"Tragi-comedy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... together, and prepared to act, for the second time that day, her part in a tragi-comedy in which where there had been two characters ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... and a company of servants are acting their parts, you should come out in the garb of a philosopher, and repeat out of 'Octavia' a discourse of Seneca's to Nero, would it not be better for you to say nothing than by mixing things of such different natures to make an impertinent tragi-comedy? For you spoil and corrupt the play that is in hand when you mix with it things of an opposite nature, even though they are much better. Therefore go through with the play that is acting the best you can, and do not confound it because another that is pleasanter comes into your thoughts. ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... THE tragi-comedy of Tsarskoe-Selo was being played with increasing vigour just prior to the war. Berlin, through Rasputin, piped the tune to which the Imperial Court was dancing—the ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... especially of the tragic fable, is unpleasingly broken. The spectators cannot bear to be so suddenly tossed from the serious to the mirthful, and from the mirthful to the serious. In short, such an heterogeneous adulteration has all the absurdity reproached to the motley mixture in tragi-comedy, without any thing of that connection which is preserved in that kind of justly exploded dramatic composition. How easy too to avoid this defect, by adapting the subjects of the dances to the different exigences of the different dramas, whether serious, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... burning question of the day, and it opened the door for a discussion of the deeper principles of the drama. The Essay itself forms part of a long controversy between Dryden and his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard. The dispute was opened by Dryden's preface to his tragi-comedy, The Rival Ladies, published probably, as it was certainly first acted, in 1664; and in the beginning Dryden, then first rising [Footnote: "To a play at the King's house, The Rival Ladies, a very innocent and most pretty witty play"—is Pepys' entry for August 4, 1664: Diary, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... given me! But, mind you, I am going to put together a bit of copy that will not deal tenderly with our gentlemen of the robe—the lot of you! No, it is a bad, unlucky business enough, but it is even more funny—it is tragi-comedy!" ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... I am doing a tragi-comedy in two acts, and have got on tolerably; but it will be refused, or worse. I never had luck with anything my name was ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... facts and made one or two suggestions. The great things of the science of Darwin, Huxley, Wallace, and Balfour remain mainly untold. In the book of nature there are written, for instance, the triumphs of survival, the tragedy of death and extinction, the tragi-comedy of degradation and inheritance, the gruesome lesson of parasitism, and the political satire of colonial organisms. Zoology is, indeed, a philosophy and a literature to those who can read its symbols. In the ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... periods of wakefulness in the middle of the night. My sleep is then divided into two chapters, and between the chapters there is a slab of unmitigated dreariness. It is my hour of pessimism. The tide has ebbed, the water is dead-low, and there is a vista of endless mud. It is then that this tragi-comedy of life touches bottom, and I see the heavens all hung with black. I despair of humanity, I despair of the war, I despair of myself. There is not one gleam of light in all the sad landscape, and the abyss seems waiting at my feet to swallow ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... the world has anything so absurd as the English Tragi-Comedy. 'Tis a Drama of our own invention; and the fashion of it is enough to proclaim it so. Here, a course of mirth; there, another of sadness and passion; a third of honour; and the fourth, a duel. Thus, in two hours and a half, we run through all the ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... still harping on the necessity of his conquering the suffrages of the public in his character of dramatist. He now set himself to write a play called Mercadet or the Faiseur,[*] the latter word implying by its meaning the tragi-comedy of a penniless financier—the novelist's own experience was there to guide him—who invents a thousand and one stratagems for keeping his creditors at bay, and for creating the illusion of a wealth which he had not; who deceives himself ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... "Tragi-comedy, indeed, you have yourself, in a former speculation, found fault with very justly, because it breaks the tide of the passions, while they are yet flowing; but this is nothing at all to the present case, where they have already ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... gods: what a tragi-comedy it is. Man has never seen one of his gods, never heard the voice of one of his gods, does not know the shape, expression, or bearing of one of his gods. Yet man has cursed man, hated man, hunted man, tortured man, ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... mockery of those bloody buffoons, who, in the merriment of their pride, were insulting with every species of contumely the fallen dignity of the rest of Europe. But Britain, though not personally appearing to bear her part in this monstrous tragi-comedy, was very far from being forgotten. The new-robed regicides found a representative for her. And who was this representative? Without a previous knowledge, any one would have given a thousand guesses before he could arrive at a tolerable ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... thought been widened in early or even in middle life by the education of mixing with men who knew more and were more advanced than himself, had he been jostled in the crowd of a great city and been made to feel deeply about the tragi-comedy of human existence, his experiences might have resulted in a deeper and more original note being sounded in his music. But we must take him as he is, reflecting, when the unbroken peacefulness of his music becomes a little tiresome, that he belonged ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... at very rare intervals, Nature seems to select a favoured man and woman to uphold the torch of the ideal, lest it be reduced to sparks and smoke, to refute the cynic and the pessimist; to hearten a world nauseated and discouraged by the eternal tragi-comedy of marriage, with the spectacle of a human relationship of unsullied beauty: a relationship that passes, by imperceptible degrees, from the first antiphony of passionate hearts to a deep deliberate bliss, "durable from ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... whole thing was only an infamous conspiracy to ruin the young man. The Belgian capitalist, this count apparently so respectable, was only an expert card-sharper whom Chauvignac had brought from Paris to play out the vile tragi-comedy, the denouement of which would be the ruin of ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... clearly put before Frederick the tragi-comedy of existence that his sense of humour was stirred and he was capable of taking ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... made of what is called the middle Attic comedy does not require notice in a historical point of view, since it was nothing but the Menandrian comedy in a less developed form. There is no trace of any employment of the older comedy. The Roman tragi-comedy—after the type of the -Amphitruo- of Plautus—was no doubt styled by the Roman literary historians -fabula Rhinthonica-; but the newer Attic comedians also composed such parodies, and it is difficult ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Bourbon; his good sense and elevated views might certainly have suggested that advice. But the general opinion was that, had he retained the portfolio of foreign affairs, the Spanish revolution would have terminated with more decorum and good faith than was exhibited in the tragi-comedy acted ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... said: "Will this tragi-comedy last much longer? Shall I not find a secret to resuscitate you? Listen to me, monsieur. I love with all my soul the woman that you pretend to love. Does that not suffice? Monsieur, you are a Polish adventurer, and I have as much admiration for your social talents as I ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... the chance of his name had thrown upon the floating stage of that tragi-comedy would have been perfectly useless for my purpose if the unusual of an obvious kind had not aroused his ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... Sooner or later this tragi-comedy must end. It concerns Europe and the world that it should end sooner rather than later, and that it should end with a pacific restoration of France to her proper place in the family of European States. Surely the most imperious ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... chapter is a piece of masterly tragi-comedy. When I say that this scene is suggestive of Balzac, I ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... never forget the night of the 19th of June, 1900, with all its tragedy and tragi-comedy, though I live to be a hundred. It allowed me to see something of real human nature in momentary flashes; of how mean and full of fear we really are, how small and how easily impressed. A hundred times I longed to have the time and the power to set down exactly so that everyone ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... Old World tragi-comedy comes back to me when I talk to New York friends on the subject of these pages! I am not, so they tell me, up to date in my information; there is a marked revulsion of feeling upon the town versus country question; the tide of the rural exodus has really turned, as I might have discerned ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... you should come out in the garb of a philosopher, and repeat, out of Octavia, a discourse of Seneca's to Nero, would it not be better for you to say nothing than by mixing things of such different natures to make an impertinent tragi-comedy? for you spoil and corrupt the play that is in hand when you mix with it things of an opposite nature, even though they are much better. Therefore go through with the play that is acting the best you can, and do not confound it because another that is pleasanter comes into your thoughts. ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... causes were manifold. Chief among them was a feeling of disgust at the many failures of the war. The defection of Prussia and Spain, the fruitless waste of British troops in the West Indies, the insane follies of the French emigres, the ghastly scenes at Quiberon, and the tragi-comedy of Vendemiaire in the streets of Paris, sufficed to daunt the stoutest hearts. By the middle of the month of October 1795, Pitt decided to come to terms with France, if the Directory, newly installed in power, should found a stable Government and exhibit peaceful tendencies. His position in this ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... to the folly of the planters—who doggedly refuse to accommodate themselves to the new state of things, and to entice the negroes from the back settlements by a promise of fair wages. But we have no reason to suppose that the whole tragi-comedy would not be re-enacted in the Slave States of America, if slavery were summarily abolished by act of Congress to-morrow. Property among the plantations consists only of land and negroes: emancipate the negroes—and the planters have no longer any capital for the ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... thought the Master, contemptuously, being like Uncle Ewen a classic of the classics. But the face of little Alice Hooper, which he caught from time to time, watching—with a strained and furtive attention—the conversation between Pryce and her cousin, was really a tragedy; at least a tragi-comedy. Some girls ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... different beings from himself. He would go with them meekly; but one would feel that it was because his path lay in their direction. When the point came that their ways parted, he would go his own way; and just there lay the seed of the tragi-comedy. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... it is sufficient to add that its detached passages are deservedly the most famous of all. The insufficiency of the reasons of Philaster's jealousy may be considered by different persons as affecting to a different extent the merit of the piece. In these two pieces tragedy, or at least tragi-comedy, has the upper hand; it is in the next pair as usually arranged (for the chronological order of these plays is hitherto unsolved) that Fletcher's singular vis comica appears. A King and no King has a very serious plot; and the loves of Arbaces and Panthea ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... in about a week: Sunday, 3d June, 1731; with great magnificence, in presence of the high guests and all the world: and Wilhelmina is the affianced Bride of Friedrich of Baireuth:—and that enormous Double-Marriage Tragi-comedy, of Much Ado about Nothing, is at last ended. Courage, friends; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Cleopatre, the love story of the Scythian King Alcamene, scenes which, when they had 'measured three thousand leagues of spacious ocean', were, nearly a quarter of a century later, to be taken out of her desk and worked up into a baroque and fanciful yet strangely pleasing tragi-comedy, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... Wild Gallant," was brought on the stage in February 1662-3, and with indifferent success, though he has told us that it was more than once the divertisement of Charles II. by his own command, and a favourite with "the Castlemain." "The Rival Ladies" (a tragi-comedy) was acted and published in the year following, and the serious scenes are executed in rhyme. Of its success we know nothing in particular; but Sir Walter thinks that the flowing verse into which some part of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... comfortable; probably his reinforcements had still to arrive: his face was calm, as the Eastern's generally is; but his feet trembled, and his toes twitched. I drily told him of our changed plans, and he left us in high dudgeon. The tragi-comedy which followed may be divided ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... men and women shut themselves up, precisely where they could be of least use. They are very fine things, for us painters, now,—the towers and white arches upon the tops of the rocks; always in places where it takes a day's climbing to get at them; but the intense tragi-comedy of the thing, when one thinks of it, is unspeakable. All the good people of the world getting themselves hung up out of the way of mischief, like Bailie Nicol Jarvie;—poor little lambs, as it were, dangling there for the sign ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... was James Mabbe, which he disguised under the Spanish pseudonym of Diego Puede-ser; Diego for James, and Puede-ser for Mabbe or May-be! He translated, with the same spirit as his Guzman, Celestina, or the Spanish Bawd, that singular tragi-comedy,—a version still more remarkable. He had resided a considerable time in Spain, and was a perfect master of both languages,—a rare talent in a translator; and the consequence is, that he ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... understand your feelings in the matter perfectly. I shall mix things up: let it be tragi-comedy. Of course it would never do for me to make it comedy out and out, with kings and gods on the boards. How about it, then? Well, in view of the fact that there is a slave part in it, I shall do just as I said ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... journey Mellowness and the critical sense Sensibility On devouring one's own God Anarchism New paths Longing for change Baroja, you will never amount to anything (A Refrain) The patriotism of desire My home lands Cruelty and stupidity The anterior image The tragi-comedy of sex The veils of the sexual life A little talk ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... them! There is quite a competition among these young lions as to which of them shall be present at the tragi-comedy, as ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... Fallit: literally A Bankruptcy) was partly written in Rome, partly in Tyrol, and published at Copenhagen in 1875. It was a thing entirely new to the Scandinavian stage for a dramatist to deal seriously with the tragi-comedy of money, and, while making a forcible plea for honesty, to contrive to produce a stirring and entertaining play on what might seem so prosaic a foundation as business finance. Some of the play's earliest critics dismissed it as "dry," "prosaic," "trivial," because ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... main action. But it borrows from the romance-idea the liberty of a large accretion and divagation of minor and accessory plot:—not the mere "episode" of the ancients, but the true minor plot of Shakespeare. It assumes, necessarily and once for all, the licence of tragi-comedy, in that sense of the term in which Much Ado About Nothing and A Winter's Tale are tragi-comedies, and in which Othello itself might have been made one. And it follows further in the wake ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... years. There are things that happened to me in my adolescence that no discipline of reason will ever bring to a just proportion for me, the first humiliations I was made to suffer, the waste of all the fine irrecoverable loyalties and passions of my youth. The dull base caste of my little personal tragi-comedy—I have ostensibly forgiven, I have for the most part forgotten—and yet when I recall them I hate each actor still. Whenever it comes into my mind—I do my best to prevent it—there it is, and these detestable people blot ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... interpretation of the wavering moods of meditation, irony, and frenzy with which Kyd had dealt only crudely. The later development of this type proceeded without much regard to Shakespeare's Hamlet, but rather in the direction started by Marston's tragedies and his influential tragi-comedy, The Malcontent. While Hamlet may be described as centering attention on a meditative and high-minded avenger, Tourneur, Webster, Middleton, and later dramatists found greater interest in the study of ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... inform you that when the tragi-comedy I have given you an account of was over, the Queen my mother turned round to the Chevalier de Seurre, whom she recommended to my brother to sleep in his bedchamber, and in whose conversation she sometimes took delight because he was a man of some humour, but ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... and satirical poetry indicates the first origin of the Spanish secular drama. Towards the close of the fifteenth century, these pastoral dialogues were converted into real dramas by Enzina, and were publicly represented. But the most important of these early productions is the "Tragi-comedy of Calisto and Meliboea," or "Celestina." Though it can never have been represented, it has left unmistakable traces of its influence on the national drama ever since. It was translated into various languages, and ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... fortune still may juggle on, For her minions blindly look around,— Man now totter on his staggering throne, And in dreary puddles now be found! Blest art thou, within thy narrow cell! To this stir of tragi-comedy, To these fortune-waves that madly swell, To this vain and childish lottery, To this busy crowd effecting naught, To this rest with labor teeming o'er, Brother!—to this heaven with devils—fraught, Now thine ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... own personality might seem to be scarcely interested. Hazlitt chose, in the strange book called the 'New Pygmalion,' or 'Liber Amoris,' to invite the British public at large to look on at a strange tragi-comedy, of which the last scene was scarcely finished. Hazlitt had long been unhappy in his family life. His wife appears to have been a masculine woman, with no talent for domesticity; completely indifferent to her husband's pursuits, and inclined to despise him for so ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... at it now; but it was rather a ghastly bit of tragi-comedy. A thousand thanks, Fitz, ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... spectator, at one and the same time. Thus much seemed necessary to explain the felicity of combination, upon which Dryden justly valued himself, and which Johnson sanctioned by his high commendation. But, although artfully conjoined, the different departments of this tragi-comedy are ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... her bedroom, and burst into tears. It was such a tragi-comedy ending to her literary ambition. She would rather the girls had been more indignant than that they had ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... the hair-splitting diplomatist, the self-sacrificing martyr, the self-seeking courtier, present essentially one type in the twelfth, the sixteenth, the nineteenth, or any other century. The human tragi-comedy seems ever to repeat itself with the same bustle, with the same excitement for immediate interests, for the development of the instant plot or passing episode, as if the universe began and ended with each ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and Cornhill, at 5 in the morning...., with her marriage to Carleton the taverner's wife's brother," are incidents fully narrated in Francis Kirkman's "Counterfeit Lady Unveiled," 1673 ("Boyne's Tokens," ed. Williamson, vol. i., p. 703). Her adventures formed the plot of a tragi-comedy by T. P., entitled "A Witty Combat, or the Female Victor," 1663, which was acted with great applause by persons of quality in Whitsun week. Mary Carleton was tried at the Old Bailey for bigamy and acquitted, after which ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... finding close resemblance between it and anyone of the 'romances.'" If the resemblance is generic, does it matter whether it is "close"? If "Measure for Measure" falls within the laborious definition of a "romance," or of a "tragi-comedy," as both that play and "Philaster" are called, why shouldn't we think of "Measure for Measure," produced in 1604, four years before the wildest conjecture puts the date of "Philaster," as the model upon ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... Ferrers took me and Creed to the Cockpitt play, the first that I have had time to see since my coming from sea, "The Loyall Subject," [A Tragi-comedy by Beaumont and Fletcher.] where one Kinaston, a boy, acted the Duke's sister, but made the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life. [Edward Kynaston, engaged by Sir W. Davenant in 1660, to perform the principal female characters: he afterwards assumed the male ones in the ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... his pupils, upon the distant figures of his fellow Dons, robed in the same garb, seemingly living the same life as himself. Where was fact, where was reality? In yonder phantasmagoric procession of Oxford life, forever repeating itself, or in this strange tragi-comedy of souls, one in two and two in one, passing behind the thick walls of that old house in the street nearby? There he stood among the rest, part and parcel apparently of an existence as ordinary, as peaceful, ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... on the loss of the provinces of France by the king's marriage with Margaret of Anjou. The pretensions and growing ambition of the Duke of York, the father of Richard III, are also very ably developed. Among the episodes, the tragi-comedy of Jack Cade, and the detection of the impostor Simcox ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... unsearchable in their Oriental languor and pride; Jerusalem becomes to us more and more a symbol and epitome of that which is changeless and transient, capricious and inevitable, necessary and insignificant, interesting and unsatisfying, in the unfinished tragi-comedy of human life. There are times when it fascinates us with its whirling charm. There are other times when we are glad to ride away from it, to seek communion with the great spirit of some antique prophet, ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... Forster—whose appointment as General had been made in the hope of attracting other Protestant gentry to the Jacobite cause—offered to submit to General Carpenter under certain conditions. Carpenter's reply was a demand for unconditional surrender, and the hopeless little tragi-comedy was played out. The last scene took place on Tower Hill three months later, when the gallant young Earl, then only twenty-six years old, laid down the life which, after all, had been spent in the service of others, with no selfish ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... perpetual collision of eccentricities—a tilt and tournament of absurdities; the prejudices and caprices of mankind are let loose, and set together by the ears, as in a bear-garden. Hogarth paints nothing but comedy or tragi-comedy. Wilkie paints neither one nor the other. Hogarth never looks at any object but to find out a moral or a ludicrous effect. Wilkie never looks at any object but to see that it is there.... In looking at Hogarth, you are ready to burst your sides ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... is one of a series of six lyrics called "The Phases of Love," with this motive from the "Anatomy of Melancholy": "I am resolved, therefore, in this tragi-comedy of love, to act several parts, some satirically, some comically, some in a mixed tone." The poems are all by American poets, and the group, opus 6, is an invaluable addition to our musical literature. The first of the series, "My Silent ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... him with her peculiar fine charm, her positive gaiety of sensibility, scarce dimmed: "I'm just selfishly glad, just selfishly glad!" Well, she was going to have reason to be; she was going to put the whole case to him, all her troubles and plans, and each act of the tragi-comedy of her recent existence, as to the dearest and safest sympathiser in all the world. There would be no chance for his case, though it was so much for his case he had come; yet there took place within him but a mild, dumb convulsion, the momentary strain of his substituting, by the ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... of Wilkes from the house as the fifth act of the tragi-comedy acted by his majesty's servants, for the benefit of the agitator, at the expense of the constitution. As for Wilkes himself, he was nothing daunted by it, for after indulging in many witticisms at ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... tragi-comedy, as its author points out with some elaboration in the critical essay he composed upon that species of the drama. The scene is laid in Arcadia, where according to Guarini it was customary to sacrifice a maiden each year to Diana, in expiation of an ancient curse brought upon the country ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Perhaps 'twill be the better estate. Do you observe this gallery, or rather lobby, indeed? Here are a couple of studies, at each end one: here will I act such a tragi-comedy between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, Daw and La-Foole—which of them comes out first, will I seize on:—you two shall be the chorus behind the arras, and whip out between the acts and speak—If I do not make them keep the peace for this remnant of the day, if not of the year, I ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... murder than when he is posing, and shuffling and twisting, and talking piously, and exhibiting the intense, unmitigated selfishness which is at the bottom of all religious sentiment. The essence of piety comes out in this tragi-comedy. Personal fear, personal hope, self, self, sell, is the be-all and the end-all ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... named Dingley to oppose him, but he could find no freeholder to second him, and he was chivied ignominiously from the scene of the election. On March 17 the House of Commons, for the third time, played what Burke called the tragi-comedy of declaring the election void. A new writ was again issued, and this time the Ministry were resolved that, come what come might, Wilkes should have an opponent. It was not the easiest of tasks to find a man ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... understood by the crowd, and almost always mistaken by musicians. The present Italian taste for music is exactly correspondent to the taste for tragi-comedy, that about a century ago gained ground upon the stage. The musicians of the present day are charmed at the union they form between the grave and the fantastic, and at the surprising transitions they make between extremes, while every hearer who has the least remainder of the taste of ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... of the insurrection of Madrid precipitated at Bayonne the denoument of the tragi-comedy in which for several days the illustrious actors had been playing their parts. The emperor feigned great anger, and the terror of the ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... the harbour lights; and it may be news even to him, that in the year 1863 their case was pitiable. Hanging about with the east wind humming in my teeth, and my hands (I make no doubt) in my pockets, I looked for the first time upon that tragi-comedy of the visiting engineer which I have seen so often re-enacted on a more important stage. Eighty years ago, I find my grandfather writing: "It is the most painful thing that can occur to me to have a correspondence of this kind with any ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... before concluding and bidding my readers farewell, it remains for me to speak of the role that is reserved for Don Quixote in the modern European tragi-comedy. ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... is a tragi-comedy by Sir William Berkely, and is advertised to be sold at the shop of the Holy Lamb in the year 1639, which we may take as the probable date of its publication. Dorothy would play Hermione, the heroine. We can imagine her speaking with sympathetic ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... line, and happily his fame does not rest upon his plays, which are deeply stained with the immorality of the age. His first effort, The Wild Gallant (1663), was a failure; his next, The Rival Ladies, a tragi-comedy, established his reputation, and among his other dramas may be mentioned The Indian Queene, Amboyna (1673), Tyrannic Love (1669), Almanzar and Almahide (ridiculed in Buckingham's Rehearsal) ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... indebted to his associate, Dekkar. His play of "Appius and Virginia" is far from being an adequate rendering of one of the most beautiful and affecting fables that ever crept into history. "The Devil's Law Case," a tragi-comedy, has not sufficient power to atone for the want of probability in the plot and want of nature in the characters. The historical play of "Sir Thomas Wyatt" can only be fitly described by using the favorite word in which Ben ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... from their adoring mistresses with marvellous adroitness; whereupon two or three days would elapse while the adoring mistress wept buckets full of tears and set the police of M. Fouche, Duc d'Otrante, by the ears in search of her pet. The next act in the tragi-comedy would be an anonymous demand for money—varying in amount in accordance with the known or supposed wealth of the lady—and an equally anonymous threat of dire vengeance upon the tou-tou if the police were put upon the track ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Accordingly, in his more deliberate prose criticism we find, amid his veneration of Shakespeare, his regard for the rules of the classical drama. The faults of Shakespeare, we read, were not so much his own as those of his time, for "tragi-comedy was the common mistake of that age," and there was as yet no definite knowledge of how a play ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... abundant and certain victory over them all as death? What could such advantages accomplish taken as actual moving causes of a human race, innumerable because constantly renewed, which unceasingly moves, strives, struggles, grieves, writhes, and performs the whole tragi-comedy of the history of the world, nay, what says more than all, perseveres in such a mock-existence as long as each one possibly can? Clearly this is all inexplicable if we seek the moving causes outside ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the story, so far as it has proceeded, the promise of an interest as unhackneyed as it will be intense. There is room for the play of all the passions and interests that make up the great tragi-comedy of life, while all the scenery and accessories will be those which familiarity has made dear to us. We are a little afraid of Colonel Burr, to be sure, it is so hard to make a historical personage fulfill ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... Stowey. In November The Borderers was finished, and Wordsworth went up to London with his sister to offer it for the stage. The good Genius of the poet again interposing, the play was decisively rejected, and Wordsworth went back to Allfoxden, himself the hero of that first tragi-comedy so common ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the wind. He recalled them from orthodox abstractions to the solid earth. "Have you forgot," he asked his followers, "the close, the milk-house, the stable, the barn, and the like, where God did visit your souls?" He himself could never be indifferent to the place or setting of the great tragi-comedy of salvation. When he relates how he gave up swearing as a result of a reproof from a "loose and ungodly" woman, he begins the story: "One day, as I was standing at a neighbour's shop-window, and there cursing and swearing after my wonted manner, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... remembered it, that first act in her little tragi-comedy, the death of her reverend husband's first wife. It happened on a spring evening, and she who now and for many years had filled that first wife's place was then ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... is said that Plautus took for his model the Sicilian Epicharmus," will warrant the conjecture that he borrowed the Amphitryo, a piece which is quite different in kind from all his others, and which he himself calls a Tragi-comedy, from that old Doric comedian, who we know employed himself chiefly on mythological subjects. Among the pieces of Terence, whose copies, with the exception of certain changes of the plan and structure, are probably much more faithful in detail than those of the other, we find two from ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... manufacturer might have resisted for many more years, in spite of his almost white hair. But the desire for death, though it was working almost unconsciously in him, soon found its way out, and made an end to the ugly tragi-comedy. One night in December it happened that the old man could not sleep. Sitting up in bed, he gave himself to his desolate thoughts, staring at the dark wall, and seemed to himself more forsaken than usual. In this mood of weariness, fear, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... into stronger relief. Our author is, not unexpectedly, an invariable moralist; is throughout a stickler for dignity; is sensitive to absurdities, improprieties, and slips in decorum; will have no truck with tragi-comedy in any of its forms. He hates puns and bombast, demands refinement in speech and restraint in manners. He regards Hamlet's speeches to Ophelia in the Player scene as a violation of propriety, is shocked by the lack ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... in Fatalite's mind neither spite nor malice ever found a place. The petty vices of womankind had never been hers. He knew now that he had been something to her, and that knowledge would make sunshine for him even in the shadow of a prison. It gave him courage also to play out the tragi-comedy to the end, to make a brave jest, to ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... custom for time out of mind, has always entitled the operator to that distinction. The predecessor of Dun was Gregory Brandon, from whom the gallows was called the Gregorian tree, by which name it is mentioned in the prologue to Mercurius Pragmaticus, tragi-comedy acted at Paris, ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... or Love of Shadows, a Tragi-Comedy; the first part printed in folio 1663, written in Venice, and dedicated to the lady Mary Villiers, duchess ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... its development should be stupendously interesting. It attracted him irresistibly. That he should leave it to his own father to say whether a man born as he was born might aspire to marry his father's ward, had in it something that savored of tragi-comedy. It was a pretty problem, that once set could not be left unsolved by a man of Mr. Caryll's temperament. And, indeed, no sooner was the idea conceived than it quickened into a resolve upon which he set ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... be the spectator of my own life-drama, to be fully conscious of the tragi-comedy of my own destiny; and, more than that, to be in the ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... of uneasiness approaching genuine alarm, I doubt whether Congress would ever have ventured upon the tragi-comedy of the impeachment. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... get, you will admit, out of dancing attendance on my very respectable cousins. My mother taught me to see everything dramatically. We have no drama in England at the present moment worth a cent; so I amuse myself with this great tragi-comedy of the working-class movement. It stirs, pricks, interests me, from morning till night. I feel the great rough elemental passions in it, and it delights me to know that every day brings us nearer to some great outburst, to scenes and struggles ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in them was too decided to allow him to undertake that successfully. He accordingly does little more than simply report the transactions in a compendious way, with all the documents necessary to a full understanding of the subject. Whoever wishes for a thorough apprehension of the German tragi-comedy, may derive ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... of letters, but also a man of action. His humour has been defined as the sunny break of his serious purpose. Horace Walpole has said that the world is a comedy to the man of thought, a tragedy to the man of feeling. To the great humorist—to Mark Twain—the world was a tragi-comedy. Like Smile Faguet, he seemed at times to feel that grief is the most real and important thing in the world—because it separates us from happiness. He was an exemplar of the highest, truest, sincerest ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... A tragi-comedy was, in fact, being enacted in Madame de la Baudraye's house, in harmony with her struggles over money matters and her successive transformations—a drama to which no one but Monsieur de Clagny and the Abbe Duret ever knew the clue, when ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... not essentially a man of books. He never fell into the characteristic weakness of the follower of letters, by treating books as ends in themselves, or placing literature before life. Character, passion, circumstance, the real tragi-comedy, not its printed shadow and image, engrossed him. He was in this respect more of the temper of Rousseau, than he was like Voltaire or Fontenelle. "Abstraction made," he used to say, "of my existence and of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... wall the well-known picture of a flaxen-haired girl with a dove on her breast and eyes turned upwards; on the table a vase of fresh roses. You see how minutely I describe it. In that drawing-room, on that terrace, was rehearsed all the tragi-comedy of my love. The colonel's wife herself was an ill-natured old dame, whose voice was always hoarse with spite—a petty, snappish creature. Of the daughters, one, Vera, did not differ in any respect from the ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... himself. Consider, also, the "Epilogue" in the revised version of the "Marionettes." The piece comprises only a score of measures; yet within it the thought of the composer traverses a world of philosophical meditation: here is reflected the mood of one who looks with grave tenderness across the tragi-comedy of human life, in which, he would say to us, we are no less the playthings of a controlling destiny than are the ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... colossal figure of Hercules. Here is the turning-point of the play: which has the peculiarity of combining an element of the Satyric Drama (or Burlesque) with Tragedy, the combination anticipating the 'Action-Drama' (or 'Tragi-Comedy') of modern times. Accordingly the costume and mask of Hercules are compounded, of his conventional appearance in Tragedy, in which he is conceived as the perfection of physical strength toiling and suffering for mankind, and his conventional appearance in Satyric plays as the ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... Twining, in his amusing and instructive notes on Aristotle's Poetics, refers to the drunken jollity of Hercules in the Alcestis, and to the ludicrous dialogue between Ulysses and Minerva, in the first scene of the Ajax of Sophocles, as instances of Greek tragi-comedy. We may add the Electra of Euripides; for if the poet did not intend to burlesque the rules of tragic composition in many of the scenes of that play, and to make his audience laugh, he calculated on more dull gravity in Athens, than we are accustomed to give that city of song the credit ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... is to a Chinese mandarin, that is a Baedeker star to a hotel-keeper; and the Boy and I were so tickled at the little tragi-comedy that we forgot, as we walked on side by side, that we had ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... attendant ready to "beat, maim, or kill" in his master's behalf; a frustrated elopement and a compulsory visit to the mayor—all these, with the picturesque old town of Lyme for a background, suggest a most appropriate first act to Harry Fielding's biographical tragi-comedy. But to do such a theme justice ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... and marriages are recorded in this Magazine, under such headings as "The Merry Gossips," "The Kissing Chronicle," and "The Undertaker's Harvest-Home," or "The Squallers—a tragi-comedy," "All for Love," and ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... undeniable. Happily, he had put it out of her power to injure him by any revelations she might make concerning May Tomalin; his avowal to Iris that May had been undisguisedly in love with him would suffice to explain anything she might hear about the tragi-comedy at Rivenoak. Whether the lady of Pont Street could be depended upon for genuine good will, was a question that must remain unsettled until he had seen her again. She had bidden him to call upon her, at all events, and ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... Dartie, who sat with her husband in the third row, squeezed his hand more than once during the performance. To her, who knew the plot of this tragi-comedy, its most dramatic moment was well-nigh painful. 'I wonder if Jon knows by instinct,' she thought—Jon, out in British Columbia. She had received a letter from him only that morning which had made ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... criticism of contemporary drama contained in its Dedication—we select Damon and Pythias (before 1567) by Richard Edwards as an example of native tragedy influenced but not subjugated by classical models. To be exact, it is a tragi-comedy, but it is very improbable that the method of presentment would have been different had it ended tragically; therefore it will suit our purpose. Of importance is the date, some three or four years later than ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... full Business, without his Hammers or Forge.—But the Humourist, as he advances in Years, is apt to grow intolerable to himself and the World; becoming at length, uneasy, and fatigued with the constant View of the same Follies; like a Person who is tir'd with seeing the same Tragi-Comedy continually acted. This sowres his Temper; And unless some favorable Incidents happen to mellow him, he resigns himself wholly to Peevishness.—By which Time he perceives that the World is quite tir'd of him.—After which he ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... pronounced in favor of separating tragedy and comedy, and Addison wrote one sentence which condemns half the plays of Shakspere and Fletcher: "The tragi-comedy, which is the product of the English theater, is one the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poet's thought."[25] Dryden made some experiments in tragi-comedy, but, in general, classical comedy was pure comedy—the prose comedy of manners—and classical tragedy admitted ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers |
