700 he must immediately have set to scribbling his first play (the Dedication says that it was "writ in two months last summer"). Perhaps at this time he lived in London in some such boarding-house as furnishes ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... readers have been led to Shakespeare by the charmingly told stories which Charles and Mary Lamb, about a hundred years ago, extracted from the plays of the greatest dramatist of all time. Though produced by Lamb at the very outset of his literary career, these stories betray that unique and finished art, that delightful freshness and rare sympathy, which are the characteristics of his ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... made Bronson Howard a dramatist, and then made him the first American dramatist of his day, were his human sympathy, his perception, his sense of proportion, and his construction. With his perception, his proportion, and his construction, respectively, he could have succeeded as a detective, as an artist, or as a general. It was ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... blood. With the commonest allowance for the exigencies of poetic presentation, we find no individual character unnatural or improbable; though the particular grouping of these characters is necessarily improbable. For grace of position and arrangement every dramatist must claim. If the poet will but take observations from real persons, however widely scattered, discretion may be exercised in the conjunction of those persons, and in the sequence of incidents by which they are affected. An aesthetic invention may be as natural ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... mostly to his rooms, where he sat smoking cigarettes, gazing at Japanese prints, and trying not to think about "props" and "rehl." Then, gradually, the almost maternal yearning to see his brain-child once more, which can never be wholly crushed out of a young dramatist, returned to him—faintly at first, then getting stronger by degrees till it could no longer be resisted. True, he knew that when he beheld it, the offspring of his brain would have been mangled almost ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... accompaniment are essential features of Plautus' style, and many other implements of the lower types of modern drama are among his favorite devices. If then we can place Plautus toward the bottom of the scale, we relieve him vastly of responsibility as a dramatist and of the necessity of adherence to verisimilitude. Where does he actually belong? The answer must be sought in a detailed consideration of his methods of producing his effects and in an endeavor to ascertain how far the audience and the acting ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... Edmond Rostand says that the great dramatist once told him of a curious encounter he had had with a local magistrate in a town not far from ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... song writer, who was also a dramatist, a composer of music, an actor, a scene painter, and a manager, had constructed in Exeter Change what he whimsically called 'The Patagonian Theatre:' in truth, a simple puppet-show, upon the plan of that ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... A dramatist of considerable talent, who is not sufficiently studied in these modern times, has said that a man in his time plays many parts. He left it to be understood that a woman plays only one. The business woman is the business woman all through her life—she is never the ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... Madeline Ayres had written. It was called "The Animal Fair," and three of the class animals appeared in it. But the mis- en-scene was an artist's studio, the great red lion was a red-faced English dramatist, the chick a modest young lady novelist attired in yellow chiffon, and the dragon a Scotch dialect writer. The repartee was clever, the action absurd, and there were local hits in plenty for those unliterary persons who ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... Southey lent it, when he possessed the magnifico, to Coleridge, who has begemmed it all over with his fine pencillings. As Ben once handled the trowel, and did other honorable work as a bricklayer, Coleridge discourses with much golden gossip about the craft to which the great dramatist once belonged. The editor of this magazine would hardly thank me, if I filled ten of his pages with extracts from the rambling dissertations in S.T.C.'s handwriting which I find in this rare folio, but I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... in; and, doubtless, a vast majority of the men we daily meet really believe that all who try to the best of their ability, according to their light and circumstances, to do what is right, in the love of God and man, shall be saved. In that moving scene of the great dramatist where the burial of the innocent and hapless Ophelia is represented, and Lacrtes vainly seeks to win from ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... foregoing references we find that strings, although called "catgut," are not made from the intestines of that domestic animal. Whether they were originally so made, and hence derive their name, it is impossible to learn. Marston, the old dramatist, says: ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... The famous comic poet and dramatist, author of the "Frogs," "Clouds," "Birds," and many other works, of which only eleven are now extant; born about 451 B.C., died not ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... not rather say to conjecture, the authorship of the humorous scenes in prose, showing as they generally do a power of comparatively high and pure comic realism to which nothing in the acknowledged works of any pre-Shakespearean dramatist is even remotely comparable. Yet, especially in the original text of these scenes as they stand unpurified by the ultimate revision of Shakespeare, there are tones and touches which recall rather the clownish horseplay and homely ribaldry of his predecessors than ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the chief of the romantic school in France, issued in the Preface to "Cromwell" the manifesto of the movement. Poet, dramatist, and novelist, Hugo remained through a long life the most conspicuous man of letters in France; and in the document here printed he laid down the principles which revolutionized the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Norfolk in 1560, Greene studied at Cambridge and received the degree of Master of Arts. After wasting his property in Italy and Spain, he returned to London to earn his bread by the pen. As a pamphleteer, as a poet, and especially as a dramatist, Greene achieved a considerable reputation. But his improvident habits and a life of constant debauchery brought his career to a close, amidst poverty and remorse, at the early age of thirty-two. He died in a drunken brawl, leaving in his works the evidence ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... is dramatic in form, it is not so in spirit. The true dramatist would have put such an incident as the swearing of brotherhood into a scene, instead of into a speech. This effort is, however, the nearest approach to a drama in English founded on saga material. It is curious that our poets have inclined to every form but the drama in reproducing Old ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... against Fate, and that Fate is only the inevitable choice of our own natures, we wait for the splendid words which shall render so great a situation; and no splendid words come. The situation, to the dramatist, has been only a dramatic situation. Here is Duse, a chalice for the wine of imagination, but the chalice remains empty. It is almost painful to see her waiting for the words that do not come, offering tragedy to us in her eyes, and with her hands, and in her voice, only not in the words that ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... which was very rich in early English poetry and in the plays and poems of Shakespeare. It contained the first and second folios of the great dramatist, and upwards of forty copies of the separate plays in quarto, many of them being first editions. The second folio formerly belonged to King Charles I., and was given by him on the night before his execution to Sir Thomas Herbert, ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... only players," the life of each man is a drama, with the events thereof divided into separate scenes, the scenes gathered into grand acts, and the acts all tending to the great tragic conclusion of the whole. Happy were it for man if he, like a great dramatist, would keep the ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... Renaissance, or, perhaps, Gothic. The poet thought they were Gothic, and probably he was right. In this town the talk was mostly about Art, and many fine things were said in regard to "sweetness and light." Everybody claimed to be an artist of some kind, whether painter, musician, novelist, dramatist, verse-maker, reciter, singer, or what not. But although they seemed so greatly devoted to the Graces and the Muses, it was but the images of the Parnassian Gods that they worshipped. For in the purlieus of this fine town, horrible cruelties and abuses were committed, yet none of ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... research to the illustration of Shakspeare. In the hope of attracting them to "fresh fields and pastures new," in which to recreate themselves, and to instruct and delight the world-wide readers of the great dramatist, I venture to solicit attention to Professor Hilger's pamphlet and its subject. In this I only echo the German reviewer's language, who most highly praises the Professor's acuteness, and the value of his strictures, and promises to return to them at greater length in a future number of the periodical ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... American dramatist or novelist had taken for the ground work of a play or work of fiction the story of the Bidwell family to-day related on another page of the Herald, all European critics would have told him that the story was too 'American,' too ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... compliment, from a rival dramatist, could only have been extracted by previous good offices and kindly countenance. Accordingly we find, that Dryden, in 1678-9, wrote a prologue to Shadwell's play, of ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... times, that they thought proper to eat raw meat for the sake of obtaining splendid dreams: how much better for such a purpose to have eaten opium, which yet I do not remember that any poet is recorded to have done, except the dramatist Shadwell; and in ancient days Homer is I think rightly reputed to have known ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... GORDON NOEL (Lord), an English poet and dramatist of rare genius, was born in London, January 22nd, 1788. He was educated partly at Harrow, and in 1805 proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge. While at College he published, in 1807, his Hours of Idleness, a volume of juvenile poems, which was severely criticised in the Edinburgh ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... the novelist and by the dramatist are at once alike and unlike. Differing in manner rather than in matter, they are rarely found united in one man. Scott, from whose novels many stirring plays have been taken, was incapable of writing one himself; Thackeray, even after he was the well-known author of Vanity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... Dryden assures us that it was Sir Thomas Clifford, whose name a year later lent the initial letter to the "Cabal," who presented him to the king, and procured his appointment.[19] Masques had now ceased to be the mode. What the dramatist could do to amuse the blase court of Charles II. he was obliged to do within the limits of legitimate dramatic representation, due care being taken to follow French models, and substitute the idiom of Corneille and Moliere for that of Shakspeare. Dryden, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... actually see her very shamefully produced again. Now all these things, that remain as they were in life, and are not transmuted into any artistic convention, are terribly stubborn and difficult to deal with; and hence there are for the dramatist many resultant limitations in time and space. These limitations in some sort approximate towards those of painting: the dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a moment, but to the duration of each scene or act; he is confined ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was not more remarkable as a dramatist than as a man of society, and passed for what was called a "wit." The name had been applied two centuries before to men of talent generally, especially to writers, but now it referred exclusively to such as were humorous in conversation. These men, though to a certain extent the successors of the ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... PHILLIPS made a mistake when he fancied himself a dramatist. Possibly he may have inherited some small share of the poetical talent of his well-known maternal grandfather,—the author of "Divine and Moral Songs for Children," but he has shown no sign of the eminent histrionic genus which ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... kind,—spirited, wholesome, strong in plot and workmanship, and containing some examples of his most perfect style. Even the more slender juvenile tales have passages of the finest poetic spirit, and a charm scarcely equaled in his more ambitious work. He won some laurels as a dramatist: 'Alpine Roses' was successfully acted in New York in 1883, and 'Ilka on the Hilltop' (taken from his story of that ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various |
