"Theatric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Orderly," and how comes his name to be thus used as a watchword? The Life of Edwin the actor, written by (to quote Macaulay) "that filthy and malignant baboon, John Williams, who called himself Anthony Pasquin," and published late in the last century, contains the following passage: "When theatric performers intend to abridge an act or play, they are accustomed to say, we will 'John Audley' it. It originated thus: In the year 1749, Shuter was master of a booth at Bartholomew Fair in West Smithfield, and it was his mode to lengthen the ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... for the Bread of Life? He mocks his Maker, prostitutes and shames His noble office, and, instead of truth, Displaying his own beauty, starves his flock! Therefore, avaunt, all attitude and stare And start theatric, practised at the glass. I seek divine simplicity in him Who handles things divine; and all beside, Though learned with labour, and though much admired By curious eyes and judgments ill-informed, To me is odious as the nasal twang Heard at ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... sullied page) Peruse, admire, and give unto the stage; Or thou, or beauteous Woffington, display What Dryden's self, with pleasure, might survey. Even he, before whose visionary eyes, Melantha, robed in ever-varying dies, Gay fancy's work, appears, actor renowned. Like Roscius, with theatric laurels crowned, Cibber will smile applause, and think again Of Harte, and Mohun, and all the female train, Coxe, Marshal, Dryden's Reeve, Bet Slade, and ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... Yet shall, my lord, your just, your noble rules Fill half the land with imitating fools; Who random drawings from your sheets shall take, And of one beauty many blunders make; Load some vain church with old theatric state, Turn arcs of triumph to a garden-gate; Reverse your ornaments, and hang them all On some patched dog-hole eked with ends of wall; Then clap four slices of pilaster on 't, That, laced with bits of rustic, makes a front Shall call the winds through long arcades to roar, Proud ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... and skilful in conducting them; but in the hour of trial and under the confront of physical danger he was paralysed by constitutional timidity. His great aim in life was to be conspicuous—digito monstrarier— coupled with a theatric mania which made scenic effects and surprises essential to ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... teachings was made in the Salon of 1819 by Gericault (1791-1824) with his Raft of the Medusa. It represented the starving, the dead, and the dying of the Medusa's crew on a raft in mid-ocean. The subject was not classic. It was literary, romantic, dramatic, almost theatric in its seizing of the critical moment. Its theme was restless, harrowing, horrible. It met with instant opposition from the old men and applause from the young men. It was the trumpet-note of the revolt, but Gericault did not live long enough to become the leader ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... literary history of this century, and the Shelley Society deserves the highest praise and warmest thanks of all for having given us an opportunity of seeing Shelley's play under the conditions he himself desired for it. For The Cenci was written absolutely with a view to theatric presentation, and had Shelley's own wishes been carried out it would have been produced during his lifetime at Covent Garden, with Edmund Kean and Miss O'Neill in the principal parts. In working out his conception, Shelley had studied very carefully the aesthetics ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the nets of others, which when torn it is all ye can do to clumsily repair, but can net no new ones of your own! ye enter on the labours of others, ye repeat the lessons of others, ye mouth with theatric effort the superficially repeated wisdom of others. As the silly parrot imitates the words that he has heard, so such men are mere reciters of all, but authors of nothing, imitating Balaam's ass, which, though senseless of itself, yet became eloquent of speech and ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... head to charge a victim and had intended abandoning it before they reached the Kor-ul-ja. Now he altered his plans—they would ride to the very village of Om-at upon the gryf, and the Kor-ul-ja would have food for conversation for many generations to come. Nor was it the theatric instinct of the ape-man alone that gave favor to this plan. The element of Jane's safety entered into the matter for he knew that she would be safe from man and beast alike so long as she rode upon the back of Pal-ul-don's ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... struggling in her soul. While Indignation, with resistless strain, Pours her full deluge through each swelling vein; By the vile fear that chills the coward breast, By sordid caution is her voice suppress'd. 30 While Arrogance, with big theatric rage, Audacious struts on power's imperial stage; While o'er our country, at her dread command, Black Discord, screaming, shakes her fatal brand; While, in defiance of maternal laws, The sacrilegious sword rebellion draws: Shall she at this important hour retire, And quench in Lethe's ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... too deep for words—too deep for all confessionals, penances, and emotions or acts of contrition; the repentance, not of the excitable, theatric Southern, unstable as water even in his most violent remorse, but of the still, deep-hearted Northern, whose pride breaks slowly and silently, but breaks once for all; who tells to God what he will never tell to man, and having told it, is a new creature from that ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... priest arrayed himself in his white satin garments, embroidered about the skirt with gold and on the chest with a purple cross pointed with gold. The brown woollen habit of his voyage was left behind. None knew better than he the value of theatric effect upon the benighted mind. His Indians wore gayly striped blankets of their own manufacture, and carried baskets ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... for the advantage of the state, a plea for the poor against the rich, and for men of property against the indigent; could we remove the clamor which some persons unfairly raise about the theatric fund, [Footnote: Boeckh, Schaefer, and others, regard it as conclusive against the genuineness of this Oration, that a different view is here taken on the subject of the Theoric fund from that which Demosthenes had expressed in the Olynthiacs. And certainly it is a strong argument. It ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... columns of the throne. Even history, written in ignorance of the truth, and inspired by the resentment of Napoleon's courtiers, has slandered this sovereign. Those who knew her will restore, not the stoical, theatric glory which was demanded of her, but her real nature.... The alleged emptiness of her silence hid feminine thoughts and mysteries of feeling which transported her far from this court. Magnificent though cruel exile!... She could ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... They were enormously theatric. They examined Del's makeup box, they sniffed the scent of grease-paint, every minute they ran out to peep through the hole in the curtain, they came back to inspect their wigs and costumes, they read on the whitewashed walls of the dressing-rooms the pencil inscriptions: "The Flora Flanders ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... repeat, one evening, 'Iphigenia's Dream,' at the request of his audience. All were held trembling, breathless by that worn and yet sovereign voice. We were amazed to find ourselves yielding to such a spell; there was no splendor and no theatric illusion. Iphigenia was a teacher in a black frock coat; the orchestra was a piano striking, here and there, an unexpected modulation; this was all the illusion—and the hall was silent, every heart throbbed, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... in his gift of masquerade alone. He is a genius in detail, and in ensemble, and the producer of today might learn far more from him than he can be aware of except by visiting his unique performances. The redman's notion of the theatric does not depend upon artificial appliances. He relies entirely upon the sun with its so clear light of the west and southwest to do his profiling and silhouetting for him, and he knows the sun will cooperate with every ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... encountering the cheek of beauty in the stage-box; and that the bravura of Mandane may produce effect, although the throat of her who warbles it should not overhang the orchestra. The Jove of the modern critical Olympus, Lord Mayor of the theatric sky, {54} has, ex cathedra, asserted that a natural actor looks upon the audience part of the theatre as the third side of the chamber he inhabits. Surely, of the third wall thus fancifully erected, our actors should, ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... word to him," commanded Scully, and even then they heard the tread of the Swede on the stairs. His entrance was made theatric. He swept the door back with a bang and swaggered to the middle of the room. No one looked at him. "Well," he cried, insolently, at Scully, "I s'pose you'll tell me now ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... Titian's colour, the "Venetian secret," was produced, some experts believe, by first painting a solid monochrome in tempera on which the picture was finished in oil. Unquestionably Titian corrected and amended his work as much as did Velasquez. It is a pleasing if somewhat theatric belief that Titian and Velasquez, duelled with their canvases, their rapier a brush. After inspecting many of the Hals portraits the evidences of direct painting, swift though calculated, are not to be denied. This may account, with the temperamental equation, for ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the incredible luck of the play—was always in his ears without so much as a conscious turn of his head to listen; so that the queer world of his fame was not the mere usual field of the Anglo-Saxon boom, but positively the bottom of the whole theatric sea, unplumbed source of the wave that had borne him in the course of a year or two over German, French, Italian, Russian, Scandinavian foot-lights. Paris itself really appeared for the hour the centre of his cyclone, with reports and "returns," to say nothing of agents ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... towards the Palace. I entered the King's Apartments, and found the Royal Family and part of the Court assembled. Grief had reached its height; everybody had his handkerchief out; and I witnessed emotions quite otherwise affecting than those that Theatric Art can produce. The King had composed an Ode on the Princess's departure; bidding her his last adieus in the most tender and touching manner. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... regret. She had washed her hands of him as light-heartedly as he washed his of the dirty, sticky day's paste. What other 'pious philanthropist' had she found to replace him? Whither had she fled? Why not to Paris that her theatric gifts might ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... purified by terror and pity; our weak, unthinking pride is humbled under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom. Some tears might be drawn from me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage. I should be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial, theatric sense of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in real life. With such a perverted mind, I could never venture to show my face at a tragedy. People would think the tears that Garrick formerly, or that Siddons not long since, have extorted from me, were the tears of hypocrisy; ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... muscle; being equally strained, though not rampant, as that inopportune charger on which Clark Mills perched General Jackson, at the national Capital. Nor is this "first in peace" by any means "the first" on horseback; the figure being theatric rather than dignified, and the extended arm ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... the chambers, the scenes which Holbein, Jones, and Vandyke had decorated, and which Earl Thomas had enriched with the spoils of the best ages, received the best touches of beauty from Earl Henry's hand. He removed all that obstructed the views to or from his palace, and threw Palladium's theatric bridge over his river. The present Earl has crowned the summit of the hill with the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, and a handsome arch designed by Sir William Chambers.* No man had a purer taste ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... man who wrote a play for the stage, to avow contempt for the theatric profession”? she wrote, when referring to Johnson’s envy of David Garrick. Boswell admitted, when he visited Anna Seward, in 1785, at Lichfield, that Johnson was “galled by Garrick’s prosperity.” . . . “Who can think Johnson’s heart a good one? In the course of ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... in it all the entertainment belonging to an excellent farce, and all the objections belonging to an indifferent play but the spirit with which she enters into every part of everything she hears, gives a sort of theatric effect to whatever is read to her; and my spirits rise in her presence, with the joy of exciting ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... locks, the sign of royalty and freedom, parted and falling over the collar of mail, the clear and steadfast eye of blue, the cheek somewhat hollowed by kingly cares, but flushed now with manly pride—the form stalwart and erect, but spare in its graceful symmetry, and void of all that theatric pomp of bearing which was assumed by William—no greater contrast could there be than that which the simple earnest Hero-king presented, to the brow furrowed with harsh ire and politic wile, the shaven hair of monastic affectation, ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... desolated at the necessity, but this gentleman has a claim that cannot be ignored. Believe me, I shall make the absence very short. Dear my life, every instant that I am from you is snatched from Paradise. Fain would I be with you alway, but stern duty"—the villain stopped to draw a plaintive and theatric sigh—"calls me to attend once for all to a matter of small moment. Anon I shall be with you, life of ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... events, the altogether unexpected amount of the troops of the Allies—(for they that had figured in the triumphal procession were, it now appeared, from the occupation of all the environs, but a fragment of the whole)—and above all, perhaps—such is the theatric taste of this people—the countless varieties of lineament and costume observable among the warlike bands lounging and parading about their streets and gardens. The capital wore the semblance of some enormous masquerade. ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... they ascend en echelon, as fiends through a stage-trap in some theatric scene, showing faces quite as satanic. Each, on arriving at the summit, rides into line alongside their leader, already up and halted. And on they come, till nineteen can ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... a shop: The trial occupied five minutes or less, and she was sentenced to twenty-one days' imprisonment,—whereupon, without speaking, she looked up wildly first into one policeman's face, then into another's, at the same time wringing her hands with no theatric gesture, but because her torment took this outward shape,—and was led away. The Yankee sailor was then brought up,—an intelligent, but ruffian-like fellow,—and as the case was out of the jurisdiction of the English magistrates, and as it was not worth while to get him sent ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... woman to need theatric affectations, Mary. I am proudest of all that we are unalloyed American in blood. Be American. Cut out the pidgin English and the interlarding of French idiom and phrases, ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck |
