"Playwright" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... letters from Carlo Angiolini, who was afterwards to bring the manuscript of the Memoirs to Brockhaus; from Balbi, the monk with whom Casanova escaped from the Piombi; from the Marquis Albergati, playwright, actor, and eccentric, of whom there is some account in the Memoirs; from the Marquis Mosca, 'a distinguished man of letters whom I was anxious to see,' Casanova tells us in the same volume in which he describes his visit to the Moscas at Pesaro; from ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... this Friday evening imbibing chocolate. 'It will be translated into every tongue.' He had passed with a characteristic bound from satisfaction with the Ghetto triumph into cosmopolitan anticipations. 'See,' he added, 'my initials make M.P.—Master Playwright.' ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... with Henslowe and his former associates, Jonson offered his services as a playwright to Henslowe's rivals, the Lord Chamberlain's company, in which Shakespeare was a prominent shareholder. A tradition of long standing, though not susceptible of proof in a court of law, narrates that Jonson had submitted the manuscript ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... many-sidedness. He is mostly content with Spanish cavaliers of the seventeenth century, ruled by the conventionalisms in manners, morals, and superstition, which have already passed away even in Spain. He is a marvelously fertile, skillful, poetic playwright. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... take revenge. The new King, Louis XVI, had for Foreign Minister Count de Vergennes, a diplomat of some experience, who warmly urged supporting the cause of the American Colonists. He had for accomplice Beaumarchais, a nimble-witted playwright and seductive man of the world who talked very persuasively to the young King ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... the production of literature in Australia is not a matter for surprise. No one, indeed, would seriously think of attempting to do so. Gordon was a mounted policeman, a horse-breaker, a steeplechase-rider—anything but a professional man of letters; Marcus Clarke was a journalist and playwright, and wrote only two novels in fourteen years; Rolf Boldrewood's books were written in spare hours before and after his daily duties as a country magistrate; Henry Kingsley returned to England before publishing anything; Kendall held a Government clerkship ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... the brilliant playwright, whose home was near the Remingtons on Lathers' Hill, and whose wife, so young, so beautiful and so accomplished, made ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... 1731—an event which marked a new development of periodical literature. Though no one would then advise a young man who could do anything else to trust to authorship (it would be rash to give such advice now) the new career was being opened. There were hack authors of all varieties. The successful playwright gained a real prize in the lottery; and translations, satires, and essays on the Spectator model enabled the poor drudge to make both ends meet, though too often in bondage to his employer to be, as I take it, better off than in the ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... to the American stage that no other American playwright has thus far succeeded in emulating. The total impression of his work leads one to believe that he also brought to the American stage a style which was at the same time literary and distinctly his own. His personality was interesting and lovable, quickly responsive to a variety ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... as a patron of art and literature that Louis XIV gained much of his celebrity. Molire, who was at once a playwright and an actor, delighted the court with comedies in which he delicately satirized the foibles of his time. Corneille, who had gained renown by the great tragedy of The Cid in Richelieu's time, found a worthy successor in Racine, ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... Anglia. It would be easy to recapitulate what every biographical dictionary will provide, a long list of famous names associated with our counties; to remind you that we have produced two poet-laureates—John Skelton, of Diss, the author of Colyn Cloute, and Thomas Shadwell, of Broomhill, the playwright—the latter perhaps not entirely a subject for pride; two very rough and ready political philosophers, Thomas Paine, born at Thetford, and William Godwin, born at Wisbeach; a very popular novelist in Bulwer Lytton, and a very popular theologian in Dr. Samuel Clarke; as also ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... seat themselves, in a triangle.) Behold the problem—the ever ancient and ever young triangle of the playwright and the short story ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... began at last to write. The precious Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, hob-a-nobbed with every Muse in her amazing divagations. But the earliest professional woman of letters was Aphra Behn, the novelist and playwright, to whose genius justice has only quite lately been done by Mr. Montague Summers. Mrs. Behn died in 1689, and it seemed at first that she had left no heritage to her sex. But there presently appeared a set of female ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... collection of "Representative Men." This collection of profoundly interesting studies is entrusted to the care of two writers, Mr. Albert Keim and Mr. Louis Lumet, both of whom have already earned their laurels, the former as poet, novelist, playwright, historian and philosopher, and author of a definitive work upon Helvetius which deserves to become a classic, and the latter as publicist, art critic and scholar of rare and profound erudition. An acquaintance with the successive volumes in this series will give ample evidence ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... complaint. 'A pretty state of things,' everybody said. 'Here's a Mr. Tomson, that no one has ever heard of, bothers Burleigh with his rubbish, and then accuses him of petty larceny. Is it likely that a man of Burleigh's position, a playwright who can make his five thousand a year easily, would borrow from an unknown Tomson?' I should think it very likely, indeed," Lucian went on, chuckling, "but that was their verdict. No; I don't think I'll write ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... of the piece. The house laughed at everything he said. He sang a song in his gasping way, and they laughed still more. Fenn's brother became incoherent with delight. The verdict of Eckleton was hardly likely to affect London theatre-goers, but it was very pleasant notwithstanding. Like every playwright with his first piece, he had been haunted by the idea that his dialogue "would not act", that, however humorous it might be to a reader, it would fall flat when spoken. There was no doubt now as to whether the lines ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... reader; he must exercise perpetually a power of selection which plays over innumerable details; he must, in the midst of such occupations, preserve unity of design, as much as must the novelist or the playwright; and yet with all this there is not a verb, an adjective or a substantive which, if it does not repose upon established evidence, will not mar the particular type of work on which he ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... Dr. Nash in spite of its importance. For the church clock had been striking eleven when the mare, four minutes after leaving Dr. Nash, reached Strides Cottage. A great deal of talk may be got through in a very little time, as the playwright knows ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... delightful, and very often full of poetry. She is never didactic or goody-goody, neither does she revel in risky situations, nor give the world stories which, to quote the well-known saying of a popular playwright, 'no nice girl would allow her ...
— Mrs. Hungerford - Notable Women Authors of the Day • Helen C. Black
... turn their special gifts. The actor had learned his business on the stage; the lecturer had gone through his apprenticeship in the pulpit. Each had his bread to earn, and he must work, and work hard, in the way open before him. For twenty years the playwright wrote dramas, and retired before middle age with a good estate to his native town. For forty years Emerson lectured and published lectures, and established himself at length in competence in the village where his ancestors had lived and died before him. He never became rich, as Shakespeare ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... languages on the tip of his tongue—by someone who had travelled far and read deeply; and, above all, by a man who had spent at least a year in a conveyancer's chambers! And yet, when this has been said, would Lord Penzance have added that the style and character of the playwright is the style and character of a really learned man of his period! Can anything less like such a style be imagined? Once genius is granted, heaven-born genius, a mother-wit beyond the dreams of fancy, and then plain humdrum men, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... Plagiary (Sir Fretful), a playwright, whose dramas are mere plagiarisms from "the refuse of obscure volumes." He pretends to be rather pleased with criticism, but is sorely irritated thereby. Richard Cumberland (1732-1811), noted for his vanity and irritability, was the model of this character.—Sheridan, The Critic, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... some intelligent people in their ranks, I am told," said the vicar, "writers and so forth. Quite a distinguished playwright, my eldest daughter was ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... twinkle or genial by-play in which Stevenson excelled. But he has more of dramatic power, pure and simple, than Stevenson had—his novels—the best of them—would far more easily yield themselves to the ordinary purposes of the ordinary playwright. Along with conscientiousness, perception, penetration, with the dramatist must go a certain indescribable common- sense commonplaceness—if I may name it so—protection against vagary and that over-refined egotism and self-confession which is inimical to the drama and in which the Stevensonian ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... production and sent him a complimentary ticket. During the first act there were signs of disapproval, which during the second act broke out into a riot. An excited man sitting alongside the guest of the playwright said: "Stranger, are you blind or deaf, or do you approve of the play?" The guest replied: "My friend, my sentiments and opinion in regard to this play do not differ from yours and the rest, but I am here ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... to have this regarded as the correct version, and has himself prepared the "copy" of same. Because of the easy accessibility of Dion Boucicault's "The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana," it was thought best to omit this Irish-American playwright, whose jovial prolixity enriched the American stage of the '60's and '70's. His "London Assurance" is included in the present Editor's collection of "Representative British ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: - Introduction and Bibliography • Montrose J. Moses
... so later I has the luck to run across Oakley Mills. Something had come up that needed to be passed on by Mr. Robert, and as he was still out lunchin' I scouts over to his club, and finds him stowed away at a corner table with this chatty playwright party. ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... Nor should the playwright fail for lack Of matter, if with curious eyes He follows in our Pressmen's track, Who find the source of their supplies In Life, that ever-flowing font, And "give the public what ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... the hour of their death. It was part of their literature and it made them build small but perfect temples. It found expression in the clothes which the men wore and in the rings and the bracelets of their wives. It followed the crowds that went to the theatre and made them hoot down any playwright who dared to sin against the iron law of good ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... introduced on the flimsiest of excuses, which arrest the progress of the main narrative—i.e., the travel—and give the author an opportunity to use up some spare material which he does not know what to do with. Such are "The Man of the Hill," in Tom Jones; "The History of Melopoyn the Playwright" in Roderick Random; the "Memoirs of a Lady of Quality," occupying fifty-three thousand words, in Peregrine Pickle; "The Philosophic Vagabond," in the Vicar of Wakefield; and "Wandering Willie's Tale," in Redgauntlet. The ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... brought back with her some new books and foreign reviews. After dinner she was lying on the great lounge before the fire, curled up in a soft dress of pale lilac, seriously absorbing an article on a Russian playwright. Hers was a little face,—pale, thin, with sunken eyes. The brow was too high, and latterly Margaret paid no attention to arranging her hair becomingly. It was not a face that could be called pretty; it would not be attractive to most men, her husband thought ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... pay for this golden secret. Sometimes a character appears but once in the course of a great drama. The man or woman, comes on the stage to deliver one message, and then disappears. But that one brief word has its place in the playwright's scheme, and its effect on the action of the piece. This child was sent to Syria to utter one speech, to speak one name, and because she spoke her little speech, kindly and clearly, things went better ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... painter's work does not count unless he can find at least a small group of patrons who will admire and buy it. The most competent architect can do nothing for himself or for other people unless he attracts clients who will build his paper houses. The playwright needs even a larger following. If his plays are to be produced, he must manage to amuse and to interest thousands of people. And the politician most of all depends upon a numerous and faithful body of admirers. Of what avail would his ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... command of the landowner and thrown into jail. The small town which had been the witness of these humiliations should be witness of the restoration of his honor. Where he had been spoken of as the actor and playwright of doubtful fame, there would he be seen again as the honored possessor of house and land. There and elsewhere should the people, who had counted him among the proletariat, learn to know him as a gentleman, ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... the novelli of Boccaccio, Masaccio, and Bandello, of Giraldi Cinthio and Ser Giovanni Fiorentino and of many another writer of romantic tales of whimsical gaiety, of intrigue, or of tragedy, and Brandilancia was a playwright gifted with a most exceptional genius for adaptation. He had read a few of these tales and had realised that they contained admirable material for dramatisation, but now by a turn of the wheel of Fortune the entire inexhaustible mine of absorbing plot of piquant situation ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... she live? What killed her? That's what I want to know. I'd look fine, wouldn't I, circularizing a dead story? Wouldn't that be a laugh on me? No, Mr. Anderson, author, artist, and playwright, I'm getting damned tired of being pestered by you, and you needn't come back here until you bring the goods. Do I make ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... very dogged. I had only one quarrel with him, but it lasted all the sixteen years I knew him. He wanted me to be a playwright and I wanted to be a novelist. All those years I fought him on that. He always won, but not because of his doggedness; only because he was so lovable that one had to do as he wanted. He also threatened, if I stopped, to reproduce the old plays and ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... that in these plays, which contain nothing salacious or indecent, there is scarcely a character of any rank who scruples to tell lies; and the truth is not to be found in works intended to school the public to virtue. The ingenious old playwright's memoirs are full of gossip concerning that poor old Venice, which is now no more; and the worthy autobiographer, Casanova, also gives much information about things that ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Otway (1652-1685), English playwright who wrote a number of important tragedies in verse, but who died destitute at the age of 33. The Coopers were familiar with his work; James Fenimore Cooper used quotations from Otway's "The Orphan" for three ...
— The Lumley Autograph • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... act is headed Actus Primus, Scaena Prima. The first systematic division into scenes was made by Nicholas Rowe, poet laureate to George I, in the edition which he issued in six octavo volumes in 1709. In this edition Rowe, an experienced playwright, marked the entrances and exits of the characters and introduced many stage directions and the list of dramatis personae which has been the basis for all later lists. A second edition in eight volumes was published in 1714. Rowe followed very closely the text of the Fourth Folio, but modernized ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... adulation of her dark and changeful face, her savage and sovereign beauty. There was insolence in her tread, and mad allurement in the rounded beauty of her powerful white arm—and at his weakest the young playwright admitted that all else concerning her was of ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... guise of playful vanity he gave vent to a torrent of self-appreciation. He then named all the "other notables present"—a poet, a cartoonist, a budding playwright, a distinguished Russian revolutionist, an editor, and another newspaper man—maligning and deriding some of them and grudgingly praising the others. Much of what he said was lost upon me, for, although ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... in Sussex, intended for the Church; took to the stage, failed as an actor, and became a playwright, his chief production in that line being "Alcibiades," "Don Carlos," "The Orphan," and "Venice Preserved," the latter two especially; he led a life of dissipation, and died miserably, from choking, it is said, in greedily swallowing ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... wouldn't be so alarmingly outspoken when she sings our praises to strangers. She gave him to understand that I am a full-fledged author and playwright, the peer of any poet laureate who ever held a pen; that Lloyd is a combination of princess and angel and halo-crowned saint, and Joyce a model big sister and an all-round genius. How she managed in the short time they were alone to ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... bad play—perhaps, considering both, a tolerably fair one; there is some good writing in it, and good situations; the latter I owe to suggestions of my mother's, who is endowed with what seems to me really a science by itself, i.e. the knowledge of producing dramatic effect; more important to a playwright than even true delineation of character or beautiful poetry, in spite of what Alfieri says: "Un attore che dira bene, delle cose belle si fara ascoltare per forza." But the "ben dire cose belle" will not make a play without striking situations and effects succeed, for ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... brilliant have also been the incursions of Jules Claretie into the theatrical domain, though he is a better novelist than playwright. He was appointed director of the Comedie Francaise in 1885. His best known dramas and comedies are: 'La Famille de Gueux, in collaboration with Della Gattina (Ambigu, 1869); Raymond Lindey (Menus Plaisirs, 1869, forbidden for some time by French censorship); Les Muscadins (Theatre Historique, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... playwright wishes to make you see that "the Earth's forgotten it's a Star." In plainer words he wants to present you with a cure for "wumbledness." People who look at the black side of things, who think chiefly of themselves—these are the wumbled. The cure is star-dust—which is sympathy. The treatment was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... play, and first attempt in literature, Cromwell, was a complete failure, this did not deter him from longing to become a successful playwright. After having established himself as a novelist, he turned again to this field of literature. Having written several plays, he was acquainted, naturally, with the leading actresses of his day; among these was Madame Dorval, whom he liked. He purposed giving her the main role in Les Ressources ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... followed Lady Maud's remark the Ambassador introduced them in foreign fashion: one was a middle-aged peer who wore gold-rimmed spectacles and looked like a student or a man of letters; another was the most successful young playwright of the younger generation, and he wore a very good coat and was altogether well turned out, for in his heart he prided himself on being the best groomed man in London; a third was a famous barrister who had a crisp and breezy way with ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... beautiful wife Lady Irene; Professor Leo Newcastle, the eminent man of science; Lady Hyacinth Gloucester, and Mrs. Milden, who were well known for their beauty and charm; Osmond Hall, the paradoxical playwright; Monsieur Faubourg, the psychological novelist; Count Sciarra, an Italian nobleman, about fifty years old, who had written a history of the Popes, and who was now staying in London; Lady Herman, the beauty of a former generation, still extremely handsome; and Willmott, ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... London dailies was represented in Belgium by a young and slender and very beautiful English girl whose name, as a novelist and playwright, is known on both sides of the Atlantic. I met her in the American Consulate at Ghent, where she was pleading with Vice-Consul Van Hee to assist her in getting through the German lines to Brussels. She had heard a rumour that Brussels was shortly going to be burned or sacked ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... scarcely ever went from my lessons to my bed before midnight." "To the Greek, Latin and Hebrew learned at school the scrivener advised him to add Italian and French. Nor were English letters neglected. Spencer gave the earliest turn to the boy's poetic genius. In spite of the war between playwright and precisian, a Puritan youth could still in Milton's days avow his love of the stage, 'if Jonson's learned sock be on, or sweetest Shakspeare Fancy's child, warble his native wood-notes wild' and gather from the 'masques and antique pageantry,' ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... that we too, in spite of our oppressive forms of government, which permit only a condition of passivity, are men who have their passions and can act, no less than a Frenchman or a Briton.' He therefore cautioned any playwright who might try his hand upon the subject to lay the scene not in a foreign country but ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the works of the story-teller we see the firm grasp of the dramatist. The characters speak for themselves; each reveals himself with the swift directness of the personages of a play. They are not talked about and about, for all analysis has been done by the playwright before he rings up the curtain in the first paragraph. And the story unrolls itself, also, as rapidly as does a comedy. The movement is straightforward. There is the cleverness and the ingenuity of the accomplished dramatist, but the construction ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... Jutland—where he spent most of his summers. His painting was his favourite pastime, but poetry the serious work of his life. He was a very prolific writer, not only of verse and lyrical poems, but of plays and prose works, and was a very successful playwright. Drachmann's personality was a strong one, though not always agreeable to his countrymen. He had a freedom-loving spirit, and lived every moment of his life. Some of his best poems are about the Skaw fishermen, and later in ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... the place of the false, and on securing for him the recognition due to his genius. Mr. William Archer has his reward; his own name is permanently attached to the intelligent appreciation of the Norwegian playwright in ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... in, and I accommodate myself to it. [Pacing the room as he warms to his theme.] And if it's necessary for a private individual such as myself to advertise, as I maintain it is, how much more necessary is it for you to do so—a novelist, a poet, a would-be playwright, a man with something to sell! Dash it, they've got to advertise soap, and soap's essential! Why not literature, which isn't? And yet you won't find the name of Mr. Philip Mackworth in the papers from one year's ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... my own impressions, Munden did not affect me much in some of his earlier performances; for then he depended on the play. Afterwards, when he took the matter into his own hands, and created personages who owed little or nothing to the playwright, then he became an inventor. He rose with the occasion. Sic ivit ad astra. In the drama of "Modern Antiques," especially, space was allowed him for his movements. The words were nothing. The prosperity of the piece depended exclusively ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... playwright, author of "Chinese Lily." Once matron of Framingham reformatory for purpose of studying prison conditions. Arrested picketing Nov. 10, 1917, and sentenced to ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... author must deal with his actors, and with his actors alone. Certain moments of suspense, certain significant dispositions of personages, a certain logical growth of emotion, these are the only means at the disposal of the playwright. It is true that, with the assistance of the scene-painter, the costumier and the conductor of the orchestra, he may add to this something of pageant, something of sound and fury; but these are, for the dramatic writer, beside the mark, and do not come under the vivifying ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... born May, 1805. He was the son of William Earle Bulwer, and owes his chief fame to his novels, some of which are among the best in the English language, notably The Caxtons, My Novel, What will He do with It? and A Strange Story. As a playwright he was equally successful; he was the author of The Lady of Lyons—the most popular play of modern days;—Richelieu, Not so Bad as we Seem, the admirable comedy of Money, etc. A man of prodigious industry he showed himself equal to the highest efforts ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... night of the play justified all that Marion and Wimpole had claimed for it, and was a great personal triumph for the new playwright. The audience was the typical first-night audience of the class which Charles Wimpole always commanded. It was brilliant, intelligent, and smart, and it came ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... those familiar with the late Lord Rokesle's [Footnote: Born 1685, and accidentally killed by Sir Piers Sabiston in 1738; an accurate account of this notorious duellist, profligate, charlatan, and playwright is given in Ireson's Letters.] peculiarities who considered that in this, at least, the crazed lady was fortunate. Among these gossips it was also esteemed a matter deserving comment that in the shipwrecks not infrequent about Usk the women sometimes survived, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... of the more practical parts of the drama are entitled to be forbearingly judged, however. Their comfort was little studied, and it is not surprising, under the circumstances, that they should have favoured a brisk and vivacious class of representations. The tedious playwright did not merely oppress their minds; he made them remember how weary ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... operatic adaptation. The wit, observe, is lost. And Cherubino—that sparkling little enfant terrible—becomes a sentimental fellow—a something I don't know what—between a girl and a boy—a medley of romance and impudence—anyhow a being quite unlike the sharply outlined playwright's page. I confess I am not a musician; the drama is my business, and I judge things by their fitness for the stage. My wife agrees with me to differ. She likes music, I like plays. To-night she was better pleased than I was; for she got ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... 1642 Sir William Berkeley took up his duties in Virginia and began a career which ended both gloriously and ignominiously thirty-five years later. Berkeley came from a distinguished family, was a graduate of Oxford and the Inns of Court, a playwright, and a courtier much admired by the King. Men frequently wondered why he chose to waste his talents in the American wilderness when he might have achieved eminence at Court. The mystery will probably ever remain. In Virginia ...
— Virginia Under Charles I And Cromwell, 1625-1660 • Wilcomb E. Washburn
... business of katatsuki dyer, (handling the cloth to be more or less gaily patterned). Anei 4th year (1775), entering at the Kanai Sansho[u] no Mon he (Yo[u]myo[u]) took the name of Katsu Byo[u]zo[u]. Later he received the name of Nan Tsuruya Boku. When he became a playwright he was about fifty years old. His plays are most ingenious, and are very numerous. Among them are the "Osome Hisomatsu," "Iro-yomi-uri," "Sumidagawa Hana Gosho[u]," "Yotsuya Kwaidan." In the playhouse they are known (collectively) as ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... or theory lives on from age to age, long after the other products of its time have been forgotten. And if it is really great, the older it grows, the greater it seems. Shakespeare, to his contemporaries, was merely an actor and playwright like any one of a score of others; but, with the passing of years, he has become the most wonderful figure in the world's literature. Rembrandt could scarcely make a living with his brush, industriously as he used it, and passed his days in misery, haunted by ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... procession, and matters of high theatrical politics engage the attention from year to year. Punch's interest in theatricals is hardly surprising when it is remembered how closely identified with the drama have been many members of the Staff. Douglas Jerrold was a successful playwright before ever Punch was heard of, and as the author of "Black-Eyed Susan" and "Time Works Wonders" he made his name popular with many who had hardly heard of his connection with "the great comic." ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... of His freedom, and when at the last she wept at His feet where He lay bound and delivered, and wrapped them, in the agony of her abandonment, in the hair of her head, the priest's lips almost moved in words other than those of the playwright—words that told her he knew the height and the depth of her sacrifice and forgave it, "Neither do I condemn thee...." In his exultation he saw what it was to perform miracles, to remit sins. The spark of divinity that was in him glowed to a white heat; the woman on the stage warmed her hands ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... me, well, you know what I said. I gave you more than hope—I promised you success. And then, when I got away into the hard, stagey world of Chicago, and my manager talked business to me, and my last playwright preached of technique, I began to wonder whether, after all, you could bring your ideas together like this, whether you would have a sense of perspective—you know what I mean, don't you? And you have it, and the play is going to be wonderful, and I shall produce it. Why don't ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Russian revolution and relieve their feelings in regard to it. There is something still more appealing in the yearning efforts the immigrants sometimes make to formulate their situation in America. I recall a play written by an Italian playwright of our neighborhood, which depicted the insolent break between Americanized sons and old country parents, so touchingly that it moved to tears all the older Italians in the audience. Did the tears of each express relief in finding that others had had the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... they were very ignorant about art, and especially about foreign art: but they all pretended more or less to some knowledge of it: and often they really loved it. There were Councils which were very like the coterie of some little Review. One of them would be a playwright: another would scrape on the violin; another would be a besotted Wagnerian. And they all collected Impressionist pictures, read decadent books, and prided themselves on a taste for some ultra-aristocratic art, which was ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... drama, "The Invisible Prince," which was played in the old Pittsburgh Theater. Bartley Campbell was the most prolific writer of plays that Pittsburgh has yet produced, and his melodramas have been played in nearly every theater in America. H. G. Donnelly, well known as a playwright, was also a Pittsburgher. Mrs. Mary Roberts Rinehart is a young author who is coming to the front as a writer of successful dramas, stories, and books. Her plays, "The Double Life" and "By Order of the Court" have been produced, and a novel, "The Circular Staircase," has ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... and the gentleman and scholar is always present. For in contradiction to most of their fellow-workers, they were not on the stage; they never took part in its more practical affairs either as actors or managers; they derived the technical knowledge necessary to a successful playwright from their intimacy ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... E M A S T E R R O A D will be a greater play than "Salvation Nell." Dramatic rights secured by America's leading playwright and producer. Sure to have ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... not the playwright's page; His table does not ape the stage; What matter if the figures seen Are only shadows on a screen, He finds in them his lurking thought, And on their lips the words he sought, Like one who sits before the keys And plays ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... requires an appreciation, if not an analysis, of the differences of human character, an appreciation for which there was no need in the miracle. In the morality again the action is no longer determined by tradition, and it becomes incumbent on the playwright to provide motives for the movements of his puppets. It follows naturally from this that situations must be devised to show up the particular quality which each type symbolizes. We need not enter the vexed question of the origin of plot construction; but we may notice in this connexion that the ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... confidence in the impossibility; he believes that here indeed lies the road to ruin; he feels inexpressibly relieved when the young man thanks Heaven for his terrible dream of the future, and sits down to Conic Sections, his head between his hands. You notice this latter touch. The playwright knows his audience. He knows they think that an influx of Conic Sections strains the cerebral centres, and that study is always carried on with the head compressed between the hands. Thus the sermon reaches the hearts ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... picturesquely down the rows their red heads were bobbing. Whence came their tunes, so quaintly weird, so boisterous and yet so full of melancholy? The composer has sought to catch them, has touched them with his refining art and has spoiled them. The playwright has striven to transfer from the field to the stage a cotton-picking scene and has made a travesty of it. To transfer the passions of man and to music-riddle them is an art with stiff-jointed rules, but the charm of a cotton-picking scene is an essence, ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... Rome as well as the unpleasant business which had brought him to Florence. Often after their banquets the Academicians were wont to amuse themselves with short impromptu dramatic representations, and so this evening the distinguished playwright and poet Filippo Apolloni called upon those who generally took part in them to bring the festivities to a fitting conclusion with one of their usual performances. Salvator at once withdrew to make ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... "Shakespearian Manual," starting from this view, have gone so far as to say that "Macbeth," as we have it, is not all Shakespeare's, but in part the work of Thomas Middleton, a second or third-rate playwright contemporary with Shakespeare, who wrote a play, called "The Witch," which is plainly an imitation of the supernatural scenes in this tragedy. The Cambridge editors believe that Middleton was permitted to supply certain scenes ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... When a playwright produces a plot whose incidents are just within the possibilities, and far beyond the probabilities, of this life, it is said to be "ingenious," because of the crowd of circumstances that are huddled into each scene. According ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Browning's work as a playwright, consisting of eight pieces, or nine if we include the later In a Balcony, is sufficiently ample to enable us to form a trustworthy estimate of his genius as seen in drama. Dramatic, in the sense that he created and studied minds and hearts other than his ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Baptist minister in his old age. When, at home, I mentioned this acquaintance, it awakened no interest. I believe that my Father had never heard, or never noticed, the name of one who had been by far the most eminent English playwright of that age. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... of the French theatre so inevitably au courant with human nature. His form is frankly farcical and his plays are so funny, so enjoyable merely as good shows that it seems a pity to raise an obelisk in the playwright's honour, and yet the fact remains that he understands the political, social, domestic, amorous, even cloacal conditions of the French better than any of his contemporaries, always excepting the aforementioned Mirbeau. In On Purge Bebe he has written saucy variations on a theme which ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... the lips of those human puppets, wholly fascinated and completely absorbed him. Douglas had forsaken all traditions. He had been fettered with only a small knowledge of the stage and its workings, and he had escaped the fatal tribute to the conventionalities paid by almost every contemporary playwright. It was a sweet and passionate story which leaped out from the lips of those fashionably dressed but earnest men and women, grandly human, exquisitely told. Here and there the touches were lurid enough, but there was plenty of graceful ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... the play's success. Moreover, Miss Colgate was as pleased as Punch over this flattering tribute to her magnetism—for the part, as described, was one that would not "get over" unless created by an actress of pronounced magnetic appeal—and lost no time in falling deeply in love with the manly playwright. They were serious-minded, ambitious young people. It is of small consequence that he was an untried, unskilled dramatist, and of equally small moment that she was little more than an amateur. They saw a bright light ahead and trudged steadily toward it, prodding ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... which when fused and refined by imagination and fancy were shaped into the shining forms of art. Shakespearean scholars have pointed out the connection between the dramatist and the exposer of exorcism. It has indeed been suggested by one student of Shakespeare that the great playwright was lending his aid by certain allusions in Twelfth Night to Harsnett's attempts to pour ridicule on Puritan exorcism.[46] It would be hard to say how much there is in this suggestion. About Ben Jonson we can speak more certainly. It is clearly evident that he sneered at ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... after I have gone away, will the act really begin. Between you and me, all the preceding has nothing to do with it at all. But you are to be compensated; much is coming soon which is very essential to the plot. I have spoken to the playwright myself and he has ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of course, take their name from the erratic poet and playwright. In one of them he lived and died, just above the rooms tenanted by the learned Blackstone, who, at that time engaged in penning the fourth volume of his "Commentaries," was often grievously annoyed by the dancing- and drinking-parties, the games of blind-man's-buff, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... cackle about books," said Jephson; "these columns of criticism to every line of writing; these endless books about books; these shrill praises and shrill denunciations; this silly worship of novelist Tom; this silly hate of poet Dick; this silly squabbling over playwright Harry. There is no soberness, no sense in it all. One would think, to listen to the High Priests of Culture, that man was made for literature, not literature for man. Thought existed before the Printing Press; and the men who wrote the best hundred books never read them. Books have their ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... collaboration with Mr. E. Belfort Bax. Mackail also describes a satirical interlude, entitled "The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened," which was acted thrice at Farringden Road in the autumn of 1887—a Socialistic farce in the form of a mediaeval miracle play—a conjunction quite typical of the playwright's political principles and literary preferences. Morris' ideal society, unlike Ruskin's, included no feudal elements; there was no room in it for kings, or nobles, or great cities, or a centralised government. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... His books, after their first season or two of favour, were selling but poorly in France, although pirated editions were issued and had a large circulation abroad. Impatiently he meditated plans for doubling and tripling his revenue. He would emigrate—he would recommence publishing—he would turn playwright. Amid these three solicitations he moved in a circle without reaching a conclusion. And fortune, while he was hesitating, did not come to his door. In default of her visit, not all the flattering epistles he received from ladies in Russia and Germany —three and ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... was obliged to shut him up in a room with his mistress and his favourite cats, without them at his side he could do nothing. The fifth act of Pizarro was actually finished by Sheridan on the first evening of its performance, when the illustrious playwright was shut up in a room with a plate of sandwiches and two bottles of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... of a young newspaper man and author, who came to me for the loan of five dollars. I had never seen him before, but I knew his brother, a brilliant playwright, in a social way. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... essayist, journalism; pen, scribbler, the scribbling race; literary hack, Grub-street writer; writer for the press, gentleman of the press, representative of the press; adjective jerker[obs3], diaskeaust[obs3], ghost, hack writer, ink slinger; publicist; reporter, penny a liner; editor, subeditor[obs3]; playwright &c. 599; poet &c. 597. bookseller, publisher; bibliopole[obs3], bibliopolist[obs3]; librarian; bookstore, bookshop, bookseller's shop. knowledge of books, bibliography; book learning &c. (knowledge) 490. Phr. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in ancestral worship. Thus Attica had a temple to Theseus, the Ionian hero; the shrine of AEsculapius at Epidau'rus was famous throughout the classic world; and the exploits of Hercules were commemorated by the Dorians at the tomb of a Ne'mean king. When the bard and the playwright clothed these tales in verse, all Greece hearkened; and when the painter or the sculptor took these subjects for his skill, all Greece applauded. Thus was strengthened the national sense of ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... may not have, as I have said, an exalted and intense inner life. I have known a number of cases where a man who seemed thoroughly commonplace and unemotional has all at once surprised everybody by telling the story of his hidden life far more pointedly and dramatically than any playwright or novelist or poet could have told it for him. I will not insult your intelligence, Beloved, by saying how he ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... The old playwright had been seized with a paroxysm of coughing that took his meagre storehouse of breath. Weakly striking at his breast, he shook and quivered in the clutch of the thing, leaning back exhausted when it had passed, but never once losing ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... book, as it is only in Ireland, of the countries that retain a Celtic culture, that the movement is the dominating influence in writing in English; and it is with the drama only that I have now to deal, though when a playwright is a poet or a story-teller, too, I have written of his attainment in verse and tale also. Had I been writing five years ago, I should have said that it was in poetry that the Celtic Renaissance had attained most nobly, but since then the drama has had more recruits of power than has ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Stevenson spent much of her time seated before the great fireplace with the haughty Kitson on her lap. On the mantelshelf there was a curious collection of photographs—one of Ah Fu, the Chinese cook of South Sea memory, side by side with that of Sir Arthur Pinero, famous playwright—silent witnesses to the wide extent of her acquaintance and the broad ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... the main instrument of Vittoria's crime and elevation. The Cardinal Montalto is called Monticelso, and his papal title is Paul IV. instead of Sixtus V. These are details of comparative indifference, in which a playwright may fairly use his liberty of art. On the other hand, Webster shows a curious knowledge of the picturesque circumstances of the tale. The garden in which Vittoria meets Bracciano is the villa of Magnanapoli; Zanche, the Moorish slave, combines Vittoria's waiting-woman, Caterina, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... refer to the antecedent plays. After this comes The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, collaborated by the same author with Henry Chettle, another successful playwright. This, differing from the ballad account, shows how he was poisoned by his uncle, the wicked prior. His obsequies are solemnized with ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... in the Austrian Minister, eagerly. "And then there is the prerogative of the author and of the playwright to drop a curtain whenever he wants to, or to put a stop to everything by ending the chapter. That isn't fair. That is an advantage over nature. When some one accuses some one else of doing something dreadful at the play, down comes the curtain quick and keeps things ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... energy in which old forms were displaced by new, and old subjects refashioned by successive poets. As in the Athenian or the English drama the story of Oedipus or of Lear might be taken up by one playwright after another, so in the North the Northern stories were made to pass through changes in ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... to the Exchange, which was then in Lumber-street, about his affairs"—seems to show that it was originally written quite early in the century, and it is just possible that T. H. stands for the voluminous playwright and pamphleteer Thomas Heywood. The Exchange was removed to its present site in 1568, and therefore our tract could not have been written before that date, but must have appeared when the memory ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... 1574; died 1637. Poet, playwright, and friend of Shakspeare, in whose honor he has left a noble eulogium. A manly, sturdy, laborious, English genius, of whose dramatic productions, however, but one ("Every Man in his Humor") has retained possession of the stage. He is also the author of some exquisite ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... virginal sweetness and purity. In 'Ingomar' the heroine comes very early and abruptly on the scene before the audience is interested in her arrival, or has, indeed, got rid of the garish realities of the street. But Miss Anderson's appearance spoke for itself without any aid from the playwright. The house, after a moment's hesitation, broke out into sudden and quickly-growing applause, which was evidently a tribute not to the artist, but to the woman. She understood this herself, and evidently enjoyed her triumph with a frank and girlish pleasure. She had conquered ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... drama, as they advance, retreat, and countermarch, little by little yielding up their secret, disclosing all the subtle interplay of human motives. From the heights of his knowledge the critic surveys the spectacle; with an insight born of his learning, he penetrates the mysteries of the playwright's craft. He knows what thought and skill have gone into this result; he knows the weary hours of toil, the difficulties of invention and selection, the heroic rejections, the intricacies of construction, the final triumph. He sees it all from the point of ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... trained to carry loads; the singer works his larynx; and the pianist hardens his wrist. A banker is practised in business matters; he studies and plans them, and pulls the wires of various interests, just as a playwright trains his intelligence in combining situations, studying his actors, giving life to ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... firearms are set forth as veritable representatives of life in the Canadian wilderness, he may rest assured that the work is nothing but a travesty on life in Canada. Any author, any illustrator, any playwright, any scenario writer, any actor or any director who depicts Canadian wilderness life in that way is either an ignoramus or a shameless humbug. And to add strength to my statement I shall quote the experience of a gentleman who was the first City ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... wanting—this surprises me more than I can tell you. I had expected to listen to a natural, ordinary, unactable episode arranged more or less in steichomuthics. There is no work so scholarly and engaging as the amateur's. But in your play I am amazed to find the touch of the professional and experienced playwright. Yes, my dear, you have proved that you happen to possess the quality—one that is most difficult to acquire—of surrounding a situation which is improbable enough to be convincing with that absurdly mechanical conversation which the theatre-going public demands. ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... Drama. The Drama of Illusion. The Modern Art of Stage Direction. A Plea for a New Type of Play. The Period of Pragmatism. The Undramatic Drama. The Value of Stage Conventions. The Supernatural Drama. The Irish National Theatre. The Personality of the Playwright. Themes and Stories of the Stage. Plausibility in Plays. Infirmity of Purpose. Where to Begin a Play. Continuity of Structure. Rhythm and Tempo. The Plays of Yesteryear. A New Defense of Melodrama. The Art of the Moving-Picture Play. The One-Act ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... impressive and earnest denunciations of masquerades and theatres (in which latter, by the way, one Samuel Foote had very recently been following the example of the author of Pasquin); but Fielding the magistrate and Fielding the playwright were two different persons; and a long interval of changeful experience lay between them. In another part of his charge, which deals with the offence of libelling, it is possible that his very vigorous appeal was not the less forcible by reason of the ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson |
