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More "Dramatist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... and, on occasion, by gorgeous receptions offered to visiting rulers and ambassadors, It has already been related that the arrival of Louis XIV and his family at Versailles in the fall of 1663 was celebrated by a fete at which a troupe headed by Moliere was heard in a piece by the great dramatist called Impromptu de Versailles, In the month of May, 1664, Louis commanded a performance of "Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle," in which his favorite actor and playwright furnished the comedy, Lully the music and the ballets, and an Italian mechanician the decorations and illuminations. On the first ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... realising that we cannot fight 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 ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... more or less accurately with the details of the tragedy. One of these was published in Italian at Brescia in 1586. A Frenchman, De Rosset, printed the same story in its main outlines at Lyons in 1621. Our own dramatist, John Webster, made it the subject of a tragedy, which he gave to the press in 1612. What were his sources of information we do not know for certain. But it is clear that he was well acquainted with the history. He has changed some of the names and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... watchmaker, a musician, a court official, a speculator, and it was only when he was thirty-five that he turned dramatist. Various French authors, Diderot especially, weary of confinement to tragedy and comedy, the only two forms then admitted on the French stage, were seeking a new dramatic formula in which they ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... knows, even if the full significance of the fact is not always sufficiently estimated, that the tragedians of Athens did not tell their story at all as the telling of a story is conceived by a modern dramatist, whose audience, when the curtain goes up, know nothing which is not ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... dark, as though the scene had been skilfully prepared by some infernal dramatist, just as the cover of night shut down tight and sealed, and suddenly, like a box-lid that had been upheld by the last rays of the setting sun, just as the great stars burst out above as if at the touch of an electric button, ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... opening of "The Primrose Way"; for Fillmore had acceded to his friend Ike's suggestion in the matter of producing it first in Chicago, and he had been called in by a distracted manager to revise the work of a brother dramatist, whose comedy was in difficulties at one of the theatres in that city; and this meant he would have to remain on the spot for some time to come. It was disappointing, for Sally had been looking forward to having him back in New York in a few days; but she refused ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... every stage of its development and every variety of its operation, is as distinctly pronounced on the pages of Scripture as in the scenes of the dramatist. Of Shakespeare it is said, "He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... 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 was young: he married before he was ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... establishment has offered GRILLPARZER, the German dramatist, $4,000 for his writings, but he refuses, not because he thinks the price too low, but because he will not take the trouble of preparing and publishing a collected edition of his dramas, the last of which was entitled Maximilian Robespierre, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... have 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 treasonable activities. For example, the author of a burlesque life ...
— The Fatal Jealousie (1673) • Henry Nevil Payne
... lived up to his reputation as a tea-drinker at all times and places. Cumberland, the dramatist, in his memoirs gives a story illustrative of the doctor's tea-drinking powers: "I remember when Sir Joshua Reynolds, at my home, reminded Dr. Johnson that he had drunk eleven cups of tea. 'Sir,' he replied, 'I did not count your glasses of wine; why ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... remember the duel at Warsaw with Count Branicki in 1766 (vol. x., pp. 274-320), an affair which attracted a good deal of attention at the time, and of which there is an account in a letter from the Abbe Taruffi to the dramatist, Francesco Albergati, dated Warsaw, March 19, 1766, quoted in Ernesto Masi's Life of Albergati, Bologna, 1878. A manuscript at Dux in Casanova's handwriting gives an account of this duel in the third person; ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... no other fount but nature's rill. It dashes not more quickly o'er the rocks than I did, as, with blunderbuss in hand, I brushed away the early morning dew, and shot the partridge, snipe, or antlered deer! Ah! well may England's dramatist remark, "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown!" Why did I steal my nephew's, my young Giglio's—? Steal! said I? no, no, no, not steal, not steal. Let me withdraw that odious expression. I took, and on my manly ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... has drawn it down, has fitted it in its proper place as a branch of physiology. And we are beginning to have a clearer understanding of the thoughts and the thought-producing actions of ourselves and our fellow beings. Soon it will be no longer possible for the historian and the novelist, the dramatist, the poet, the painter or sculptor to present in all seriousness as instances of sane human conduct, the aberrations resulting from various forms of disease ranging from indigestion in its mild, temper-breeding forms to acute homicidal or suicidal mania. In that day of greater enlightenment ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... Denis Von Wisine (1741-92), a favourite Russian dramatist. His first comedy "The Brigadier," procured him the favour of the second Catherine. His best, however, is the "Minor" (Niedorosl). Prince Potemkin, after witnessing it, summoned the author, and greeted him with the exclamation, ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... the artist or sculptor, which he is endeavoring to reproduce in stone or on canvas, seems very real to him. So do the characters in the mind of the author; or dramatist, which he seeks to express so that others may recognize them. And if this be true in the case of our finite minds, what must be the degree of Reality in the Mental Images created in the Mind of the Infinite? ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... seeming ubiquity of the famous quadroon[8] is not more marvellous than the multiplicity of characters he assumes. "Dumas at Home and Abroad" offers an inexhaustible theme and a boundless field for pen and pencil caricaturists. Alternately dramatist, novelist, tourist, ambassador, the companion of princes, the manager of theatres, an authority in courts of justice, a challenger of deputies, and shining with equal lustre in these and fifty other capacities equally diverse, what wonder that the slightest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Timanthes to throw an imaginary one over the face of Agamemnon; neither height nor depth, propriety of expression was his aim.' It is a question whether Timanthes took the idea from the text of Euripides, or whether it is his invention, and was borrowed by the dramatist. The picture must have presented a contrast to that of his rival Parrhasius, which exhibited the fury ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... psychological phenomenon of a dramatist depicting a psychosis correctly in "Concerning Hamlet and Orestes." Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. XIII, ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... 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 write a play ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... been able to consider the case logically and without prejudice, I should probably have scorned this presentation of rigid alternatives as the invention of a romantic mind; I might have recognised in it the familiar device of the dramatist. But I had so far surrendered myself to the charm of Anne's individuality that I accepted her statement without the least shadow of criticism. It was the search to find some mechanical means of influencing the Jervaises' decision that reminded me of Arthur Banks's hint of an advantage ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... with a very slender knowledge of the classics. It would be sufficient to reply, that we are speaking of cases where ignorance of antiquity is not counterbalanced by any very exuberant or profound knowledge of human nature. Possibly posterity may have to deal with another myriad-minded dramatist whose poverty is better than other men's riches; but it must not be rashly presumed that he is likely to appear at all; or, if at all, with the same deficiency of learning which was not unnatural three hundred years back. Meanwhile, it is a perverse ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... Friend, the work which owes its origin to your suggestion. Long since, you urged me to attempt a fiction which might borrow its characters from our own Records, and serve to illustrate some of those truths which History is too often compelled to leave to the Tale-teller, the Dramatist, and the Poet. Unquestionably, Fiction, when aspiring to something higher than mere romance, does not pervert, but elucidate Facts. He who employs it worthily must, like a biographer, study the time and the characters he selects, with a minute and earnest diligence which ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... argument is employed to prove that the drama may be pure in itself, and effectual as a moral educator,—argument which, however excellent it may be in theory, has hitherto proved impotent in fact. But from the beginning it was not so; Ezekiel was a dramatist; he acted his prophecies and his preachings on a stage. The warnings were in this form clearly articulated, and forcefully driven home; if they failed to produce the ultimate result of repentance, the obstacle lay not in the feebleness of the instrument, but in the wilful ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... LEDGER, is, as usual, full of information concerning things theatrical—some of it gay, some of it sad. "Replies to Questions by Actors and Actresses" is the liveliest contribution in the little volume. The Obituary contains the name of "EDWARD LITT LEMAN BLANCHARD," dramatist, novellist, and journalist, who died on the 4th of September, 1889. It is hard to realise the Era Almanack without the excellent contributions of poor "E. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... think. It is generally believed that the purely literary mind scorns the idea of reforming: that art is above moral purpose. I have yet to discover the purely literary mind. Homer and Shakespeare, Goethe and Dante are clearly not of it. Shakespeare, so say the wiseacres, is the strictly impartial dramatist. He depicts the good and the bad, the great and the small, with complete detachment. Naturally, the art is the detachment and the lesson is in the perfect representation. The literary man may indignantly repudiate ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... record of the babe, William. He was baptized on April 26 and as children were usually baptized three days after their birth we infer he was born April 23. We know that he married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior; that in early manhood he went to London; that he became an actor, dramatist, manager of a theater; that in 1597 he bought New Place, the stateliest residence in Stratford; that he lived in Stratford during the last years of his life as a highly esteemed and worthy man, and that he died in 1616 and was buried ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... 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 ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... history of genius is the 23rd of April, as being at once the day of the birth and death of Shakspeare; and these events took place on the same spot, for at Stratford-upon-Avon this illustrious dramatist was born, in the year 1564, and here he also died, in 1616. It has been conjectured, that his first dramatic composition was produced when he was but twenty-five years old. He continued to write for the stage for a great number of years; occasionally, also, appearing as a performer: and at ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... 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 Mayer to the galleys at Toulon first; then, among ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Homage to the Master Dramatist of his Age and with the Gratitude that is his Due from Every Younger ...
— Oliver Cromwell • John Drinkwater
... course, the fundamental one that the Greek plays were written for performance and that many of them have {245} elaborately contrived "plots." No one supposes that Samson would be effective on the stage; but the modern dramatist who could make his play as exciting to the spectator as the Oedipus Tyrannus or Electra of Sophocles, or the Hippolytus or Medea of Euripides, would assuredly be no ordinary playwright. This Milton did ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... conventional in nature, is omitted here. In it Gally, following Casaubon,[2] theorizes that the character evolved out of Greek Old Comedy. The Augustans saw a close connection between drama and character-writing. Congreve (Dedication to The Way of the World, 1700) thought that the comic dramatist Menander formed his characters on "the observations of Theophrastus, of whom he was a disciple," and Budgell, who termed Theophrastus the father of modern comedy, believed that if some of Theophrastus's characters "were well worked up, and ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... of Sir Walter, despite his high Tory predilections, were more favourable to the people as such than those of Shakespeare. If the station be low among the characters of the dramatist, it is an invariable rule that the style of thinking and ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... that I have duplicate copies of three or four of the Plays. These duplicates I shall ask Mullet to oblige me by accepting. Mullet is not the chap who bored your father so fearfully by endless talk about Shakespeare and Napoleon, but he is a prodigious admirer of the great dramatist. He has the Plays in one huge, unwieldy volume, and for that reason reads them less than he would if they were in a more handy form. Mullet is a great reader of the old English poets (I don't mean so far back as Chaucer and Spenser), ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... American literature that it can boast no name of commanding genius—no dramatist to rank with Shakespeare, no poet to rank with Keats, no novelist to rank with Thackeray, to take names only from our cousins oversea—and yet it displays a high level of talent and a notable richness of achievement. ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... as an Irish novelist and dramatist, should have immediately succeeded him in the tenancy of "13 Brompton Grove," as this house was ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... known collectively as the Elizabethan writers, silence as to the element of childhood is profound. In all the comedies and the tragedies of the greatest dramatist of all, children play but minor parts. In none of them save in King John, where historic necessity precludes the absence of the princes in the Tower, they might be wholly omitted without impairment of the structure. In the Merry Wives of Windsor, Mistress Anne Page's son is briefly introduced, ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... that this solitary chamber is called a study: the word reminds us that hard mental labour must generally be gone through when we are alone. Any interruption by others breaks the train of thought; and the broken end may never be caught again. You remember how Maturin, the dramatist, when he felt himself getting into the full tide of composition, used to stick a wafer on his forehead, to signify to any member of his family who might enter his room, that he must not on any account be spoken to. You remember ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... his 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 ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... even I, living in his home and seeing him almost every hour of the day, have little chance to talk with him. Last night we met M. Voltaire—dramatist and historian—now in the evening of his days. We were at the Academy, where we had gone to hear an essay by D'Alembert. Franklin and Voltaire—a very thin old gentleman of eighty-four, with piercing black eyes—sat side by side on the platform. The ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... before McQuiston's meaning gaze and turned aside in pained silence. He knew, as a dramatist, that there are dark chapters in all men's lives, and this but too clearly explained why his father had stayed in town all summer ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... Truth is stranger than fiction. No dramatist dare invent a 'poetic justice' more perfect than fell upon the traitor. It is not always so, no doubt. God reserves many a greater sinner for that most awful of all punishments—impunity. But there ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... The same small topics, the same petty interests engage them. They display the same ardent enthusiasm about trifles, and the same thorough indifference to great things, as their grandfathers; and they are marvellously like the dreary puppets that the immortal dramatist has given us ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... in the drama. Kleist, the greatest dramatist of the period, was not primarily a Romantic poet. The Schlegels wrote frosty plays and Tieck attempted dramatic production. It was left for the most bizarre of the Romantic group to write the play of greatest power in it and to set a dramatic fashion which ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... always been badly treated in literature," said Raphael. "We are made either angels or devils. On the one hand, Lessing and George Eliot, on the other, the stock dramatist and novelist ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... enjoyed the greatest social and professional prestige, he received the most verbal abuse and criticism. Perhaps the most damaging and galling satire of the century flowed from the pen of the French dramatist, Moliere, who had a medical student—not completely fictitious—swear always to accept the pronouncements of his oldest physician-colleague, and always to treat by purgation, using clysters (enemas), phlebotomy ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... his genius that is incalculable. It would be hard to define the causes of the difference of impression made upon us respectively by two such men as Aeschylus and Euripides, but we feel profoundly that the latter, though in some respects a better dramatist, was an infinitely lighter weight. Aeschylus stirs something in us far deeper than the sources of mere pleasurable excitement. The man behind the verse is far greater than the verse itself, and the impulse he gives to what is deepest and most sacred in us, though we cannot always ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... had at least one notable son, John Fletcher the dramatist, associate of Francis Beaumont and perhaps of Shakespeare, and author of "The Faithful Shepherdess." Fletcher's father was vicar of Rye. The town also gave birth to a curious father, son, and grandson, all named Samuel Jeake. The first, born in ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... The story of his life, reveal its secret. I know the secrets, but I want the secret. You'd think his spirit out of gratitude Would start me off. It's something, I insist, To find a haven with a dramatist After your bones have crossed the sea, and after Passing from hand to hand they reach ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... of Alcestis is quite untouched by the dramatist's keener analysis. The strong light only increases its effect. Yet she is not by any means a mere blameless ideal heroine; and the character which Euripides gives her makes an admirable foil to that of Admetus. Where he is passionate ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... of 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
... it forte and ended it pianissimo—contrary to all the rules of dramatic art. It has turned into a novel. I am rather dissatisfied than satisfied with it, and reading over my new-born play, I am more convinced than ever that I am not a dramatist. The acts are very short. There are four of them. Though it is so far only the skeleton of a play, a plan which will be altered a million times before the coming season, I have ordered two copies to be typed and will send you one, only don't let ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... living! The more intelligent you become, the better read, the greater the interest you take in community and public affairs, the more effectively you become what in reality and jointly you are—the backbone of this and of every nation. Teacher, poet, dramatist, carpenter, ironworker, clerk, college head, Mayor, Governor, President, Ruler—the effectiveness of your work and the satisfaction in your work will be determined by the way in which you relate your thought and your work to the Divine plan, and coordinate your every activity in ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... it is true, profess to find in it a reference to the unfortunate Sicilian Expedition, then in progress, and a prophecy of its failure and the political downfall of Alcibiades. But as a matter of fact, the whole thing seems rather an attempt on the dramatist's part to relieve the overwrought minds of his fellow-citizens, anxious and discouraged at the unsatisfactory reports from before Syracuse, by a work conceived in a lighter vein than usual and mainly unconnected with contemporary realities. The play ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... 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 ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... the following from an essay on George Bernard Shaw by Robert Blatchford, the English Socialist: "Shaw is something much better than a wit, much better than an artist, much better than a politician or a dramatist; he is a moralist, a teacher of ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... will ultimately supersede all others. It must certainly be deemed an essential acquisition by every lover of the great dramatist."—N. ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... chance glimpses through the history of the times. For this voluntary oblivion it has been rarely compensated in the immortality it meets with through Hawthorne. Not that he set himself with forethought to the illustration of it; but, in studying as poet and dramatist the past from which he himself had issued, he sought, naturally, to light it up from the interior, to possess himself of the very fire which burned in men's breasts and set their minds in movement at that epoch. In his own person and his own blood ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... heroine Marina, are sketched with a vigorous and flowing pencil. The form of this play is ostensibly Shakspearian; but it appears to us to resemble less the works of Shakspeare himself, than some of the more successful imitations of the great dramatist's manner—as, for instance, some parts of the Wallenstein. As to the language and versification, it is in blank verse, and the style is considered by Russians as admirable for ease and flexibility. At this time ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... the dramatist, has stated that in 1855 he visited the Bicetre and met an old gardener who had known De Sade during his reclusion there. He told that one of the marquis's amusements was to procure baskets of the most beautiful and expensive roses; he would then ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... is illustrated with steel engravings by Rogers, Heath, Finden, and Walker, from designs by Henry Warren, Edward Corbould, and other English artists who are favorably known to the public. It is intended that this edition shall contain all the writings ascribed to the immortal dramatist, without distinction, including not only the Poems and well-authenticated Plays, but also the Plays of doubtful origin, or of which Shakspeare is supposed to have been only in ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... one day talked to Jerrold about the humor of a celebrated novelist, dramatist, and poet, who was ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... was covered, and it was not until the time of Charles II. that women began to make their appearance upon the boards and unite the stage with the second estate. Many writers have emphasised the difficulties besetting the Elizabethan dramatist; Sir Philip Sidney himself has apologised to the spectator for the heavy overdraft on his imagination, and we have but to consider some of the most striking moments in our poet's work to realise what they must have ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... of the eminent services of a personal character which he had rendered to the emperor, in order to make way for the count. The latter's intimacy with his sovereign is largely due to his cleverness as a poet, a dramatist, and a composer, and while he has furnished the words to many of the musical compositions of the kaiser, William has, in turn, had much of his own poetry set ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... themselves in this under-mind, as the novelist and dramatist will testify. The artist finds his picture forming itself before his inner vision, and so the musician hears his composition. "It comes," they say: so does the oak. But like the oak it can only come when conditions ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... a philosophical analysis, and explanation of all the principal 'characters' of our great dramatist, as Othello, Falstaff, Richard the Third, Iago, Hamlet, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... JUAN RUIZ DE, a Spanish dramatist born in Mexico, who, though depreciated by his contemporaries, ranks after 200 years of neglect among the foremost dramatic geniuses of Spain, next even to Cervantes and Lope de Vega; he was a humpback, had an offensive air of conceit, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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 extraordinary guilt of Iago, and would no doubt be accorded to him as such, were he ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... Jewesses and American dollars. In more sober truth, education: Presentation Brothers Schools, Cork School of Art, Cork School of Music, Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin, and Royal College of Art, London. Profession: sculptor and dramatist. Chief interests: literature, art, and music. First magazine to publish his work, The Tatler. Author of "The Whale and the Grasshopper," "Duty, and Other Irish Comedies," and "The Knowledgeable Man." Lives ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... wheresoever I wished 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 ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... permitted to 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 ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... personal friends) to bear cruelly. This difficulty is not a flattering or gentle discipline, nor are its discriminations always good or always bad. It works almost as crudely as that of the stage works on the theatrical dramatist. A cunning subservience to it covers a multitude of sins, and often achieves for the literary craftsman place and preference over the truer artist, if he overlooks the need of being also a craftsman. Yet it is the hard demand, not ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... 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 ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... were introduced to Johnson by their common friend, Arthur Murphy, an actor and dramatist, who afterwards became the editor of Johnson's works. One day, when calling upon Johnson, they found him in such a fit of despair that Thrale tried to stop his mouth by placing his hand before it. The pair then joined in begging Johnson to leave his solitary abode, and ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... over 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 make of some of the passages. Notwithstanding ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... acquainted with a very gentlemanly and experienced manager who thinks that it can be done for that price with strict economy. Has the young man of pronounced theatrical talent arrived from Keokuk with gold and a thirst for fame? The Jackal knows just the dramatist who will write him the play that he ought to star in. Does the wealthy and important person from Podunk desire to back something absolutely safe and sure in the line of theatrical speculation? The Jackal has the very thing for which he ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... always been a large proprietor in London, and he had come to strike a bargain with them. They could have as many sites as they chose, on one condition. Every year they must send him a dramatist. ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... announcements in the theatrical columns informed an indifferent theater-going world that Miss Marie Courtenay, an actress new to Broadway, was to play the ingenue part in the latest comedy by a highly popular dramatist. Immediately upon the production, the theater-going world ceased to be indifferent to the new actress; in fact, it went into one of its occasional furores about her. Not that she was in any way a great genius, but she had a certain indefinable and winningly individual ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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
... be explained that Bernard Shaw added to his negative case of a dramatist to be depreciated a corresponding affirmative case of a dramatist to be exalted and advanced. He was not content with so remote a comparison as that between Shakespeare and Bunyan. In his vivacious weekly articles in the Saturday Review, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... intelligent and literary, went in to see the little play which 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 did ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... good, so we 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 named Mr. "Zeal-of-the-Lord ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... gatherings," in Greek and in English. Then comes "The Epistle Apologeticall to the lettered Reader," signed "Thine for thy pleasure and profite—Abraham Fleming," which, in excuse for taking up so slight a subject, contains a very singular notice of the celebrated John Heywood, the dramatist of the reign of Henry VIII., and of his remarkable poem The Spider and the Fly. The Pretie Paradoxe, by Synesius, next commences, and extends as far as sign. D. v. b. This portion of the tract is, of course, merely a translation, but it includes a passage or two from Homer, cleverly ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... to representation" in their original state. Does Mr. Crummles know better than Master Shakespeare knew how "Romeo and Juliet" should be ended with the best effect,—not only to the ear in the closet, but theatrically on the stage? The story was not a new one; and the dramatist deliberately followed one of two existing versions rather than the other. In Boisteau's translation of Bandello's novel, Juliet wakes from her trance before Romeo's death; in Brooke's poem, which the great master chose to adopt ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... 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 a plot. ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... Dr. Abbott has written on this subject. From your statement of his position, I think he entertains quite a sensible view, and, when we take into consideration that he is a minister, a miraculously sensible view. It is not the business of the dramatist, the actor, the painter or the sculptor to teach what the church calls morality. The dramatist and the actor ought to be truthful, ought to be natural—that is to say, truthfully and naturally artistic. He should present pictures of life properly ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... journalist in The Express, "forget the shudder with which I saw a very well-known dramatist at a garden party eating strawberries with his gloves on." We ourselves sometimes have these sudden sensations, but, unlike the writer, are very prone to let them slip ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... 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 Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... of Milton and the Macbeth of Shakspeare. Aeschylus is equally artful with Sophocles—it is the criticism of ignorance that has said otherwise. But there is this wide distinction—Aeschylus is artful as a dramatist to be read, Sophocles as a dramatist to be acted. If we get rid of actors, and stage, and audience, Aeschylus will thrill and move us no less than Sophocles, through a more intellectual if less passionate ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tenderness with her husband after the guests have left 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 ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... bound to be more or less tragic. It is the struggle between two claims, the destruction of either of which would bring ruin to the ethical life. Curiously enough, it is almost exactly this contradiction which is the tragedy set forth by the Greek dramatist, who asserted that the gods who watch over the sanctity of the family bond must yield to the higher claims of the gods of the state. The failure to recognize the social claim as legitimate causes the trouble; the suspicion constantly remains that woman's public efforts are merely selfish ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... who was a great champion of Crabbe and allotted several essays to him, takes delight in analysing the plots or stories of these tales; but it is a little amusing to notice that he does it for the most part exactly as if he were criticising a novelist or a dramatist. "The object," says he, in one place, "is to show that a man's fluency of speech depends very much upon his confidence in the approbation of his auditors": "In Squire Thomas we have the history of a mean, domineering spirit," and so ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... suffering is felt at once to be real where all else had been false; and the historian of the gestures of fever and words of delirium can count on the applause of a gratified audience as surely as the dramatist who introduces on the stage of his flagging action a carriage that can be driven or a fountain that will flow. But the masters of strong imagination disdain such work, and those of deep sensibility shrink ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... imagination,' Trombin observed, following his own train of thought. 'In me a great romancer has been lost to our age, another Bandello, perhaps a second Boccaccio! An English gentleman of taste once told me that my features resemble those of a dramatist of his country, whose first name was William—I forget the second, which I could not learn to pronounce—but that my cheeks are even rounder than his were, and my mouth smaller. Under other circumstances, who knows but that I might have been the William Something of Italy? My English ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... deceived by the gallant Stanley; the sayings and doings of Mrs. Moneylove, who is "what she ought not to be," and the way she tricks her husband, are very racy, perhaps too much so for the taste of the present times. I do not think any dramatist would now bring upon the stage a young lady like Theodocia, daughter of old Moneylove, reading the list about Squire Careless. Tom Essence is a seller of perfumes, a "jealous coxcomb of his wife;" and Courtly is "a sober gentleman, servant to Theodocia;" these are ...
— Sganarelle - or The Self-Deceived Husband • Moliere
... lifting your eyebrows over the book, as the blue waggon of the Sisters rolled lumberingly into the story? The long arm of coincidence stretched to aching tenuity by the dramatist and the novelist! Nay! but the thing happened, just as ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... occupations, recalled him to Liverpool. To Liverpool accordingly he returned, to work as a draughtsman, and fired withal with a double ambition—for one thing to win fame as a poet, for another to succeed as a dramatist. Already in 1870 he had written a long poem, which was published in 1874 anonymously by an enterprising Liverpool publisher. About this poem George Gilfillan, to whom Hall Caine sent it in 1876, wrote that there was much in it that ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... thought, "that's a bit thick, that is! She's stuck me up with a dramatist I don't believe in, and a play I don't believe in, and an actress I don't ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... inartistic to intervene—to interrupt the action at an inopportune moment—to stultify what promised to be an unusually involved complication. When first I saw and recognized you on the Nevski, it was like one of those divine surprises of the master dramatist, M. Sardou. Really, I was indebted for the thrill of it. Besides, had I spoken, the prince might have tossed you overboard; he is quite capable of doing so. That, too, would have been inartistic, would have turned a comedy of ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... the beginning of a friendship which formed a valuable element in Wordsworth's life. Sir George Beaumont, of Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire, a descendant of the dramatist, and representative of a family long distinguished for talent and culture, was staying with Coleridge at Greta Hall, Keswick, when, hearing of Coleridge's affection for Wordsworth, he was struck with the wish to bring Wordsworth also to Keswick, and bought and presented ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... I sat silent for a moment, and then, with a spontaneous impulse, we both broke out clapping as at the well-wrought crisis of a play. A flush of colour sprang to Holmes's pale cheeks, and he bowed to us like the master dramatist who receives the homage of his audience. It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause. The same singularly proud and reserved nature which turned away with disdain from popular notoriety was capable of being ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... only one word in the passage, so far as its outward form goes, is completely alien to our knowledge. But how different the matter stands when we consider meanings! The words are words of today, but the meanings are the meanings of Shakespeare. We should be baffled and misled as to the dramatist's thought if we had made no ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... self made man—from laboring in a brick-yard to journalism, then a dramatist. He was a noble boy, a manly man. He toiled patiently all the days of his only too brief life ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... Oxford. We have seen (above) 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 ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... special point something must be said hereafter. Meanwhile, hear one of the 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 morality ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... chief actor, and the source from which the dramatist must cull his choicest beauties, painting up to nature the varied scenes which mark the changeful courses of her motley groups. Here she opes her volume to the view of contemplative minds, and spreads her treasures forth, decked in all the variegated tints that Flora, goddess of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... whole of the preceding day. I was thus able to discover the origin of the substance of the materialization of the writing, and also its psychic origin.' In other words, he claims that the message was not from the shade of the great dramatist, but was a precipitation of the blood of the psychic and an exercise of her subconscious mind, all of which ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... other feuds. As further proof that the girls were under the guidance of older heads, it is obvious, that there was, in the order of the proceedings, a skilful arrangement of times, sequences, and concurrents, that cannot be ascribed to them. No novelist or dramatist ever laid his plot deeper, distributed his characters more artistically, or conducted more methodically ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Lady Chapel. We were not there for that beauty, however, but for John Harvard's sake; yet no sooner were we fairly inside the church than our thoughts were rapt from him to such clearer fames as those of Philip Massinger, the dramatist; Edmund Shakespeare, the great Shakespeare's younger brother; John Fletcher, of the poetic firm of Beaumont and Fletcher; the poet Edward Dyer; and yet again the poet John Gower, the "moral Gower" who so insufficiently filled the long ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the famous sea 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 contrived years before by Mr. Powell, under the Piazza, Covent Garden, and concerning which ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... wherewithal in the least to indulge them, was a less evil for him than seeing us rudely corrected. It was in truth an extraordinary situation and would have offered a splendid subject, as we used to say, to the painter of character, the novelist or the dramatist, with the hand to treat it. After I had read David Copperfield an analogy glimmered—it struck me even in the early time: cousin Henry was more or less another Mr. Dick, just as cousin Helen was in her relation to him more or less another Miss Trotwood. There were disparities indeed: Mr. Dick was ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... 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
... real greatness. Marguerite Claes, the daughter, is a noble heroine; and if one wishes to see how Balzac's characters and ideas suffer when treated by another though an able hand, one has but to read in conjunction with this novel the 'Maitre Guerin' of the distinguished dramatist Emile Augier. A proper pendant to this history of a noble genius perverted is 'La Confidence des Ruggieri,' the second part of that remarkable composite 'Sur Catherine de Medicis,' a book which in spite of its mixture of history, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... books—or let us say twenty—on Mr. Bernard Shaw. They deal with him as a sociologist, a dramatist, or what not, but never as a humorist. There is a mass of books on Oscar Wilde, and they deal with everything concerned with him, except his humour. The great humorists—as such—go unsung to their graves. That is because there is nothing so obvious ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... dramatists, I confess I am not in the position to deny that their wares frequently "sell." [Laughter.] I might, of course, artfully plead in extenuation of this condition of affairs that success in such a shape is the very last reward the dramatist toils for, or desires; that when the theatre in which his work is presented is thronged nightly no one is more surprised, more abashed than himself; that his modesty is so impenetrable, his artistic absorption so profound, that the sound of the voices of public ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... highest excellence and repute in the age of Louis XIV, and we should not be making a very hazardous assertion if we were to say that the literature of that epoch in France attained its height of glory in the drama. No French dramatist has excelled Moliere, Corneille, and Racine; no group of authors in the seventeenth century were more brilliant, more powerful, more originative. When we turn our eyes upon the stage for which these three wrote, we find ourselves ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... to himself, from this "Examination of Shakspeare," more favourable opinion of Sir Thomas than is left upon his mind by the dramatist in the character of Justice Shallow. The knight, indeed, is here exhibited in all his pride of birth and station, in all his pride of theologian and poet; he is led by the nose, while he believes that nobody can move him, and shows ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... learning; all that is required is to prove adherence to common nature and common rationality. This is the ground upon which Anonymous stands, and it is the ground upon which Morgann is to stand when he gives us the "Falstaff of Nature," and Johnson when he presents Shakespeare as the dramatist who is "above all modern writers the poet of nature," whose "persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions by which all minds are agitated," whose "drama is the mirror of life," ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... better in heroic or in ludicrous parts. He was allowed to be both the best Alexander and the best Sir Courtly Nice that ever trod the boards. Queen Mary, whose knowledge was very superficial, but who had naturally a quick perception of what was excellent in art, admired him greatly. He was a dramatist as well as a player, and has left us one comedy which ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his churlish tale in his manner," of which manner the less said the better; while in the "Reeve's Tale," Chaucer even, after the manner of a comic dramatist, gives his Northern undergraduate a vulgar ungrammatical phraseology, probably designedly, since the poet was himself a "Southern man." The "Pardoner" is exuberant in his sample-eloquence; the "Doctor of Physic" is gravely ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... begin his studies (or at least his enjoyment) thereof, not with "Sapho," but with Gauthier de Costes, Seigneur de la Calprenede, himself according to Tallemant almost the proverbial "Gascon et demi"; a tragic dramatist, as well as a romantic writer; a favourite of Mme. de Sevigne, who seldom went wrong in her preferences, except when she preferred her very disagreeable daughter to her very agreeable son; and more than any one else the inventor, or at least perfecter, of the hectoring heroic style which we associate ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... literature of the day. Tottel and The Mirror for Magistrates (which was, considering its constant accretions, a sort of miscellany) have been already noticed. They were followed by not a few others. The first in date was The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), edited by R. Edwards, a dramatist of industry if not of genius, and containing a certain amount of interesting work. It was very popular, going through nine or ten editions in thirty years, but with a few scattered exceptions it does not yield much to the ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... British 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 a bush of ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... dramatist and poet laureate, and one of the first editors of Shakespeare, was at this time under-secretary to the Duke of Queensberry, Secretary of ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... the present life of Shakespeare endeavours loyally to adhere to the principles that are inherent in the scheme of the 'Dictionary of National Biography.' I have endeavoured to set before my readers a plain and practical narrative of the great dramatist's personal history as concisely as the needs of clearness and completeness would permit. I have sought to provide students of Shakespeare with a full record of the duly attested facts and dates of their master's career. I have avoided merely aesthetic criticism. ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... by him or published as his, must certainly have preceded "Every Man in His Humour" on the stage. The former play may be described as a comedy modelled on the Latin plays of Plautus. (It combines, in fact, situations derived from the "Captivi" and the "Aulularia" of that dramatist). But the pretty story of the beggar-maiden, Rachel, and her suitors, Jonson found, not among the classics, but in the ideals of romantic love which Shakespeare had already popularised on the stage. Jonson never again produced ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... 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 types the modern folk-life ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... up Mr. Martin's Privately Printed Books, but neither our dramatist nor his press is there alluded to. Touching the latter, Mr. Wallace ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... 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 ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... drawers made out of a highly polished outlandish wood, with little devices of gilt rails, and drawer-furnishings, and tiny figures, and little bits of china "let in," which might easily catch a duster, thought Mrs. Dixon, and "mak' trooble." That it had belonged to a French dramatist under Louis Quinze, and then to a French Queen; that the plaques were Sevres, and the table as a whole beyond the purse of any but a South African or American man of money, was of ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... carrying an unsavoury sense. (Act I. Scene 4.) A puzzle, in the usual meaning of the word, the Maid was to the dramatist. I shall not enter into the dispute as to whether Shakespeare was the author, or part author, of this perplexed drama. But certainly the role of the Pucelle is either by two different hands, or the one author was 'in two minds' about the heroine. Now she appears as la ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... face always wore a smile so sweet that I forgot my pain when I gazed upon her. Her voice rings in my ears even now. It was peculiarly soft and musical, and I never heard her speak but I recalled those lines of the great dramatist, 'Her voice was ever low, an excellent thing in woman.' Every sufferer waited to hear her speak and seemed to hang upon her accents. Her words were few, but so kind that we all felt that with such a friend to help us we could ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... some explanation of what had happened to his brother, and sister, and himself. Or, failing to do this, she might accidentally reveal some event in her own experience which, acting as a hint to a competent dramatist, might prove to be the making of a play. The prosperity of his theatre was his one serious object in life. 'I may be on the trace of another "Corsican Brothers,"' he thought. 'A new piece of that sort would be ten thousand pounds ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... February 27, 1842, and produced the sum of L1918 2s. 6d. It is on the latter part that I am disposed to dwell more particularly, because it was so eminently rich in Shakspearian lore; and because, at this present moment, the name of our immortal dramatist seems to be invested with a fresh halo of incomparable lustre. The first edition of his smaller works has acquired most extraordinary worth in the book-market. The second part of Mr. Chalmers's collection ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... plays were successful and promised a career as dramatist, his reputation now rests chiefly ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... 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 ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... "He is conscience." Valjean's struggle with conscience is one of the majestic chapters of the world's literature, presenting, as it does, the worthiest and profoundest study of Christian conscience given by any dramatist since Christ opened a new chapter for conscience in the soul. Monsieur Madeleine, the mayor, is rich, respected, honored, is a savior of society, sought out by the king for political preferment. ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... of an invalid. The easily rendered, and too surely recognized, image of familiar suffering is felt at once to be real where all else had been false; and the historian of the gestures of fever and words of delirium can count on the applause of a gratified audience as surely as the dramatist who introduces on the stage of his flagging action a carriage that can be driven or a fountain that will flow. But the masters of strong imagination disdain such work, and those of deep sensibility shrink ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... at the Central Hotel they were plunged into a denser fog than ever, and by means so ludicrously simple that even a budding dramatist would hesitate to avail himself of such a crude device. The police had searched the dead man's clothing without finding any positive clew to his name. His linen was marked H. R. H., and certain laundry marks might ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... Porter was a dramatist of considerable reputation, all his productions, except the copy now reprinted, appear to have utterly perished; and, I believe, the only materials to be found for his biography are the subjoined memoranda ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... Reginald, "and, anyhow, I'm not responsible for the audience having a happy ending. The play would be quite sufficient strain on one's energies. I should get a bishop to say it was immoral and beautiful—no dramatist has thought of that before, and everyone would come to condemn the bishop, and they would stay on out of sheer nervousness. After all, it requires a great deal of moral courage to leave in a marked manner ...
— Reginald • Saki
... or as critic; but all eighteenth-century editors accepted many of his emendations, and the biographical material that he and Betterton assembled remained the basis of all accounts of the dramatist until the scepticism and scholarship of Steevens and Malone proved most of it to be merely dubious tradition. Johnson, indeed, spoke generously of the edition. In the Life of Rowe he said that as an editor Howe "has done more than he promised; ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... sentences kept dancing through his memory: "Unknown dramatist of tremendous power," "A love story so pitiless, so true, that it electrifies," "The deep cry of a suffering heart," "Norma Berwynd enters the galaxy ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... had faded suddenly from his dreams, as if a bat's wing had fluttered overhead, and in his new mood, he felt a resurgence of his old self-consciousness. He was provoked by the suspicion that he had shown less as a coming dramatist than as a present fool, and he contrasted his own awkwardness with Adams' whimsical ease of manner. Did a woman ever forget how a man appeared when she first met him? Would any amount of fame to-morrow obliterate from Laura's memory his embarrassment of yesterday? He had heard that the surface impression ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... in 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 ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... 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 ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... murmured. 'Not thus shall they treat my lines. Every syllable must be engraved upon their hearts, or I forbid the curtain to go up. Not that it matters with this fool-dramatist's words; they are ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... 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 opera. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... of all, need to define their tasks. I do not mean their technical problems merely, although I cannot conceive that a dramatist or playwright, who has his subject well in mind, can possibly be hurt by thinking out his methods with the most scrupulous care. Lubbock's recent book on "The Craft of Fiction" has emphasized an art of ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... this opera is surpassingly delightful. Though Schumann's genius was not that of a dramatist of a very high order, this opera deserves to be known and esteemed universally. Nowhere can melodies be found finer or more poetical and touching than in this noble musical composition, the libretto of which ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... 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 ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... "Venice Preserved." A tragedy by Thomas Otway, one of the Elizabethan dramatists (1682).—"Fiesco." A tragedy by the great German dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1783), the full title of which is The ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... the old sphinx of political and social economy who sits by the roadside has been proposing to mankind from the beginning, and which mankind have shown such a singular talent for answering wrongly. In this sense Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekker said he was the first true gentleman. The characters may be easily doubled, so strong is the likeness between them. A beautiful and profound parable of the Persian poet Jellaladeen tells us that "One knocked at the Beloved's door, and a voice asked from ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Benrimo, the dramatist, who wrote "The Yellow Jacket," relates that when he was a young writer, fresh from the breezy atmosphere of San Francisco, he visited London. Coming out of the Burlington Gallery one day, he saw a little ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... department at Wellesley continued unswervingly to make use of philology, sources, and even art forms, as means to an end; that end the interpretation of literary epochs, the illumination of intellectual and spiritual values in literary masterpieces, the revelation of the soul of poet, dramatist, essayist, novelist. No teaching of literature is less sentimental than the teaching at Wellesley, and no teaching is more quickening to the imagination. Now that the method of accumulated detail "about it and ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... Shakespeare, the greatness which has made men try to make a dozen specialists out of him, is not so very wonderful when one considers that he was a dramatist. A dramatist cannot help growing great. At least he has the outfit for it if he wants to. One hardly wants to be caught giving a world recipe,—a prescription for being a great man; but it does look sometimes as if the habit of reading ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... preceded "Every Man in His Humour" on the stage. The former play may be described as a comedy modelled on the Latin plays of Plautus. (It combines, in fact, situations derived from the "Captivi" and the "Aulularia" of that dramatist). But the pretty story of the beggar-maiden, Rachel, and her suitors, Jonson found, not among the classics, but in the ideals of romantic love which Shakespeare had already popularised on the stage. Jonson never again produced so fresh ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... spirit and admiration of woman in those days! Old Priam and all his aged council pay her reverence. Menelaus is the only one of the Grecian heroes that had no other wife or mistress—here was devotion and constancy! Andromache has been, and ever will be, the pride of the world. Yet the less refined dramatist has told of her wrongs; for he puts into her mouth a dutiful acquiescence in the gallantries of Hector. Little can be said for the men. Poor old Priam we must pardon, if Hecuba could and did; for Priam told her that he had nineteen children by her, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... celebrities whom his fascinating and versatile talents attracted thither. As I shall return to this later on, I will merely mention here the names of such men as Thackeray, Tennyson, Frederick Locker, Stirling of Keir, Tom Taylor the dramatist, Millais, Leighton, and others of lesser note. Cayley was a member of, and regular attendant at, the Cosmopolitan Club; where he met Dickens, Foster, Shirley Brooks, John Leech, Dicky Doyle, and the wits of the day; many of whom occasionally formed part ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... to whom Walter consigned Jonson in a clothes-basket carried by two stout porters. Though the particular tales are hardly credible, Jonson's revelries may have laid him open to lectures by the father, and disrespect from the son, which would have something to do with the dramatist's sneer at the memory of Ralegh, as one who 'esteemed more fame than conscience.' At all events, Walter, now just twenty-three, was back from the Continent in time to command his father's finely-built and equipped flagship, the Destiny. He was as full of life as Edward Hastings ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... mother-country may have taken refuge about that time in Athens. At Athens he resided for nearly fifty years, and during that period became the friend and teacher of many eminent men, among the rest of Pericles, the great Athenian [118] statesman, and of Euripides, the dramatist. Like most of the Ionian philosophers he had a taste for mathematics and astronomy, as well as for certain practical applications of mathematics. Among other books he is said to have written a treatise on the art {53} of scene-designing for the stage, possibly to oblige his friend and pupil ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... he should find resources in his wit and invention; and accordingly he commenced as writer for the stage. His first play, a comedy entitled Love in Several Masks, was performed at Drury Lane in February 1728, just before the youthful dramatist had attained his twenty-first year. In his preface to these 'light scenes' he alludes with some pride to this distinction—"I believe I may boast that none ever appeared so early on the stage";—and he proceeds to a generous acknowledgment of the aid received from those dramatic stars of the eighteenth-century, ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... comparison," Mrs. Parmele sweeps away all secondary details, all the less important incidents, and proceeds to her narrative of Columbus's discovery, the colonial period, the founding of our Republic, and its subsequent life down to the present year, with the simple directness of a dramatist; there is no halting in her impetuous relation; it is infused throughout with the same degree of philosophical ardor, and one follows as one does a wonder tale the rapid sequence of events, tracing with an awakened interest the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 36, July 15, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... writers in the "N. & Q.," who have devoted their ingenuity and 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... mean that Shakespeare was less the poet, as well as less the dramatist, if he revealed himself to us in his poetry? And is ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... them all down at the right moment and without confusion. Such is the narrator's task, and it was at this task that Macaulay proved himself a past master. He could dispose of a number of trivial events in a single sentence. Thus, for example, runs his account of the dramatist Wycherley's naval career: "He embarked, was present at a battle, and celebrated it, on his return, in a copy of verses too bad for the bellman." On the other hand, when it is a question of a great crisis, like the impeachment of Warren Hastings, he knew how to prepare for ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... had given poetical expression to a view of the world nearly allied to Schopenhauer's, though this was previous to his acquaintance with the works of the latter.[1] One of the most thoughtful disciples of the Frankfort philosopher and the Bayreuth dramatist is Fried rich Nietzsche (born 1844). His Unseasonable Reflections, 1873-76,[2] is a summons to return from the errors of modern culture, which, corrupted by the seekers for gain, by the state, by the polite writers and savants, especially by the professors of philosophy, has ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... his profession as a comic poet alone drove him into the faction of the malcontents? This would surely be to wilfully mistake the dignity of character and consistency of conviction which are to be found underlying all his productions. Throughout his long career as a dramatist his predilections always remain the same, as likewise his antipathies, and in many respects the party he champions so ardently had claims to be regarded as representing the best interests of the state. It is but just therefore to proclaim Aristophanes as having deserved well of ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... Northington, Fighting Fitzgerald, Captain Ayscough, and finally the Prince of Wales; whilst her talents and conversation secured her the friendship and interest of David Garrick, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Charles James Fox, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Murphy, the dramatist, and various other men ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... at Westminster, England, about 1573. He was the friend of Shakespeare and a famous dramatist in his day, but his plays no longer hold the stage. His best play is "Every Man in his Humour." His songs and short poems are beautiful. He died in 1637. His tomb in Westminster Abbey is ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... it reported of Dryden and of Fuseli, in modern 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 ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... is the games they play!" said the wife of a dramatist, whose one successful piece had been followed by years ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... we cannot deny to music an emotional content of some kind. I would go farther, and assert that, while a merely mechanical musician may set inappropriate melodies to words, and render music inexpressive of character, what constitutes a musical dramatist is the conscious intention of fitting to the words of his libretto such melody as shall interpret character, and the power to do ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of Licia, was one of that distinguished family that included Richard Fletcher, the Bishop of London, and his son John Fletcher, the dramatist. The two sons of Dr. Giles Fletcher were also men of marked poetic ability: Phineas, the author of that extraordinary allegorical poem, The Purple Island; and Giles, of Christ's Victory and Triumph. There was a strong family ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... The plot is intricate. The interest of the piece is in the plot. When a plot engrosses the vitality of a dramatist's mind, his character-drawing dies; so here. It is sufficient to say that the character of AEgeon is ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... ante, p. xxvi. The intended marriage above referred to above came to nothing, Miss Cumberland, the eldest daughter of the dramatist subsequently marrying Lord Edward Bentinck, son ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... Synge, the master dramatist of the new movement, while he does not reproduce the average Irishman, is just as natively Irish in his extravagance and irony as the old folk-tale of the "Two Hags"; Lady Gregory in her farces is in a similar way representative of the riot of ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... ancient castle, its dismantled tower within easy bow-shot, overrun with weeds and ivy, overlooks the noble river, whose expansive sweep of waters is at this point of passage spanned by an old, but still substantial bridge. In the shadow of the cathedral and within hearing of the river, Gerald Griffin, dramatist, poet and novelist, was born on the 12th of December, 1803. His father, who had succeeded to a goodly estate, a considerable fortune and an honored name, sold the fee simple of his landed inheritance, and removed to ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... exhibited his magic glass, in which the noble poet saw this beautiful dame, sick, weeping upon her bed, and inconsolable for the absence of her admirer.—It is now known, that the sole authority for this tale is Thomas Nash, the dramatist, in his Adventures of Jack Wilton, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... different merit, offer some marked points of resemblance. Both are lyric poems in the form of plays. There are perhaps no two kinds of composition so essentially dissimilar as the drama and the ode. The business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his personal feelings, the illusion is broken. The effect is as unpleasant as that which is produced on the stage by the voice of a prompter or the entrance of a scene- ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... for instance? Was he the cook, or the man cooked for? I fancy I knew once, but I have forgotten. But chicken-a-la-king will live to perpetuate his name as long as there are chickens to be eaten and men to eat them. Even Sardou, spectacular dramatist, for all his Toscas and Fedoras (and ten to one you think of Fedora as a hat!), lives for me, a dramatic critic, by virtue of eggs Victorien Sardou, a never-to-be-too-much-enjoyed concoction secured at the old Brevoort House in New York. He may actually have invented this ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... [2] Our dramatist Webster, whose genius was fascinated by the crimes of Italian despotism, makes the Duke of Bracciano exclaim ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Reade made his first appearance as an author comparatively late in life. He was the son of an English squire, born at Ipsden on June 8, 1814, and was educated for the Bar, being entered at Lincoln's Inn in 1843. His literary career began as dramatist, and it is significant that it was his own wish that the word "dramatist" should stand first in the description of his works on his tombstone. His maiden effort in stage literature, "The Ladies' Battle," was produced in 1851; but it was not until November, 1852, with the appearance of "Masks ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... reader's mind. And the total difference between the second and the first volume in point of fulness, variety, and colour is most marked. The artist, the inventor, the master of dialogue, the comic dramatist, in fact, as distinct from the humorous essayist, would almost seem to have started into being as we pass from the one volume to the other. There is nothing in the drolleries of the first volume—in the broad jests upon Mr. Shandy's crotchets, or even in the ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... and clean Latin literature, and also in Greek if such may be gotten. When Jonson spoke as above, he intended to put Shakespeare low among the learned, but not out of their pale; and he spoke as a rival dramatist, who was proud of his own learned sock; and it may be a subject of inquiry how much Latin he would call little. If Shakespeare's learning on certain points be very much less visible than Jonson's, it is partly because ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... stated as follows: It is not possible for us to think of the heroes and singers of the ages as having less endurance than the words which they have uttered and the deeds which they have performed. Milton's and Shakespeare's bodies have long been dead. The great dramatist has recorded a dire curse on any one who should move his bones. In the chancel of the Church of the Holy Trinity at Stratford-on-Avon those bones are supposed to rest. But the plays that Shakespeare wrote are ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... in order to compass a selfish end, are nowhere abundant but in the world of the dramatist: they demand too intense a mental action for many of our fellow-parishioners to be guilty of them. It is easy enough to spoil the lives of our neighbors without taking so much trouble; we can do it by lazy ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... questions of divinity and the Church "his mind was literally world-wide. His eyes were for ever observant of what was around him. At a time when science was hardly out of its shell he had observed Nature with the liveliest curiosity. He studied human nature like a dramatist. Shakespeare himself drew from him. His memory was a museum of historical information, anecdotes of great men, and old German literature, songs, and proverbs, to the latter of which he made many rich additions ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... picturesque language, if he is inclined to do so—and he is very often inclined. He received the "Prix Vitet" in 1879 from the Academy for Le Drapeau. Despite our unlimited admiration for Claretie the journalist, Claretie the historian, Claretie the dramatist, and Claretie the art-critic, we think his novels conserve a precious and inexhaustible mine for the Faguets and Lansons of the twentieth century, who, while frequently utilizing him for the exemplification of the art of fiction, will salute him as "Le ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... fashion themselves in this under-mind, as the novelist and dramatist will testify. The artist finds his picture forming itself before his inner vision, and so the musician hears his composition. "It comes," they say: so does the oak. But like the oak it can only come when conditions allow, and one of the main conditions is that the consciousness ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... espousals of the sister Marcela de San Felix to the eldest son of God—the audacious phrase is of the father and priest Frey Lope—were celebrated with princely pomp and luxury; grandees of Spain were her sponsors; the streets were invaded with carriages from the palace, the verses of the dramatist were sung in the service by the Court tenor Florian, called the "Canary of Heaven;" and the event celebrated in endless rhymes by the ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... gidayu recitation; but in the privacy of one's circle and hobby the banquet is an important feature—at least to the guests. In his history of "Japanese Literature" (Dai Nihon Bungaku Shi, pp. 591-596) Suzuki Cho[u]ko[u] gives a long extract from the play, as sample of Tsuruya's powers as a dramatist. Adopted into the House of the actor Tsuruya Namboku, and marrying his daughter, Katsu Byo[u]zo[u] in turn assumed the name ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... one of the most attractive features of earlier art in pursuit of a more logical design, and should then have been forced to abandon that very vault which gave their design all its logic. It is as if a dramatist strictly subordinated all his characters before the central figure of the hero, and then discovered that the exigencies of the plot would not allow of the introduction of ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... Sir Charles Sedley (properly Sidley), the famous wit and dramatist of Charles II.'s reign. In his reprint of 1735, Faulkner prints the name "Sidley," though the original twopenny tract and the "Hibernian Patriot" print it as "Sidney." Sir W. Scott corrects it ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... analysis, and explanation of all the principal 'characters' of our great dramatist, as Othello, Falstaff, Richard the Third, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... Corneille,* which had given edge to the polished weapon of Boileau, which had lavished over the bright page of Moliere,—Moliere, more wonderful than all—a knowledge of the humours and the hearts of men, which no dramatist, save Shakspeare, has surpassed. Within those walls still glowed, though now waxing faint and dim, the fame of that monarch who had enjoyed, at least till his later day, the fortune of Augustus unsullied by the crimes of Octavius. Nine times, since the sun of that monarch rose, had the Papal ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... insipid. It is a competent, but woefully uninspiring, piece of work. Above all things, Mr. Roberts lacks humour—a quality indispensable in a writer on Ibsen. For Ibsen, like other men of genius, is slightly ridiculous. Undeniably, there is something comic about the picture of the Norwegian dramatist, spectacled and frock-coated, "looking," Mr. Archer tells us, "like a distinguished diplomat," at work amongst the ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... I write the fourth Act with this ridiculous thing posed among my papers? What thing? It is a doll in a pink silk dress—an elaborate doll that walks, and talks, and warbles snatches from the operas. A terrible lot it cost! Why does an old dramatist keep a doll on his study table? I do not keep it there. It came in a box from the Boulevard an hour ago, and I took it from its wrappings to admire its accomplishments again—and ever since it has been reminding me that women are ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... political, dramatist speaks of the Athenian empire as comprehending a thousand states. The language of the stage must not be taken too literally; but the number of the dependencies of Athens, at the time when the Peloponnesian confederacy attacked her, was undoubtedly very great. With a few trifling exceptions, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... singers, who had supported him at the outset, joined the rival ranks or left England. In fact it may be almost said that the English public were becoming dissatisfied with the whole system and method of Italian music. Colley Cibber, the actor and dramatist, explains why Italian opera could never satisfy the requirement of Handel, or be anything more than an artificial luxury in England: "The truth is, this kind of entertainment is entirely sensational." Still both Handel and his friends and his ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... could, poor woman, but in what belittling, coarsening conditions! She had to interpret a character in a play, and a character in a play—not to say the whole piece: I speak more particularly of modern pieces—is such a wretchedly small peg to hang anything on! The dramatist shows us so little, is so hampered by his audience, is restricted to so poor ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... the magazines of the United States are hungry for good Short-stories, and sift carefully all that are sent to them, in the hope of happening on a treasure, the theatres of the United States are closed to one-act plays, and the dramatist is denied the opportunity of making a humble and tentative beginning. The conditions of the theatre are such that there is little hope of a change for the better in this respect,—more's the pity. The manager has a tradition that a "broken ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... to a hasty dinner [in Pall Mall], and then hurried away to see honest Dan Terry's house, called the Adelphi Theatre, where we saw the Pilot, from the American novel of that name. It is extremely popular, the dramatist having seized on the whole story, and turned the odious and ridiculous parts, assigned by the original author to the British, against the Yankees themselves. There is a quiet effrontery in this that is of a rare and peculiar ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... imaginary one over the face of Agamemnon; neither height nor depth, propriety of expression was his aim.' It is a question whether Timanthes took the idea from the text of Euripides, or whether it is his invention, and was borrowed by the dramatist. The picture must have presented a contrast to that of his rival Parrhasius, which exhibited the fury ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... of the "romantic" 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 ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... that garret on some Saturday afternoon while our century was not far advanced in its second score of years, he might have found three boys in cloaks and doublets and plumed hats, heroes and bandits, enacting more or less impromptu melodramas. In one of the boys he would have seen the embryo dramatist of a nation's life history, John Lothrop Motley; in the second, a famous talker and wit who has spilled more good things on the wasteful air in conversation than would carry a "diner-out" through half a dozen London seasons, and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and had achieved the not too easy task of amassing a fortune while avoiding all risk of Holloway. He and his wife, Edith (nee Eppington), were as ill-matched a couple as could be conceived by any dramatist seeking material for a problem play. As they stood before the altar on their wedding morn, they might have been taken as symbolising satyr and saint. More than twenty years his junior, beautiful with the beauty of a Raphael's ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... to the Master Dramatist of his Age and with the Gratitude that is his Due from Every Younger Writer for the ...
— Oliver Cromwell • John Drinkwater
... Queen Elizabeth included England's greatest dramatist, William Shakespeare; and the Queen not only took delight in witnessing Shakespeare's plays, but also admired the poet as a player. The histrionic ability of Shakespeare was by no means contemptible, though probably not ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... our American novelist and dramatist, George Henry Miles, is not only a romantic and interesting story, it recalls one of the most striking achievements of ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... leave to do, my brother dramatists, I confess I am not in the position to deny that their wares frequently "sell." [Laughter.] I might, of course, artfully plead in extenuation of this condition of affairs that success in such a shape is the very last reward the dramatist toils for, or desires; that when the theatre in which his work is presented is thronged nightly no one is more surprised, more abashed than himself; that his modesty is so impenetrable, his artistic absorption so profound, that the sound of the voices of public approbation reduces him to ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... it in its proper place as a branch of physiology. And we are beginning to have a clearer understanding of the thoughts and the thought-producing actions of ourselves and our fellow beings. Soon it will be no longer possible for the historian and the novelist, the dramatist, the poet, the painter or sculptor to present in all seriousness as instances of sane human conduct, the aberrations resulting from various forms of disease ranging from indigestion in its mild, temper-breeding forms to acute ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... was still pursuing his Latin and Greek studies; and one article, on a classical subject, deserves especial notice. It is a thorough criticism of all the dramas of Euripides, in which he takes a view of the dramatist exactly the reverse of that maintained by Walter Savage Landor—asserting that he was a bungler in the tragic art, and far too much addicted to foisting his stupid moralisings into his plays. Another article in the Westminster, on the Prussian ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... play of Ibsen's has with the actors. They can't play false. It turns the merest theatrical sticks into men and women, and it does it through the perfect honesty of the dramatist. He deals so squarely with himself that they have to deal squarely with themselves. They have to be, ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... the Original: not as more adapted to an Athenian Audience 400 years B.C. but to a merely English Reader 1800 years A.D. Some dropt stitches in the Story, not considered by the old Genius of those days, I have, I think, 'taken up,' as any little Dramatist of these Days can do: though the fundamental absurdity of the Plot (equal to Tom Jones according to Coleridge!) remains; namely, that OEdipus, after so many years reigning in Thebes as to have a Family about him, should apparently never have heard of Laius' murder ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... judicious. I have been privileged to read the comments sent by him to Professor Matthews during the period of their collaboration together over "Peter Stuyvesant;" they are practical suggestions, revealing the peculiar way in which a dramatist's mind shapes material for a three hours' traffic of the stage—the willingness to sacrifice situation, expression—any detail, in fact, that clogs the action. Through the years of their acquaintance, Howard and Matthews were ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... 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 ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... 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, he speaks truly, ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... for nineteen nights. Many years afterwards, in 1863, it was 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 amid ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... in Council issued prohibiting the representation of matters of Church or State upon the stage, clearly implies the prevalence of such representations. It is altogether unlikely that the most popular dramatist of the day should, in this phase of his art, have remained an ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... Macbeth, for his realistic portrayal of Shylock, for his quarrel with Garrick in 1743, and for his private lectures on acting at the Piazza in Covent Garden. He is less well known than he deserves as a dramatist although there has been a recent revival of interest in his plays stimulated by a biography by William W. Appleton, Charles Macklin: An Actor's Life (Harvard University Press, 1960) and evidenced in "A Critical Study of the Extant Plays of Charles Macklin" by Robert ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... pleased and astonished me by its freedom from those defects that so often ruin the theatrical story. For one thing, of course, the explanation of this lies in my sustaining confidence that I was being handed out the genuine stuff. When a dramatist of Mr. VACHELL'S experience says that stage-life is thus and thus, well, I have to believe him. As a fact I seldom read so convincing a word-picture of that removed and esoteric existence. The title (not too happy) means the world beyond the theatre, that which so many players count well ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... he was, in the matter of social intercourse, even more indebted to distinguished men connected with it by authorship or acting. At Scribe's he was entertained frequently; and "very handsome and pleasant" was his account of the dinners, as of all the belongings, of the prolific dramatist—a charming place in Paris, a fine estate in the country, capital carriage, handsome pair of horses, "all made, as he says, by his pen." One of the guests the first evening was Auber, "a stolid little elderly man, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... 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
... spies, Hardy, Adams, Martin, an attorney, Loveit, a hair-dresser, the Rev. Jeremiah Joyce, preceptor to Lord Mahon, John Thelwall, the political lecturer, John Home Tooke, the philologist, Thomas Holcroft, the dramatist, Steward Kydd, a barrister, with several others, were all arraigned at the Old Bailey. The papers of Hardy and Adams had been seized, and an indictment was made out, which contained no less than nine overt acts of high-treason, all resolving themselves into the general charge, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... or York. For years they have lived and thought and spoken in an atmosphere and jargon of denationalised culture—even those of them who have never left our shores. They would take pains to be intimately familiar with the domestic affairs and views of life of some Galician gipsy dramatist, and gravely quote and discuss his opinions on debts and mistresses and cookery, while they would shudder at 'D'ye ken John Peel?' as a piece of uncouth barbarity. You cannot expect a world of that sort to be permanently concerned or downcast because the Crown of ...
— When William Came • Saki
... first he was prejudiced against it because it was in the Bible, but the majesty of the poem charmed him, overwhelmed him. He had read the plays of Shakespeare; he had closely studied what many consider to be the great dramatist's masterpiece, but "Macbeth" seemed to him poor and small compared with the Book of Job. The picture of Satan going to and fro on the earth, the story of Job's calamities, of his sorrows, and of the dire extremity in which he found himself, ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... yet how wide apart were these two in their real lives! I know of no one who has pictured the pathos of lives so near and yet so far apart as has George Eliot when she says: "Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion, and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every moment. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... to fling out those poetical hand grenades, those pasquinades and squibs, whose rich humour and keenly-pointed satire had so much influence on the politics of the day. It was in this century that Sheridan, who was the first to introduce Moore to London society, distinguished himself at once as dramatist, orator, and statesman, and left in his life and death a terrible lesson to his nation of the miseries and degradations consequent on indulgence in their besetting sin. It was in this century that ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... public instruction in Rio de Janeiro, professor at the Normal School and the National School of Fine Arts, and also a deputy from Pernambuco. With the surprising versatility of so many South Americans he has achieved a reputation as poet, novelist, dramatist, ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... and which the Commons chose to vote libellous. At the time we are now describing he had re-entered Parliament, and was still a brilliant penman on the side of the Whigs. His career as politician, literary man, and practical dramatist combined, seems in some sort a foreshadowing of that of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Gay was appointed Secretary to Lord Clarendon on a diplomatic mission to Hanover. Nicholas Rowe, the author of the "Fair Penitent" and the translator of Lucan's "Pharsalia," was at ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... the commissionership, must often have admitted of performance by deputy; for in 1707, the Whigs having become stronger, Lord Halifax was sent on a mission to the elector of Hanover; and, besides taking Vanbrugh the dramatist with him as king-at-arms, he selected Addison as his secretary. In 1708 Addison entered parliament, sitting at first for Lostwithiel, but afterwards for Malmesbury, which he represented from 1710 till his death. Here unquestionably he did fail. What part he may have taken in the details of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
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