"Dramatist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... opinion, all the great 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 foes, all the exponents of musical opinion ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... actresses, all of them pronounced characters, endowed with a degree of will and self-assertion, which, although it could not be matched against Strindberg's, yet would have been capable of producing friction with rather more pliant natures than that of the Swedish dramatist. ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... provides a good deal of sustenance to the particular form of vanity that lies behind the temptation. The dramatic sense loves public appearances and trappings, processions and ceremonies. The instinctive dramatist, who is also a clergyman, tends to think of himself as moving to his place in the sanctuary in a solemn progress, with a worn spiritual aspect, robed as a son of Aaron. He likes to picture himself as standing in the pulpit pale with emotion, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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
... 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 ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... Ostrovsky (1823-86) is the great Russian dramatist of the central decades of the nineteenth century, of the years when the realistic school was all-powerful in Russian literature, of the period when Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy created a literature of prose fiction that has had no superior in the world's history. His work in the drama takes ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... had a splendid start. Not, indeed, as a poet and dramatist, as he had hoped at first, but thanks to a series of scandalous stories which had made a sensation on the boulevards, so that after an action for damages and several duels, he had become our witty and brilliant ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... of you as have a genuine interest in the brilliant work of Bernard Shaw I shall first continue the animadversions on the importance of his social thought, endeavor to link it with the great and growing vision of H. G. Wells (novelist and not dramatist though he is, because of the significance of his new books, Kips and Mankind in the Making), and point out the serious purpose that seems to me to underlie Shaw's sarcastic pictures ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... educated at Jena, under Griesbach. He was made Professor at Berlin in 1810, but was deprived in 1819, in consequence of the Prussian government having opened a letter of condolence written by him to the mother of Sand, the assassin of the dramatist Kotzebue. (For the history of the excited state of the German students at this time, see K. Raumer's Paedagogik, vol. iv. translated.) In 1826 he was made Professor at Basle. An interesting life of him is given in the Bibliotheca Sacra for 1850. His ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Lear was never seen on any stage, so perfect in appearance, so entirely the ideal of SHAKSPEARE'S ancient King. It must have been a vision of IRVING in this character that the divinely-inspired poet and dramatist saw when he had a Lear in his eye. For a moment, too, he reminded me of BOOTH—the "General," not the "particular" American tragedian,—and when he appeared in thunder, lightning, hail, and rain, he suggested an embodiment of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... Sardou, 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 sit on ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... that I am the dramatist in real life," said he. "Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-staged performance. Surely our profession, Mr. Mac, would be a drab and sordid one if we did not sometimes set the scene so as to glorify our results. The blunt accusation, the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... materials, it is impossible to speak too highly. It is adequate praise to say that the language, in its perfect simplicity and exquisite beauty, is in keeping with the elevation of the thought, which is that of the Scriptures themselves. Nor should the constructive skill be unnoticed with which the dramatist has filled in the characters sketched by the Bible; the humility and grace of Esther's account of her own triumph (ll. 31-80), the art with which Haman betrays his cruel nature by the very offer of services he makes ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... ever-heightening accessions of feeling into forgetfulness of their personal lives, and absorption in the impersonal harmony, the spiritual receptivity, from which the grand truths are visible. The actors' masks allowed only the facial expression of a single mood; and it was a single mood the dramatist aimed to produce: a unity; one great word. There could be no grave-diggers; no quizzing of Polonious; no clouds very like a whale. The whole drama is the unfoldment of a single moment: that, say, in which ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... correct. Imagination painted it as a wild and romantic country,—romantic in its scenery and the character of its inhabitants; a very region of romance and sentiment; a fine field for the novelist and the dramatist; and to that class of writers it ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... BRINSLEY SHERIDAN was born at Dublin, September, 1751. His father was Thomas Sheridan, author of a Pronouncing Dictionary, and a distinguished teacher of elocution. His career was brilliant and successful, both as a dramatist and an orator. He entered Parliament in 1780 where his first speech was a failure; and when told, at its close, by one of his disappointed friends, that he had better have stuck to his former pursuit of writing plays, he rested his head on his hand for some minutes, and ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... assigned with a view to giving the students an insight into the dramatic structure of each scene in this act and of the act as a whole. All the questions would then bear on dramatic movement, on the dramatist's technique, on his way of arousing interest in his story, on devices for giving the cause and the development of the action. In the opening scene ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... on seditious proceedings would, if it were possible, have fastened on so compromising an act. Its members belonged to a higher class than those of Hardy's Society; for they included Romney the painter, Holcroft the dramatist, Horne Tooke, the humorous litterateur, and Thelwall, the ablest lecturer of the day.[276] That these men had advanced far beyond the standpoint of the Whiggish "Friends of the People," appears from a letter from ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... our year's income (proceeds of poems and the like), and of not getting into debt. Oh, I take no credit to myself; I was always in debt in my little way ('small im morals,' as Dr. Bowring might call it) before I married, but Robert, though a poet and dramatist by profession, being descended from the blood of all the Puritans, and educated by the strictest of dissenters, has a sort of horror about the dreadful fact of owing five shillings five days, which I call ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Sophocles is like the difference between the Satan 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 medium. A poem may be dramatic, yet not ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... how venial offence it was considered in the middle of the reign of Elizabeth. Looking over some MSS. of that time, a few weeks since, I met with a very singular and confirmatory piece of evidence, establishing that in the year 1585, the precise period when our great dramatist is supposed to have made free with the deer of the knight of Charlcote, nearly all the cooks'-shops and ordinaries of London were supplied with stolen venison. The following letter from the lord mayor (which I copy from the original) of that day, Thomas Pullyson, to secretary Walsingham, ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... royal house. A Danish dramatist. A celebrated Moorish King. An early King of England. An early King of Spain. A modern English poet. Answer—Primals form the first name and finals the second name of a ...
— Harper's Young People, June 29, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... 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
... more popular dramatist than either AEschylus or Sophocles. His fame passed far beyond the limits of Greece. Herodotus asserts that the verses of the poet were recited by the natives of the remote country of Gedrosia; and Plutarch ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... South London residence. It is the day following the final performance of the Smith-Hybrows' strenuous season of J.M. SYNGE drama, undertaken with the laudable intention of familiarising the suburb with the real Irish temperament and the works of the dramatist in question. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... Spanish play of the same name, of which the author is unknown; Molire seems to have partly followed an Italian comedy, written by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini, under the name of Le Gelosie fortunata del principe Rodrigo; the style, loftiness and delicacy of expression are peculiar to the French dramatist. ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... as you honor me, by giving me 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 ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... rage in that day, joint proprietors of the St. James's Chronicle, contributors both of them to the Connoisseur, and translators, Colman of Terence, Bonnell Thornton of Plautus, Colman being a dramatist besides. In the set was Lloyd, another wit and essayist and a poet, with a character not of the best. On the edge of the set, but apparently not in it, was Churchill, who was then running a course which to many seemed meteoric, and of whose verse, sometimes strong but ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... dire erection of English holiday array, as the face of an old but forgotten friend name Ezza. This youth had been a prodigy at college, and European fame was promised him when he was barely fifteen; but when he appeared in the world he failed, first publicly as a dramatist and a demagogue, and then privately for years on end as an actor, a traveller, a commission agent or a journalist. Muscari had known him last behind the footlights; he was but too well attuned to the excitements of that ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... after his death, in 1857, was defended many years later by his son in "The Book of the Dead," reflective of Tennyson's "In Memoriam," and marked by a triteness of phrase which was always Boker's chief limitation, both as a poet and as a dramatist. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... signification, brought into connexion with what precedes it, so is it, through its unusual meaning of grave, brought into connexion with what follows, it thus furnishing that equivocation of sense of which our great dramatist is so fond, rarely missing an opportunity of "paltering with ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... that nonjurors and Papists shared or affected to share it. Dryden, not long after the burning of Teignmouth, laid a play at the feet of Halifax, with a dedication eminently ingenious, artful, and eloquent. The dramatist congratulated his patron on having taken shelter in a calm haven from the storms of public life, and, with great force and beauty of diction, magnified the felicity of the statesman who exchanges the bustle of office and the fame of oratory for philosophic studies and domestic endearments. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "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 Conspiracy of ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 an unfailing ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... words and audiences to applaud them. Men such as Wycherly gave Milton models for the Belial of his great poem, "than whom a spirit more lewd fell not from heaven, or more gross to love vice for itself." The dramatist piques himself on the frankness and "plain dealing" which painted the world as he saw it, a world of brawls and assignations, of orgies at Vauxhall and fights with the watch, of lies and doubles-ententes, of knaves and dupes, of men who sold their daughters, and women who cheated their husbands. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... literature, and like a rift of light in a fogbank you then caught a gleam of an entirely different mentality. One day I found him reading a book by the French writer Huysmans, dealing with new art. And he confessed to me that he admired Hauptmann's Hannele, though he despised the same dramatist's Weavers. The truth is that no human being is made all of a piece; we are, mentally at least, more of a ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... of the 1818 edition of his Works. Louisa was Louisa Holcroft. Guichy was possibly the Frenchman, mentioned by Crabb Robinson, with whom the Lambs had travelled to France. Poole was, I imagine, John Poole, the dramatist, author of burlesque plays in the London Magazine and later of "Paul Pry," which, it is quite likely, he based ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... 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 within 'Who is there?' and he ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... national life, is clear from the directions in which he now sought his good. In Strafford as in Paracelsus, and even in Sordello, the subject had made some appeal to the interest in great epochs and famous men. Henceforth his attitude, as a dramatist, to history is a curious blend of the historical specialist who explores the recondite byways of history, and the romantic poet who abandons actuality altogether. He seeks his heroes in remote sequestered corners of the world,—Sardinia, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... "deed" above the "word," of action above speech, does not exhaust its meaning in setting the man of deeds, the soldier or the politician, above the thinker or the artist. It is an affirmation of the glory of the sole Actor, the Dramatist of the World, the Demiourgos, whose actions are at once the deeds and the thoughts of men. "Im Anfang war die That." The "deed" is nearer the eternal fountain than the "word"; though, on the other hand, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... has discussed the psychological phenomenon of a dramatist depicting a psychosis correctly in "Concerning Hamlet and Orestes." Journal of Abnormal Psychology, ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... himself never once in his reign entered a theatre. The piety of Queen Mary rendered her a rare attendant at the play-house. Plays were therefore no longer wanted. A playwright could not amuse. Congreve was a dramatist who had never exhibited even passable talent for other forms of poetical composition. But Tate's limited gifts, displayed to Dorset's satisfaction in various encomiastic verses addressed to himself, were fully equal to the exigencies of the office under the new order of things; he was by profession ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... Concerning the dramatist of the time, upon the occasion of the first performance of his play, his anxiety, irascibility, and peculiarities generally, Ben Jonson provides sufficient information. "We are not so officiously befriended by him," says one of the characters in the Induction ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... perception in some direction or other. To the musician, notes and intervals and vibrations are just the fairy flights and dances of forms audible to the ear; to the painter, it is a question of shapes and colours perceptible to the eye. The dramatist sees the same beauty in the interplay of human emotion; while it may be maintained that holiness itself is a passionate perception of moral beauty, and that the saint is attracted by purity and compassion, and repelled ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... inconsistent with each other; to make them meet in rapture, and part in agony; to fill their mouths with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow; to distress them as nothing human ever was distressed; to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered; is the business of a modern dramatist. For this, probability is violated, life is misrepresented, and language is depraved. But love is only one of many passions; and, as it has no great influence upon the sum of life[3], it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... 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
... case in the beginning of every nation's literature, any writer in Russia is taken for a miracle, and regarded with stupor. The dramatist Kukolnik is an example of this. He has written a great deal for the theater, but nothing in him is to be praised so much as his zeal in imitation. It must be admitted that in this he possesses a ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... to her, unless indeed by Schiller. Fourthly, we are not entitled to view as an attack upon Joanna, what, in the worst construction, is but an unexamining adoption of the contemporary historical accounts. A poet or a dramatist is not responsible for the accuracy of chronicles. But what is an attack upon Joan, being briefly the foulest and obscenest attempt ever made to stifle the grandeur of a great human struggle, viz., the French ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... to say that the Russian is so defective in the critical faculty as to balance the combined creative output of the greatest English dramatist against Gogol's one comedy, or even to attribute to it the literary value of any of Shakespeare's better plays. What the Russian's appreciation indicates is the pregnant role that literature plays in the life of intellectual Russia. Here literature is not ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... Court, I had always looked upon Corneille as the greatest tragic dramatist in the world, and as the foremost of our poets and men of letters. The King ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... course, I didn't think of bringing the children, Mr. Charteris—Shakespeare's language is not always sufficiently obscure, you know, to make that safe. And besides, as I so often say to Mr. Rabbet, it is sad to think of our greatest dramatist having been a drinking man. It quite depressed me all through the play to think of him hobnobbing with Dr. Johnson at the Tabard Inn, and making such irregular marriages, and stealing ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... Bronson Howard a dramatist, and then made him the first American dramatist of his day, were his human sympathy, his perception, his sense of proportion, and his construction. With his perception, his proportion, and his construction, respectively, ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... 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 movement. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the thoughts ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... a line of music, had he elected to be a literary man, a poet, a dramatist, philosopher, his fame to-day would still be world-wide. Had he confined his genius into this one channel of literary expression, as was his original intention, with his mental equipment, and a Napoleonic ambition that balked at nothing, the product would have ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... first brought to book in the courts for violation of his copyright, and then indemnified for such rights as his adaptation of the book had given him. The structure of the play as John T. Raymond gave it was substantially the work of this unknown dramatist. Clemens never pretended, to me at any rate, that he had the least hand in it; he frankly owned that he was incapable of dramatization; yet the vital part was his, for the characters in the play were his as the book embodied them, and the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... however, like that of 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... as the father of English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine upon principles the merit of composition. Of our former poets, the greatest dramatist wrote without rules, conducted through life and nature by a genius that rarely misled, and rarely deserted him. Of the rest, those who knew the laws of propriety ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... as was his own individuality from other men's. You could not classify his library according to any of the accepted nomenclatures peculiar to the initiated. He was not a black-letter man, or a tall copyist, or an uncut man, or a rough-edge man, or an early-English-dramatist, or an Elzevirian, or a broadsider, or a pasquinader, or an old-brown-calf man, or a Grangerite, or a tawny-moroccoite, or a gilt-topper, a marbled-insider, or an editio princeps man; neither did he come under any of the more vulgar classifications ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... hand to writing plays, but he was always a 'neglected dramatist' in the sense that he had to push his plays; his plays ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... excitement once allayed, he marked with exultation the symptoms of reaction. There was much in the circumstances attending his flight to awaken popular sympathy, and to cast a veil over his errors. The pathetic picture drawn of parental suffering by the great dramatist in the character of King Lear, seemed realized to the life in the person of King James. Message followed message from the three kingdoms, urging him to return and place himself at the head of his faithful subjects in a war against the usurper. The French ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... 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 ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... that vast region, with its thirty or forty million people and its territory as large as a half a dozen Frances or Germanys, there is not a single poet, not a serious historian, not a creditable composer, not a critic good or bad, not a dramatist dead or alive. ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... father of Denison Cumberland, Bishop of Clonfert and of Kilmore. This last named married a daughter of Dr Bentley, the famous Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and one of their sons was Richard Cumberland, the dramatist. Bishop Richard Cumberland is buried in the Cathedral, and a tablet to his memory remains in ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... cycle,[5] in like manner, seems to have been revised and largely written when it was last transcribed in 1468. But the supreme example of fifteenth-century addition to an older cycle is that of the Wakefield Plays, which early in the century were taken in hand by a dramatist of extraordinary ability, whose traceable contributions amount to over three thousand lines, distributed among at least six, or quite probably as many as nine different plays, of which five are homogeneous and entirely from his hand. Among these five are the well-known Prima and Secunda ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... the human heart in particular is a phrase which covers very different states of mind. It may mean that power by which the novelist or dramatist identifies himself with his characters; sees through their eyes and feels with their senses; it is the product of a rich nature, a vivid imagination, and great powers of sympathy, and draws a comparatively small part of its resources ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... this precious MS.? In this age of Shakspearian research, when every newly discovered relic is hailed with intense delight, may I inquire of some of your numerous readers, who seem to take as much delight as myself in whatever concerns our great dramatist and his writings, whether they can throw any light upon ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... manuscript; and after reading a bit of it, it appeared so remarkably Vealy, that I put it with indignation into the fire. Still I observed various facts of interest as to great things done by young men, and some by young men who never lived to be old. Beaumont the dramatist died at twenty-nine. Christopher Marlowe wrote "Faustus" at twenty-five, and died at thirty. Sir Philip Sidney wrote his "Arcadia" at twenty-six. Otway wrote "The Orphan" at twenty-eight, and "Venice Preserved" at thirty. Thomson wrote the "Seasons" at twenty-seven. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... because of certain political diatribes for which he was held responsible 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 ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... place in the great hierarchy of privilege and obligation, from the lowest human being up to the Olympian gods, so copiously and magnificently set forth as in Pindar's Odes of Victory. And AEschylus was the first dramatist to see with clear vision the primacy of the intellect in the law of orderly development, seemingly at variance with the divine immutable will of Fate, yet finally in mysterious accord with it. When the philosophers of the later period came to the creation of systematic ethics, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... Polonius with his arm in a sling, severely but not fatally wounded, form the sort of stage picture, as the curtain went down, that has sent audiences home, dissolved in happy tears, from so many theatres. But Shakespeare, being a dramatist as well as a playwright, learned from Hamlet himself that Hamlet could not end as he had meant him to end. Hamlet, in fact, could not really end at all, and, in the sort of anticlimax in which the tragedy closes, he must rise from death, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Colley Cibber, born in 1671, died in 1757; famous as a comedian and dramatist, and immortalized by Pope as the hero of the "Dunciad"; appointed Laureate in December, 1730, in succession to Eusden, who died in September that year. See Cibber's "Apology for his Life"; Disraeli's "Quarrels of Authors," edit. ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... 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
... the dramatist, describes in a kind of dream poem what he supposed to pass through the mind of a dying girl of thirteen or fourteen, who does not wish to live and is so absorbed by the "Brownies of her brain" that she hardly knows whether she is alive on earth or dead in heaven, and who sees the Lord Jesus ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... 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
... Dramatist had produced a tremendous drama and she had watched curtain after curtain fall from the wrong side of the lights. Now she had been given a speaking part; and she would be down stage for a moment or two—dusting the furniture—while the stars were retouching their make-up. It was ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... 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 such as to have transmitted his name to posterity ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... unprecedented event in the history of the theatre. The work of Greban was rehandled and enlarged by Jean Michel, and great was the triumph when it was given at Angers in 1486. Greban was not to be outdone either by his former self or by another dramatist; in collaboration with his brother Simon, he composed the yet more enormous Actes des Apotres, in sixty-two thousand lines, demanding the services of five hundred performers. When presented at Bourges as late as 1536, the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... precluded the danger of a false ideal,—of aiming at more than what is possible on the whole. What play of the ancients, with reference to their ideal, does not hold out more glaring absurdities than any in Shakspeare? On the Greek plan a man could more easily be a poet than a dramatist; upon our plan more easily ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... born of a family that had already produced two men of splendid genius, whose names are written in golden letters in the annals of literature: Beaumont, the dramatist, who wrote, in collaboration with his friend Fletcher, some plays that are considered by our best critics as inferior only to Shakespeare's, was related by his mother to the Pierreponts of the Elizabethan ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... when she wrote the biographical sketch of Alfieri for Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia nearly twenty years later. She then spoke of the difficulties inherent in such a subject, "inequality of age adding to the unnatural incest. To shed any interest over such an attachment, the dramatist ought to adorn the father with such youthful attributes as would be by no means contrary to probability."[xvii] This she endeavored to do in Mathilda (aided indeed by the fact that the situation was the reverse of that in Myrrha). Mathilda's father was young: he married before he ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... 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
... societies. Much discovery in science has been due to this power of the imagination to realise conditions that are unseen, and the habit or faculty of living other lives than our own is scarcely less valuable to the historian, and even to the statesman, than to the poet or the novelist or the dramatist. It gives the magic touch which changes mere lifeless knowledge ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... gay play-writers to whom Greene addressed his warning. They seem at this time to have united the professions of dramatist and actor, and to have been infected with that dissipation which has since been attributed with more or less justice to the stage. Peele is as fond as Greene of surprises and miraculous interventions. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Shakespeare will ultimately supersede all others. It must certainly be deemed an essential acquisition by every lover of the great dramatist."—N. Y. ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... astrological science, and above all, alchemist, if not sorcerer; the handsome and gallant, but "not intelligent" and not very chivalrous soldier Phoebus de Chateaupers, with minors not a few, "supers" very many, and the dramatist Pierre Gringoire as a sort of half-chorus, half-actor throughout. The evolution of this story could not be very difficult to anticipate in any case; almost any one who had even a slight knowledge of its actual author's ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... behind him 360 quires of paper full of his own compositions, in a writing so exceedingly small, and so exceedingly bad, that no person but himself could read it. Lord Holland has given a facsimile of Lope's handwriting, and though it cannot be compared to that of a dramatist of late times, one of whose plays, in the original manuscript, is said to be a sufficient load for a porter, it is evident that one of Mariner's pages would contain as much as a sheet of his friend's, which would, as nearly as possible, ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... The Conduct of Life gives fairly enough the leading thought of Emerson's life. The unending warfare between the individual and society shows us in each generation a poet or two, a dramatist or a musician who exalts and deifies the individual, and leads us back again to the only object which is really worthy of enthusiasm or which can permanently excite it,—the character of a man. It is surprising to find ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... origin, and quite unfounded) has it that, about this period, she established contact with a certain Jean Francois Montez, "an individual of immense wealth who lavished a fortune on her"; and Edward Blanchard, a hack dramatist of Drury Lane, contributes the somewhat unhelpful remark, "She became a Bohemian." Perhaps she did. But she had to discover a second career that would bring a little more grist to the mill. Such a ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... the author, and not of a growth from within. Indeed a large proportion of Ben Jonson's thoughts may be traced to classic or obscure modern writers, by those who are learned and curious enough to follow the steps of this robust, surly, and observing dramatist. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... others from the same source, was the convenient sentence of an adroit but reckless ignorance. The merits of St. Real are undoubtedly great; but Otway's indebtedness to him is exceedingly slight; and it is remarkable to see how ingeniously, from a few meagre historical details, the great dramatist has constructed one of the noblest imaginative works of which literature can boast. The names of nearly all the dramatis personae with the exception of Belvidera, are taken from St. Real; but their characters ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Thomas Otway
... said, 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 are ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... action of his play so far beyond the sacrifice of his heroine. A comparison of Webster's Virginius with any of Fletcher's wordy warriors will suffice to show how much nearer to Shakespeare than to Fletcher stands Webster as a tragic or a serious dramatist. Coleridge, not always just to Fletcher, was not unjust in his remark "what strange self-trumpeters and tongue bullies all the brave soldiers of Beaumont and Fletcher are"; and again almost immediately—"all B. and F.'s generals are pugilists, or cudgel-fighters, that boast of their bottom and ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... shall do my duty. Opposite you is Mademoiselle Trezani, the famous singer at Covent Garden. Do I need to tell you that, I wonder? Rudolf Maesterling, the dramatist, stands behind her there in the corner. He is talking to the wonderful Cleo, whom all the world knows. Monsieur Guyer there, he is manager, I believe, of the Alhambra; and talking to him is Marborg, the great pianist. One of the ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the first edition, were presumably intended for Cibber and Wilks, with whom, notwithstanding the "civil and kind Behaviour" for which he had thanked them in the "Preface" to Love in Several Masques, the young dramatist was now, it seems, at war. In the introduction to the Miscellanies, he refers to "a slight Pique" with Wilks; and it is not impossible that the key to the difference may be found ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... diligence in setting foorth of Dialogues and Enterludes before us fo' ou' regell disporte and recreacion.' ... And then goes on to authorize the loan of apparel for those purposes. Did the popularity of the Dramatist, and her personal acquaintance with him, since they had worked together on Erasmus' Paraphrase, lead the Queen to condone the intense Protestantism of the Preacher, even to the continuing of him ...
— Roister Doister - Written, probably also represented, before 1553. Carefully - edited from the unique copy, now at Eton College • Nicholas Udall
... not successful 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 ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... only collected edition of his dramas. Five plays are presented here which that edition did not include, and hence the present collection gives the completest view now attainable of Hauptmann's activity as a dramatist. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... (not Darwinian,) by which each would aim to draw forth a spirit to his liking. One would not summon the author of such and such a book, but this or that man. Milton wrote an admirable epic, but he would be awful in society. Shakspeare was a splendid dramatist, but one would hardly ask him for a boon-companion. Who could feel at ease under that omniscient eye? But, if the Plutonian shore might, for a few brief moments, render to our call its waiting shades, there ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... 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
... in an elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable in himself. Now our modern politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness; forgetfulness that the production of this happy and conscious life is after all the aim of all complexities and compromises. We talk of nothing but useful men ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... relates that when they met Oscar used to be full of his occasional visits to London and could talk of nothing but the impression made upon him by plays and players. From youth on the theatre drew him irresistibly; he had not only all the vanity of the actor; but what might be called the born dramatist's love for the varied life of the stage—its paintings, costumings, rhetoric—and above all the touch of emphasis natural to it which gives such ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... 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), and I suppose he can repeat ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... Does her calmness and 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 in ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... for a young poet to try his hand at a churchyard piece. Thus Richard Cumberland, the dramatist, in his "Memoirs," records the fact that when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1752 he made his "first small offering to the press, following the steps of Gray with another church-yard elegy, written on St. Mark's Eve, when, according to rural tradition, the ghost of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... All Screamersville turned out to hear him. William was a great favorite,—the most popular speaker in the country,—had the versatility of a mocking-bird, an aptitude for burlesque that would have given him celebrity as a dramatist, and a power of acting that would have made his fortune on the boards of a theater. A rich treat was expected, but it didn't come. The witness had taken all the wind out of William's sails. He had rendered burlesque impossible. The thing as acted was ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... usual, in a failure to see that there is glory enough in both; in the art of highly-finished composition and presentation, and in the art of bold and striking creation. Yet Vauvenargues was able to discern the secret of the popularity of Moliere, and the foundation of the common opinion that no other dramatist had carried his own kind of art so far as Moliere had carried his; 'the reason is, I fancy, that he is more natural than any of the others, and this is an important lesson for everybody who wishes to write.'[26] He did not see how nearly ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... natural and beautiful. Xenophon sympathetic with such a beautiful humanity. The woman's nature brought out by these touches. Xenophon, Dramatist: the moral problem is subordinate, that is to say, is made to grow out of ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... are true to the situation and really serve to enhance the suspense. There is much interest in the question often raised whether, if he had lived in an age like the Elizabethan, when the drama was the dominant literary form, he too would have been a dramatist. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... people. Amedee Silvenoire—the dramatist, you know; an interesting man. He paid me the compliment of refraining from compliments on my French. Madame Jacquelin, a stout and very plain woman, who told us anecdotes of George Sand; remind me to repeat them to-morrow. And Mr. ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... danseuse[Fr]. property man, costumier, machinist; prompter, call boy; manager; director, stage manager, acting manager. producer, entrepreneur, impresario; backer, investor, angel[fig]. dramatic author, dramatic writer; play writer, playwright; dramatist, mimographer[obs3]. V. act, play, perform; put on the stage; personate &c. 554; mimic &c. (imitate) 19; enact; play a part, act a part, go through a part, perform a part; rehearse, spout, gag, rant; "strut and fret one's hour upon a stage"; tread the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... made up a very handsome purse, which they presented to the dramatist for this championship of ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Tempest, are ready to maintain that its author must have been for at least a year before the mast. As for Shakespeare's law, which has taken in so many matter-of-fact practitioners, one can now refer to Ben Jonson's evidence in Hall v. Russell, where that great dramatist has no difficulty in showing that if none but a lawyer could have written Shakespeare's plays, a lawyer alone could have preached Thomas Adams's sermons. Judge Willis's profound knowledge of sound old divinity has served ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... compliment, from a rival dramatist, could only have been extracted by previous good offices and kindly countenance. Accordingly we find, that Dryden, in 1678-9, wrote a prologue to Shadwell's play, of "The ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... Euripides, appeared the great comedy writer, Aristophanes, about 420 B.C. This great artist was not simply a dramatist, but also a patriot and a philosopher. In several of his plays he satirizes the classical dramas effectively, parodies their effects, and in general pokes fun at them. He was, however, a well accomplished musician, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... works which, though of very 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Norfolk in 1560, Greene studied at Cambridge and received the degree of Master of Arts. After wasting his property in Italy and Spain, he returned to London to earn his bread by the pen. As a pamphleteer, as a poet, and especially as a dramatist, Greene achieved a considerable reputation. But his improvident habits and a life of constant debauchery brought his career to a close, amidst poverty and remorse, at the early age of thirty-two. He died in a drunken brawl, leaving in his works the evidence of talents and qualities which ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... and then went to enliven myself at the theatre, where I saw Momolo's girls strutting about with Costa; afterwards I went to Lord O'Callaghan, and was pleasantly surprised to meet the poet Poinsinet. He was young, short, ugly, full of poetic fire, a wit, and dramatist. Five or six years later the poor fellow fell into the Guadalquivir and was drowned. He had gone to Madrid in the hope of making his fortune. As I had known him at Paris I addressed ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... 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 from his own genius. Scarce a subject could be spoken of ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... emotions which we associate with the heroes of the romantic novels of the age. He believed in the almost unlimited powers of the human mind, and his own career, which saw his rise from stable-boy and cobbler to dramatist, was itself a monument to the human will. Looking in their mirrors, the progressives of that generation were tempted to think that perfection might have been within their reach had not their youth been stunted by the influence of Calvin and the British Constitution. ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... reading public at home in Iceland gave them too little scope. So they emigrated, mostly to Denmark, and in the early decades of the century began to write in foreign languages, though the majority continued simultaneously to write in the vernacular. Pioneers in this field were the dramatist Johann Sigurjnsson (1880-1919), and the novelist Gunnar Gunnarsson (b. 1889). Both of these wrote in Danish as well as in Icelandic. Early in the second decade of the century three of this overseas group produced ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... 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
... say, 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
... the same learned society. John Selden entered the Inner Temple in the second year of James I., where in due course he numbered, amongst his literary contemporaries,—William Browne, Croke, Oulde, Thomas Gardiner, Dynne, Edward Heywood, John Morgan, Augustus Caesar, Thomas Heygate, Thomas May, dramatist and translator of Lucan's 'Pharsalia,' William Rough and Rymer were members of Gray's Inn. Sir John David and Sir Simonds D'Ewes belonged to the Middle Temple. Massinger's dearest friends lived in the Inner Temple, of which society George Keate, the dramatist, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... produced Salome in 1906 they asked me for some other short drama by Wilde to present at the same time, as Salome does not take very long to play. I offered them the fragment of A Florentine Tragedy. By a fortunate coincidence the poet and dramatist, Mr. Thomas Sturge Moore, happened to be on the committee of this Society, and to him was entrusted the task of writing an opening scene to make the play complete. {1} It is not for me to criticise his work, but there ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... very things that are most essential to make oneself prevail as an Original. I have not the qualities of an orator, nor of a poet, nor of an administrator, nor of an organizer, nor of a composer, nor of a dramatist. The only things I have are patience, insight ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... 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 ...
— 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
... dramatist, a younger son of Dr. Richard Fletcher afterwards bishop of London, by his first wife Elizabeth, was born in December 1579 at Rye in Sussex, where his father was then officiating as minister. A 'John Fletcher ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... of the Antarctic that has never been explored," said Dr. Mundson; "and there, just showing on the horizon, is the Great Ice Barrier." His characteristic smile lighted the morose black eyes. "I am enough of the dramatist to wish you to be impressed with what I shall show you within less than an hour. Accordingly, I shall make a landing and let you feel polar ice under ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... of his earlier plays were successful and promised a career as dramatist, his reputation now rests chiefly upon his ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... 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 ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... told here. One may perhaps fairly easily detect its inspiration in certain actual happenings. It is the story of a woman, Lucy Briarwell, clever and gifted with personality, the grass-widow of an apparently incurable lunatic who, living in Bruges, falls under the influence of a Belgian poet-dramatist. Together—for Lucy is shown as his collaborator and source of inspiration—they evolve a wonderful new form of miracle play in which she presently captivates London and Paris as the reincarnate Notre Dame de Bruges. So much of the tale I indicate; the rest is your affair. It is ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... as a writer, which no one acquainted with our literature, save Elia himself, will think disproportionate or misplaced. If I had not these better reasons to govern me, I should be guided to the same selection by your intense yet critical relish for the works of the great Dramatist, and for that favorite play in particular which has furnished ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... face, nay, even in the manner his fat fingers held his fat cigar, that set Morgan wondering for the first time whether Ingram's attitude to literature did not in truth sum up the whole man; whether that popular novelist and dramatist could really have a place in his heart for anything that was of unimportance to his own personal existence—for a poor devil ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... different—as everything in this war has been—from anything I had ever dreamed when I imagined war. Yet I suppose that the future dramatist who uses this period as a background can get his effects just the same, without greatly falsifying the truth. You know I am like Uncle Sarcey—a really model theatre audience. No effect, halfway good, passes ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... 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 ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... this then the fate of that high-gifted man, The pride of the palace, the bower, and the hall— The orator, dramatist, minstrel,—who ran Through each mode of the lyre, and was master ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 12, No. 349, Supplement to Volume 12. • Various
... 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 ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... deepest springs of human nature. Of his style the most perfect criticism was given in the next generation by a single phrase, Horatii curiosa felicitas, of no poet can it be more truly said, in the phrase of the Greek dramatist Agathon, that "skill has an affection for luck and luck for skill." His poetry supplies more phrases which have become proverbial than the rest of Latin literature put together. To suggest a parallel ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... with the events thereof divided into separate scenes, the scenes gathered into grand acts, and the acts all tending to the great tragic conclusion of the whole. Happy were it for man if he, like a great dramatist, would keep the ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... 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 work flowing from the pen of so remarkable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... is that not of the historian but of the dramatist. The historical presentation of my hero has been faithfully made in many volumes; notably, in England, by Lord Charnwood in a monograph that gives a masterly analysis of Lincoln's career and character and is, it seems to me, a ...
— Abraham Lincoln • John Drinkwater
... ran 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
... of 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 ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... 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 ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... student! Mastered by the things he had believed he controlled! Meeting his life's destruction from the things which were to bring his life's triumph! In that moment of understanding's throwing wide her gates to torture, fate stood out as the master dramatist. Making him do it himself! Working it out ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... the final step necessary to complete his wonderfully progressive march was taken when he associated himself with Boito. Here was a man who united in himself in a creditable degree the qualifications which Wagner demanded for his "Artist of the Future"; he was poet, dramatist, and musician. No one who has studied "Otello" can fail to see that Verdi owes much in it to the composer of "Mefistofele"; but the indebtedness is even greater in "Falstaff," where the last vestige of the old subserviency ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... called Judaeo-Alexandrian. It includes among its writers the last of the Neoplatonists, particularly Philo, the originator of the allegorical interpretation of the Bible and of a Jewish philosophy of religion; Aristeas, and pseudo-Phokylides. There were also Jewish litterateurs: the dramatist Ezekielos; Jason; Philo the Elder; Aristobulus, the popularizer of the Aristotelian philosophy; Eupolemos, the historian; and probably the Jewish Sybil, who had to have recourse to the oracular manner of the pagans to proclaim the truths ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... into the instrument by which his most valuable provinces were, to be taken from him, and eventually re-organized into: an independent commonwealth. Could a vision, like that imagined by the immortal dramatist for another tyrant and murderer, have revealed the future to Philip, he, too, might have beheld his victim, not crowned himself, but pointing to a line of kings, even to some who 'two-fold balls and treble sceptres carried', and smiling on them for his. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... met with great and deserved success in America. As the present issue, in addition to the careful revision of Mrs Cowden Clarke, has had the benefit of the labours of Mr Charles Cowden Clarke, one of the most zealous and successful illustrators of the great Dramatist now living, they believe they are presenting Editions of Shakespeare's Works distinguished by an amount of mature judgment in collating the earlier copies which will vindicate their claim to ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... conscientious opponent of capital punishment. And legend has its fixed points no less than history. In the theatre, indeed, there is little distinction between them: history is legend, and legend history. A dramatist may, if he pleases (though it is a difficult task), break wholly unfamiliar ground in the past; but where a historic legend exists he must respect it at ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... to see the Uhlans stand, Paying their pious sixpences to enter That little homestead of the Fatherland That housed the dramatist in Stratford's centre; A trifle flushed, maybe, with English beer, But mutely reverent and not talking chattily, They write beneath their names: "A friend lives here; Not to be ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... mostly to his rooms, where he sat smoking cigarettes, gazing at Japanese prints, and trying not to think about "props" and "rehl." Then, gradually, the almost maternal yearning to see his brain-child once more, which can never be wholly crushed out of a young dramatist, returned to him—faintly at first, then getting stronger by degrees till it could no longer be resisted. True, he knew that when he beheld it, the offspring of his brain would have been mangled almost out of recognition, but that did not deter him. The mother loves her crippled ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... they may respond to the improved moral judgments, is at once an indispensable branch of moral education and an indispensable condition of moral progress. But this is the function, not so much of the scientific moralist, as of the parent, the instructor of youth, the poet, the dramatist, the novelist, the journalist, the artist, and, above all, of ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... the discoveries of these 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... 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 is looking. And in all these, and in all similar ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... our country with him and his newly married spouse: a lively, lady-like, and intelligent woman. She is warm in commendation of the Mary Stuart of Schiller; which, in reply to a question on my part, she considers to be the most impassioned of that Dramatist's performances. Of English she knows nothing; but her husband is well read in Thomson, Akenside, and Pope; and of course is sufficiently well acquainted with our language. A more amiable and zealous man, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... 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
... necessary link between knowing and willing. Many legends in the biographies of artists have sprung from this erroneous identification, since it seemed impossible that a man who gives expression to generous sentiments should not be a noble and generous man in practical life; or that the dramatist who gives a great many stabs in his plays, should not himself have given a few at least in real life. Vainly do the artists protest: lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba. They are merely taxed in addition with lying and hypocrisy. ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... loneliness, 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, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... it indecent to pry into that treasure-house of individuality from which, if we reject the nursery hypotheses mentioned above, it is clearly obvious that authors derive their works. That the drama must needs be closely related to the dramatist is just one of those simple discoveries that invariably elude the subtle professional mind; but in this wiser hour I may be permitted to assume that the author was the conscious father of his novel, and that he did not find it surprisingly ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton |
