"Comedy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... comedy appeared in Gripsack for 1882, and was written at the request of the editor of Grip, who was, and is, in full sympathy with all efforts to secure the rights of women. At that date the Council of University College had refused to entertain the application of ladies ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... read in the paper that morning that the chorus was to be "tried out" for a new musical comedy. Thinking that Ann, too, might have read that in the paper, ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... notion of attending a baronet in the country, what influence won't a countess have on him? When he is softened—when he is quite ripe, we will break the secret upon him; bring in the young people, extort the paternal benediction, and finish the comedy." ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... great reason to doubt how far the second line could justly be applied to the parish! but there was no judging of the sermon, for only detached sentences reached us in a sort of mumble. Griff afterwards declared churchgoing to be as good as a comedy, and we all had to learn to avoid meeting each other's eyes, whatever we might hear. When the scuffle and tramp of the departing congregation had ceased, we came forth from our sable box, and beheld the remnants of a once handsome church, ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the house; the polytechnic candidate was my her, my only spectator, for whom I played. And when the performance was over, all the puppets were called forward, and I was invited by the polytechnic candidate to take a glass of wine with him; and he spoke about my comedy, and I of his science; and I believe we each derived equal pleasure from the other. But yet I had the advantage, for there was so much in his performance that he could not account for: as for instance, that a piece of iron which falls through a spiral line, becomes magnetic,—well, ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... heard of The Doomswoman, The Golden Senorita, gave me no idea of this. What a pity that our houses are at war! She is not maternal, at all events; I never saw a baby held so awkwardly. What a poise of head! She looks better fitted for tragedy than for this little comedy of life in the Californias. A sovereignty would suit her,—were it not for her eyes. They are not quite so calm and just and inexorable as the rest of her face. She would not even make a good household tyrant, like Dona Jacoba Duncan. Unquestionably she is religious, and ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... tactfully. "Have some of this Spanish goo? The English department here is crazy on theatricals. They will probably want you for a grand revival of the Comedy ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... of the famous "Doctor Marigold." The fair is now held on a large piece of waste ground near the Railway Station. There are the usual set-out of booths, "Aunt Sallies," shooting-galleries, "Try your weight and strength, gentlemen" machines, a theatre, with a tragedy and comedy both performed in about an hour, and hot-sausage and gingerbread stalls in abundance. But the deafening martial music poured forth from a barrel-organ by means of a steam-engine, belonging to the proprietor of ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... seen the waters spreading everywhere with overwhelming force and the wretched human beings perishing without possibility of help? Let us remember that Noah and his sons were also flesh and blood; that is, they were men who, as that person in the comedy (Terence, Heaut. 1: 1, 25) says, thought nothing human was foreign to themselves. They were in the ark for forty days before it was lifted off the earth. In those days were destroyed all the human beings and animals living upon the earth. ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... greeting. He had taken her hand and, somewhat tremblingly, returned the frank, firm pressure. While she was speaking, he looked into her face and saw that she had already assumed the invisible but impenetrable mask in which the society woman plays her part in the tragic comedy of Vanity Fair. It was the same face and yet not the same, the same voice and yet a different one, and the sight and sound acted upon him like a powerful tonic. This was not the Enid he had loved, after all, at least, so it seemed to him. He had forgotten, or had never known that every ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... came with hat and wig: a wig that flowed behind, A hat not much the worse for wear—each comedy ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... him. You just now said that Aristophanes wanted wit. What foolish fellows then the Athenians must have been, in the very meridian of their literature, to be so delighted with what they mistook for wit as to decree him a crown of olive! He has been styled the Prince of Old Comedy too. How do ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... Haywood's own plays. But if she formed a connection with either of the London theatres after leaving her husband, the engagement was soon broken off, and her subsequent appearances as an actress in her comedy of "A Wife to be Lett" (1723) and in Hatchett's "Rival Father" (1730) were due in the one case to an accident and in the other to her friendship for ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... am back again in that salon jaune, and he is walking in at the door, pausing a second on the threshold at sight of me. I will give you the little play in one act. We smile. The hero of the comedy-drama has a rather big mouth, and such white teeth that his smile, in his brown face, is a lightning-flash at dusk. It is a thin face with two dimples that make lines when he laughs. His eyes are gray ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... was known as an all-round dialect comedian, having a large repertoire of German, Irish, Swede, and black-face specialties. But Mr. Hargraves was ambitious, and often spoke of his great desire to succeed in legitimate comedy. ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... the Communists exclaimed, "we came here to witness a comedy, and it has turned into ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... written he was not down. To make quite sure, I have gone through the proof sheets very carefully, and deleted everything that could possibly be mistaken for a foul blow. I have of course maintained the ancient privilege of comedy to chasten Caesar's foibles by laughing at them, whilst introducing enough obvious and outrageous fiction to relieve both myself and my model from the obligations and responsibilities of sober ...
— The Inca of Perusalem • George Bernard Shaw
... of quiet dignity. The tragedy in the woman's heart made the more pathetic the comedy of the half-drunken husband. Besides, he was philosopher enough to know that more than half the drunkenness of the world was the pitiful effort to ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... it is apt)—is but another sign of the general lack of a sense of the separation between Nature and her sentient mirror in the mind. In some of his persons, indeed, Shakespeare is as Nature herself, all-inclusive; but in others—and chiefly in comedy—he is partial, he is impressionary, he refuses to know what is not to his purpose, he is light- heartedly capricious. And in that gay, wilful world it is that he gives us—or used to give us, for even the word ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... (1885); and, again in collaboration with Eugne Cormon, the books of Auber's operas, Le Premier Jour de bonheur (1868) and Rve d'amour (1869). He prepared for the stage Balzac's posthumous comedy Mercadet ou le faiseur, presented at the Gymnase theatre in 1851. Reversing the usual order of procedure, Dennery adapted some of his plays to the form of novels. He died in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... don't pretend that you and my uncle have not been getting up this little comedy of a quarrel, merely to show Kitty and me what fools we look when we are fighting! Why! It was better than ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... and Alban remained silent, and the declaration she had desired at first as an amusement now became a vital necessity to her fasting vanity. Believing that their surroundings at Hampstead, the formality, the servants, the splendor of "Five Gables," forbade that little comedy of love for which she hungered, she went off, in her father's absence, to their cottage at Henley, and compelling Alban to follow her, she played Phyllis to his Corydon with an ardor which could not have been surpassed. Aping the schoolgirl, she would wear her ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... woof of life under fire. It is the parade of the living, the dead and those on the borderland. Men go through the whole gamut of emotions. War is an object lesson of laughter and tears playing hide and seek with each other. The tragedy and the comedy follow close on each other's heels. Deep calls not only to deep but to shallow as well, and in the end all notes harmonize. Where the swathe of the scythe is wide men's souls expand in heart qualities. Amidst the wreckage ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... Washington, my own measure of familiarity, and the questionable taste on the part of my hero—hero, because, from the rise to the fall of the curtain, he occupies the center of the stage in this little comedy-drama, and because authors have yet to find a happy synonym for the word. The name James Osborne was given for the simple reason that it was the first that occurred to the culprit's mind, so desperate an effort did he make to hide his identity. Supposing, ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... At last the comedy grew wearisome. The avantageur was sent off to bed, and Frommelt had to play a cancan, to which Gropphusen and Landsberg danced. Gropphusen was supple and agile, and, with his pale, handsome, rather worn face, looked a perfect Montmartre type. ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... tones, a mumble of commonplaces. Bud forgot for the moment his distaste for such places, and let himself slip easily back into the old thought channels, the old habits of relaxation after a day's work was done. He laughed at the one-reel comedy that had for its climax a chase of housemaids, policemen, and outraged fruit vendors after a well-meaning but unfortunate lover. He saw the lover pulled ignominiously out of a duck pond and soused relentlessly into a watering trough, ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... he looked as bad as that!" says Barbara, hastily, unthinkingly filled with grief, not only at this summary dismissal of poor Felix from our earthly sphere, but for her sister's unhappiness, which is as plain to her as though no little comedy had been performed for ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... red portfolio, and affixed the seal in the unpoetic guise of an adhesive stamp; nor did his perturbed and clumsy movements at all lessen the comedy of the performance. Sir John looked on with a malign enjoyment; and Otto chafed, regretting, when too late, the unnecessary royalty of his command and gesture. But at length the Chancellor had finished his piece of prestidigitation, and, without ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to her part in this horrible, but necessary, comedy. She was absolutely heroic in the way she made her whole body lie,—in drawing up her enfeebled form to its full height as she passed the shops, whose proprietors' eyes were upon her; in quickening her trailing footsteps; in rubbing her cheeks with a rough towel before ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... seeing them approach, the peasants take refuge in dialect. Mrs. Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates, lawn-tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome things. Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himself upon the altar of local colour. He is like the lady in the French comedy who keeps talking about "le beau ciel d'Italie." Besides, he has fallen into the bad habit of uttering moral platitudes. He is always telling us that to be good is to be good, and that to be bad is to be wicked. At times he is almost edifying. Robert Elsmere ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... his disinterestedness, and his evident disinclination to any kind of vehemence carried an implication more exasperating than an open challenge. They changed melodrama into comedy. They made his protagonist ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... fair-sized poster announcing the production at the "Eureka Opera House" of the "Thrilling Comedy-Drama, The Golden Gods." Pearson looked at it, made a face, ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... study by M. Cousin amongst the ‘Illustrious Women of the Seventeenth Century.’ She was beautiful as her sister, and a child of genius like her brother. She began to compose verses at the age of eight, and in her eleventh year assisted in the composition and the acting of a comedy in five acts, which was a subject of universal talk in Paris. Her powers, both as an actor and a verse-maker, made a wonderful reputation at the time, which, as we shall see, was highly serviceable to her after. ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... "comedy," as Lottie here used it, jarred unpleasantly on Hemstead's ear, and the thought crossed Harcourt's mind, "Can she be leading Hemstead on in heartless jest, as we proposed at first? How I have changed since that day! and I was in hopes ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... All the comedy in life and some of the tragedy can be found at London railway stations, and only the fact that members of the staff are well occupied prevents them from furnishing shelves of bookstalls with records of their observation. The ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... who sat with her husband in the third row, squeezed his hand more than once during the performance. To her, who knew the plot of this tragi-comedy, its most dramatic moment was well-nigh painful. 'I wonder if Jon knows by instinct,' she thought—Jon, out in British Columbia. She had received a letter from him only that morning which had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... platform has been built of bamboo, nipa and boards, to serve as the stage. It is here that the comedy company from Tondo will tell wonderful tales, and will compete with the gods in the performance of miracles. Here Marianito, Chananay, Balbino, Ratia, Carvajal, Yeyeng, Liceria and the others will sing and dance. The Filipino ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... any good," said Bert. "He'd just be getting that impression, and then Tom would pull some of his low comedy stuff and queer the whole thing. We can never palm ourselves off as ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... recreation, diversion, sport, disport, gambols, frolic, jest, merriment; action, use, employment, practice, exercise; comedy, drama, melodrama, farce, burlesque; dalliance, toying, twiddling; liberty, scope, swing. Associated Words: dramaturgy, dramaturgist, dramatic, dramatize, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... called Alsatia, from its resemblance to the seat of the war then raging on the frontiers of France, in the dominions of King James's son-in-law, the Prince Palatine. Its roystering bullies and shifty money-lenders are admirably sketched by Shadwell in his Squire of Alsatia, an excellent comedy freely used by Sir Walter Scott in his "Fortunes of Nigel," who has laid several of his strongest scenes in this once scampish region. That great scholar Selden lived in Whitefriars with the Countess Dowager of Kent, whom he was supposed to have married; and, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... power which silently moves them forward with the inaudible advance of the successive files in the ranks of the generations, and which makes them contemporary with each generation. For while the mediaeval frame-work upon which Dante constructed the "Divine Comedy" becomes obsolete, the fundamental thought of the poet about human souls and the identity of the deed and its result not only remains true to experience but has received the most impressive confirmation from subsequent history ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... no means the end of the matter. The agent-in-advance of one of the touring musical-comedy companies of Lionel Belmont, the famous Anglo-American manager, was in Hanbridge during that week, and after seeing Milly in the piece he telegraphed to Liverpool, where his company was, and the next day the manager visited Hanbridge incognito. Then Harry Burgess began to play ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... to dine with some friends and later to visit a musical comedy. Carter had changed his clothes, and, while he was waiting for Dolly to dress, was reclining in a huge arm-chair. The heat of the day, the excitement, and the wear on his nerves caused his head to sink back, his eyes to close, and his ...
— The Man Who Could Not Lose • Richard Harding Davis
... latter finally wrote, complaining of the lack of news. He was in the midst of campaign activities, he said, writing a life of Hayes, and gaily added: "You know I wrote the life of Lincoln, which elected him." He further reported a comedy he had completed, and gave Clemens a general stirring up as ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... There is a mood in which a deprivation of high comedy may drive one to low-down farce. To-day people are even going farther. A worthy stage is dead, they say; and they patronize, somewhat willfully and contemptuously (or with a loose, slack tolerance that is worse), the moving pictures. Perhaps it was in some such ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... 1040, Alcmena's son.]—Heracles was made a slave to Omphale, Queen of Lydia. His grumbles at his insufficient food were a theme of comedy. ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... characteristic thing Oscar Wilde ever wrote, a thing produced in perfect health at the topmost height of happy hours, more characteristic even than "The Importance of Being Earnest," for it has not only the humour of that delightful farce-comedy, but also more than a hint of the deeper feeling which was even then forming itself into a master-work that will form part of ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... already intimated, their apparent enjoyment is no more deserving the name of social happiness than that which is often represented as enjoyed by a company of stage actors, in the harassing performance of the fictitious scenes of some genteel comedy. Who was ever made any better? Any rational discussion tending to exalt or purify the mind would be deemed out of place; and any moral teachings would be ridiculed or find no listeners. And, finally, who was ever made healthier? ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... he seized it in both hands with a grin and a jest and went to stand behind King and Ismail, in line with the lashless mullah, facing Yasmini. Yasmini smiled at them all as if they were actors in her comedy, and she well pleased ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... that the situation has some of the elements of comedy, and I presume that it will eventually be regarded with considerable amusement, but right at the moment, my sense of humor is ...
— Indirection • Everett B. Cole
... among the humblest rangers of these pastoral solitudes, there was here a depth and a brightness that filled him with wonder, combined with a quaintness of humour, and a thousand little touches of absurdity, which afforded him more entertainment, as I have often heard him say, than the best comedy that ever set the pit in a roar." Scott remained several days in the forest, daily accompanied in his excursions by Hogg and Laidlaw, both of whom rapidly warmed in his regard. From the recitation of the Shepherd's mother, he obtained important and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... back to the sign of The Ship overlooking the Cross, and, kicking off his sodden shoes, he supped quietly in the room of which shattered door and broken window reminded him of his odd interview with Ruth, and of the comedy of love she had enacted to detain him there. The thought of it embittered him; the part she had played seemed to his retrospective mind almost a wanton's part—for all that in name she was his wife. And yet, underlying a certain irrepressible nausea, came the ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... my intelligence as to suppose it possible to impart an atmosphere of probability to a scheme that was pure farce. Yet that was what he tried to do; he wanted me to believe that I was assisting at a comedy. There was no knockabout business; nobody entered the room with a somersault, tripped over a pin or hung his hat on the scenery. They all behaved as if they were presenting us with what is known as a human document, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... gaol your la'ship. But it was still more certain that the King's Highness should pardon you. Therefore no bones should have been broken. And I did come myself to take you to a safe place, and to enlighten you as to the comedy.' ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... mind," he said after a moment's thought, "there is no doubt that I have witnessed a very clever comedy. An effective one, I grant, because it has accomplished all ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... Davus sum non Oedipus, Andria, Act I, Scene II. The quotation, transposed by Martyr from the singular into the plural number, is from Terrence, Davus being a comic character in the comedy ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... for he was susceptible to the comely order of things. The fact was a fact, and nature, not he, was responsible for it. That, and the circumstance of his material independence, would necessarily keep the ensuing interview well within the limits of urbane comedy. The young man smiled already at the suggested comparison with his father's own choice in matrimony. Wilfrid had never had the details of that story avowedly represented to him, but it was inevitable that he should have learnt ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... self-possessed. As he had never thought of dramatizing himself, nor thought of himself at all, it did not occur to him that drama requires setting, that tragedy required black velvet rather than tooth-brushes, and that a small boy with an aching tooth was a comedy relief ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... got a chance to talk it was shown that their desires were all for a parlor comedy with bright lines, some farcical turns to the plot, but a play of sufficient weight to gain the approval of sober-minded people. It was, however, ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... early winter that I saw Lucy. It was by accident. I sat just behind her at a musical comedy. She was with her husband. They looked very prosperous. They seemed to be comradely enough. Mostly I saw only the back of her head; once, her full profile; and then at last she turned half around in her seat, and saw ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... regular theatre season began in 1754, and from this time forth the stage seems to have filled an important part in the activities of society. We find that Washington attended such performances at the early South Street Theatre, and was especially pleased with a comedy called The Young Quaker; or the Fair Philadelphian by O'Keefe, a sketch that was followed by a pantomimic ballet, a musical piece called The Children in the Wood, a recitation of Goldsmith's Epilogue in the character of Harlequin, and a "grand finale" by some adventuresome ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... mingled with that throng of joyous folk, I lost myself. I became an actor in a prodigious and picturesque American social comedy. For stage we had the lawn, banks of flowers, and the massive towers of the castle. For background rose the rugged hills!—Nothing could have been farther from our home in Neshonoc. Glowing with esthetic delight in the remote and singular ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... pluck,—for has he not, in the first place, overcome the prudery of the Lord Chamberlain's Licensing Department, and, in the second place, has he not introduced on the boards of the Haymarket a good old-fashioned Melodrama, brought "up to date," and disguised in a Comedy wrapper? Walk in, Ladies and Gentlemen, and see The Dancing Girl, a Comedy-Drama shall we call it, or, generically, a Play? wherein the prominent figures are a wicked Duke,—vice the "wicked Baronet," now shelved, as nothing under the ducal rank will suit us nowadays, bless ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 31, 1891 • Various
... us," he replied, "who try to make an art of living. Yes, art, that is the word! To me life appears like a great tragi-comedy. It has its shadows as well as its lights, but we would not lose one of them, for fear of destroying the harmony of the whole. Call it good, or call it bad, no matter, so it is. The villain no less than the hero claims our applause; it would be dull without ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people." In his view tragedy should be eclectic; in Shakespeare's it should be all embracing. Shelley, perhaps, judged more rightly than either when he said: "The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy is undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in 'King Lear,' universal, ideal, and sublime." On the whole, "Samson Agonistes" is a noble example of a style which we may hope will in no generation ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... enjoyed his cruel work of deceit. Sometimes, after palming off a particularly fantastic and outrageous lie upon me, he was so 'full of laugh' that he had to step aside for a minute, upon one pretext or another, to keep me from suspecting. I staid faithfully by him until his comedy was finished. Then he remarked that he had undertaken to 'learn' me all about a steamboat, and had done it; but that if he had overlooked anything, just ask him and he would supply the lack. 'Anything about this boat that you don't know the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... at length within earshot, they had it out in a wild scolding match, a contest of lung and tongue. Meanwhile I rested on a canoe midway betwixt them, in the hope of averting a renewal of hostilities. By and by an old Sacred Man, a Chief, called Sapa, with some touch of savage comedy in his breast, volunteered an episode which restored good humor to the scene. Leaping up, he came dancing and singing towards me, and there, to the amusement of all, reenacted the quarrel, and mimicked rather cleverly my attempt at ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... renditions of Booth with great zest; yet after witnessing "The Merchant of Venice" he remarked on the way home: "It was a good performance, but I had a thousand times rather read it at home, if it were not for Booth's playing. A farce or a comedy is best played; a tragedy is best read at home." He was much pleased one night with Mr. McCullough's delineation of the character of "Edgar," which the actor played in support of Edwin Forrest's "Lear." He wished to convey his approval to the ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... this theatre, is the MOLIERE of his company; that is, he is at once author and actor, and, in both lines, indefatigable. Undoubtedly, the most striking, and, some say, the only resemblance he bears to the mirror of French comedy, is to be compelled to bring on the stage pieces in so unfinished a state as to be little more than sketches, or, in other words, he is forced to write in order to subsist his company. Thus then, the stock-pieces of this theatre are all of them of his own composition. The greater ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... there is something of Ann in every woman." I need not recall to you Ann's pursuit of her victim, Tanner, nor his futile efforts to escape. Here, as so often he has done, Mr. Shaw has presented us in comedy with a philosophy of life. You believe, perhaps, the fiction, still brought forward by many who ought to know better, that in love woman is passive and waits for man to woo her. I think no woman in her heart believes this. She knows, by instinct, that Nature has unmistakably ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... range of parts in which nobody has approached the finish, refinement, and spirit of his acting. Moreover, his whole demeanor, carriage, and manner were so essentially those of a gentleman, that the broadest farce never betrayed him into either coarseness or vulgarity; and the comedy he acted, though often the lightest of the light, was never anything in its graceful propriety but high comedy. No member of the French theatre was ever at once a more finished and a more delightfully ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... a wide gallery to the great staircase where her lackeys waited. Then he bowed to her and she curtsied low to him, but no word was spoken by either. This little comedy must needs be played in pantomime lest the actors should spoil it with a ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... terrible battery of hand artillery (for we are at last all heavily armed); and consequent of these varied things, I, like everybody else, was a good deal out of temper and rather sick of it all. I began to ask myself this question: Were we really playing an immense comedy, or was there a great and terrible peril menacing us? I could never get beyond asking the question. I could not think sanely ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... and winter of '76 that Bret Harte came to Hartford and collaborated with Mark Twain on the play "Ah Sin," a comedy-drama, or melodrama, written for Charles T. Parsloe, the great impersonator of Chinese character. Harte had written a successful play which unfortunately he had sold outright for no great sum, and was eager for another ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the precise moment when I reached the point of its junction with the avenue—I returned with a sense of satisfaction to the memory of the last four hours. I was conscious of some kind of plan in the way the comedy of Brenda's disappearance had been put before us. I realised that, as an art form, the plan was essentially undramatic, but the thought of it gave me, nevertheless, a distinct feeling ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... We could never be long together without something out of the common happening, and one day something far out of the common happened, which fortunately refused the nature of absolute tragedy, while remaining rather the saddest sort of comedy. We were looking out of my library window on that view of the Charles which I was so proud of sharing with my all-but-next-door neighbor, Doctor Holmes, when another friend who was with us called out ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Restif de la Bretonne, whose unedifying novels the Parisians of 2440 would assuredly have rejected from their libraries, published in 1790 a heroic comedy representing how marriages would be arranged in "the year 2000," by which epoch he conceived that all social equalities would have disappeared in a fraternal society and twenty nations be allied to France under the wise supremacy of "our well-beloved monarch ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... occupied with Dante. A story told of him in 1506, together with the dialogues reported by Donato Giannotti, prove that he was regarded by his fellow-citizens as an authority upon the meaning of the "Divine Comedy."[415] In 1518, when the Florentine Academy petitioned Leo X. to transport the bones of Dante from Ravenna to Florence, Michael Angelo subscribed the document and offered to erect a statue worthy of the poet.[416] How deeply the study of Dante influenced his art, appears ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... however, lest you should think I wait only for a recantation of it, I shall answer you plainly, No, not I; my business is of another kind with you, and I did not expect you would have turned my serious application to you, in my own distracted case, into a comedy.' ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... is an evil-doer, and a curious person, who searches into things under the earth and in heaven, and he makes the worse appear the better cause; and he teaches the aforesaid doctrines to others.' Such is the nature of the accusation: it is just what you have yourselves seen in the comedy of Aristophanes (Aristoph., Clouds.), who has introduced a man whom he calls Socrates, going about and saying that he walks in air, and talking a deal of nonsense concerning matters of which I do not pretend to know either much or little—not that I mean to speak disparagingly ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... nor in pairs and trios, nor by scores and dozens; it is to see it in battalias and acres, and all of them meeting your eyes with the frank open gaze of the West. San Francisco is, I fancy, the only city on the globe where any musical comedy audience is always more beautiful than any musical comedy chorus. They are not ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... and tedious journey; he found he had come into an undreamt-of silvery splendour of motion. For it seemed as though even the automobile was running on moonlight that night.... Pyecrafts could wait. Indeed the later he got to Pyecrafts the more moving and romantic the little comedy of reconciliation would be. And he was in no hurry for that comedy. He felt he wanted to apprehend this vast summer calm about him, that alone of all the things of the day seemed to convey anything whatever of the majestic tragedy that was happening to mankind. As one slipped ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... we are unlike the heroes of Mrs. Ward Beecher Stowe. No one of us will attain a ripe old age without experiencing three different generations marked by three different sets of habits, sentiments, ideals. Mr. Bennett's subject is the tragi-comedy of ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... two chief reasons why Mr. Allen seems to me one of the first of our novelists to day. He is most exquisitely alive to the fine spirit of comedy. He has a prose style of wonderful beauty, conscientiousness and simplicity.... He has the inexorable conscience of the artist, he always gives us his best; and that best is a style of great purity and felicity and sweetness, a style ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... fond of the theatre and frequently acted as an amateur in private houses. She was excellent in high comedy and recited poetry effectively. Mrs. Damer was one of the most interesting of Englishwomen at a period of unusual excitement ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... Distinguish between tragedy and comedy and tell how this play should be classified. How is this play like Shakespeare's latest plays, the Romances? (See Merchant ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... small sensation, wandering from table to table, from room to room, the girl with a look of dread and weariness on her face, and I with the Frenchman's hat grasped firmly in my hand and my brows scowling. If I hadn't been in love it would have been a fine comedy. Once I surprised her looking toward the corner table near the orchestra. How many joyous Sunday dinners ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... reason that I never knew of them. I have tried to be more careful this time. During the revising process "The Woman-Haters" has more than doubled in length and, let us hope, in accuracy. Even now it is, of course, not a novel, but merely a summer farce-comedy, a "yarn." And this, by the way, is all ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... once said of Shakespeare that the great mind that conceived the tragedies of "Hamlet," "Macbeth," etc., would have lost its reason if it had not found vent in the sparkling humor of such comedies as "The Merry Wives of Windsor" and "The Comedy of Errors." ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... looked an imposing personage enough, of the very type to awe the weak and timorous. He was much entertained on this particular morning,—one might almost say he was greatly amused. Quite a humorous little comedy was being played at the Vatican,—a mock- solemn farce, which had the possibility of ending in serious disaster to the innocent,—and he, as a student of the wily and treacherous side of human nature, was rather interested in its development. ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... to be sure, but it was also well meant, and therefore we will not stop to quarrel with men who were equal to the perpetration of a legal fiction so full of the comedy and tragedy of civilized society. But enough—the municipal wiseacres having put their heads together and evolved the brilliant plan of committing the prophet as a disturber of the peace, immediately set about its execution, which developed in the sequence into a bird of altogether another color. ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... official in him has finally gained the ascendency over the artist; his still youngish face has grown yellow, and his hair scanty; he now neither sings nor sketches, but applies himself in secret to literature; he has written a comedy, in the style of a "proverb," and as nowadays all writers have to draw a portrait of some one or something, he has drawn in it the portrait of a coquette, and he reads it privately to two or three ladies who look kindly upon him. He ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... Sam'l, wondering what the issue of the comedy would be. After them toddled old Tammas, chuckling. While over the yard-wall was now a little cluster of heads: 'Enry, oor Job, Maggie and David, ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... tired of sowing wild oats, and became less irregular in his mode of life. A lively, pretty little comedy called Une Nuit Venitienne, which he wrote at the request of the director of the Odeon, for some inexplicable cause fell flat, which, besides turning him aside from writing for the stage during a number of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... German Council might actually result from that assembly. He saw his enemies busy with their secret schemes of mischief, and feared lest many of his comrades in the faith, such as the Landgrave Philip, might treat too lightly the matter, which was no mere comedy among men, but a tragedy in which God and Satan were the actors. He rejoiced again, however, that the falsehood and cunning of his enemies must be brought to nought by their own folly, and that God Himself would consummate ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... revived a mad dream, of ludicrous coherence. Since his display of rhetoric at luncheon all was downright somnambulism. What fatal power had subdued him? What extraordinary influence had guided his tongue, constrained his features? His conscious self had had no part in all this comedy; now for the first time was he taking count of the character ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... 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 Busy," had given up the making of these cakes "because they were served at bridals and other profane feasts." This baker, we ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... she would have conveyed the impression—I know her way—that she alone, throughout the whole commotion, had remained calm and helpful. "Dear old Dick" and "Poor dear papa"—I can hear her saying it—would have supplied the low comedy, and Veronica, alluded to with affection free from sentimentality, would have furnished the dramatic interest. It is not that Robina intends to mislead, but she has the artistic instinct. It would have made quite a charming story; Robina always the central figure. She ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... Otis Yeere At the Pit's Mouth A Wayside Comedy The Hill of Illusion A Second-rate Woman Only a Subaltern In the Matter of a Private The Enlightenments of ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... scene might have been comic enough—notwithstanding the sacred character of the place—but neither my companion nor I were in any humour for comedy. Matters were still too serious; and although the idea of this skeleton barricade was a good one, we were not yet assured of safety. It might only give us a temporary respite; for we feared that our ferocious assailants would ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... it is certainly inclusive enough, since some critics are struck by the tragic relations subsisting between the virtuous discreet Northern wife and the peccable, expansive Southern husband, while others see in the latter the hero of a comedy of manners almost worthy of Moliere. If Numa represents the highest achievement of Daudet in dramatic fiction or else in the art of characterization, The Evangelist proved that his genius was not at home in those fields. Instead of marking an ordered advance, this overwrought study of Protestant ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet |
