"Comedy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... steer panic-stricken cattle or heavily laden oxen across them. But even though the work lacked the glamour of the pioneers' primitive, golden day, it was not without engrossing interests. It was filled with drama, relieved by comedy, sometimes fraught ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... the "Divine Comedy," which has made his name immortal. His was the first great name in literature after the long dark period of the Middle Ages. It is said of him that "he was not the restorer of classic antiquity, but one of the great prophets of that restoration." ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... of disgrace, but I am not worthy of it—not yet, at any rate. I remember that I used to say that I thought I could bear a real tragedy if it came to me with purple pall and a mask of noble sorrow, but that the dreadful thing about modernity was that it put tragedy into the raiment of comedy, so that the great realities seemed commonplace or grotesque or lacking in style. It is quite true about modernity. It has probably always been true about actual life. It is said that all martyrdoms seemed mean ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... Complement of the Court, which tho it may seem very pretty, yet amongst good Critics, let Veratus {32} say what he will in their excuse, it cannot be allowed: For 'tis against Minturnus's Opinion, who in his second Book de Poeta says thus: Mean Persons are brought in, those in Comedy indeed more polite, those in Pastorals more unelegant, as suppos'd to lead a rude life in Solitude; and Jason Denor a Doctor of Padua takes notice of the same as a very absurd Error: Aristotle heretofore for a like fault ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... an old woman like me to assist you, Everard. You'll have the town at your feet. You'll be able to frivol with musical comedy, flirt with our married beauties, or—I'm sorry, ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... away from hence," said Mr Vernon Wycherley; "the subject of them was my comedy, which, as you know, I intend to offer for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... needless to criticise their peculiar dialect, were it not that Thackeray has made for himself a reputation by his writing of Irish. In this he has been so entirely successful that for many English readers he has established a new language which may not improperly be called Hybernico-Thackerayan. If comedy is to be got from peculiarities of dialect, as no doubt it is, one form will do as well as another, so long as those who read it know no better. So it has been with Thackeray's Irish, for in truth he was not familiar with the modes ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... hundreds of remarkable freaks performed by those ugly minie-balls during the war. Why that brigade should have been allowed to march into that ambuscade, from which we had so narrowly escaped, I could not understand. It was one of the early faux pas of that unfortunate comedy, rather tragedy ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... as far back as 1602, when the old Cross was pulled down, and are mentioned by Ben Jonson, a great dramatist, and the friend of Shakespeare. He was Poet Laureate from 1619, and had the honour of being buried in Westminster Abbey. In his comedy Bartholomew Fair, published in 1614, he mentions that a Banbury baker, whom he facetiously named Mr. "Zeal-of-the-Lord Busy," had given up the making of these cakes "because they were served at bridals and other profane feasts." This baker, we imagined, must have been a Puritan, for from ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... the boat when he came and seated himself by my side, and appeared not a little tipsy. He commenced the conversation in the most magnific style, and a sort of pioneering to his own vanity, he flattered me with such grossness! The parasites of the old comedy were modest ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... war has brought to woman. (See p. 120.) Pietro's modeling is worthy of an older artist. Another human tragedy is well told in "The Outcast," a graphic figure by Attilio Piccirilli. (p. 136.) Charming bits of comedy are the whimsical little fountain pieces by Janet Scudder and Anna Coleman Ladd. The honor-winners in sculpture are named in ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... mercenary, and were the chief agents in promoting a match, if it were for their own family's advantage. No doubt Uncle Francis had arranged the whole affair with this Lady Tancred in the first instance, and she, Zara, would not be required to keep up the comedy, as with the uncle and cousins. She decided she would be quite frank with her if the occasion required, and if she should, by chance, make the same insinuation of the continuance of the Tancred race as Lady Ethelrida had innocently done, she would have plainly ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... paint a magnificent picture. But Prince Henry is anything but a great portrait; he is at first hardly more than a prig, and later a feeble and colourless replica of Hotspur. It is very curious that even in the comedy scenes with Falstaff Shakespeare has never taken the trouble to realize the Prince: he often lends him his own word-wit, and now and then his own high intelligence, but he never for a moment discovers to us the soul of his hero. He does not even tell us what pleasure Henry ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... was molting for the musical comedy lost his last feather and the company broke up. The ponies trotted away and I was left in the window ownerless. The janitor gave me to a refined comedy team on the eighth floor, and in six weeks I had been set in the window of five different flats I ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... think the ordinary theatrical audience is of a high grade intellectually; it's third or fourth rate; but morally it seems quite as good as other public assemblages. All the people were nicely dressed, and they sat there before that nasty mess—it was an English comedy where all the jokes turn upon the belief of the characters that their wives and husbands are the parents of illegitimate offspring—and listened with as smooth self- satisfaction as if they were not responsible for it. But all at once it occurred to me that they were responsible, every ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... Monday night, For the ninth time—oh accents of delight To the poor author's ear, when three times three With a full bumper crowns, his Comedy! When, long by money, and the muse, forsaken, He finds at length his jokes and boxes taken, And sees his play-bill circulate—alas, The only bill on which his name will pass! Thus, Vapid, thus shall Thespian scrolls of fame Thro' box and ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... are immensely entertaining; but are there to be many more of them, before you can permit our little comedy to reach ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... does this union of voice and action become in the song of Deborah and Barak, in Judges V. A possible description of the performance of this musical comedy is given by Herder, who suggests that "Probably verses 1-11 were interrupted by the shouts of the populace; verses 12-27 were a picture of the battle, with a naming of the leaders with praise or blame, and mimicking each one as ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... soul!—Morgan Bennett saw Barrie at the theatre, and looked at her through his opera-glasses almost as often as he looked at Mrs. Bal in her gay, exciting comedy-drama, "The Nelly Affair." The play had been written for the actress and suited her exactly. In fact its whole success was made by her magnetic personality, her beauty, and her dresses. She scarcely left the stage, and had something to do or say every minute, ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... 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 ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Tim. "I don't call this a comedy situation, if you do, Tim. I'd certainly hate to get on pro and have to ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... she was simply enjoying herself and trying to amuse her masculine companion, when her gestures were unconscious and her speeches unstudied, when she laughed through sheer merriment and was charmingly theatrical because she could not help it and because little bits of pathos and comedy were natural to her at times, then it was that the danger became deadly; then it was that her admirers were regardless of consequences, and defied results. And she was in just such a ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Vitalis, as I placed my hat on my head, "and we'll get to work, because to-morrow is market day and we must give a performance. You must play in a comedy with the two ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... work, the composer's first real success, is due not only to the sparkling and easy flow of melody, but also in large measure to the skill with which the librettists have adapted Rauppach's old-fashioned comedy. ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Julia's wife in a absurd green bonnet over one ear. Waves of laughter followed them the whole length of the course. Julia played the part extremely well. I never dreamed that a Pendleton could display so much comedy spirit—begging Master Jervie' pardon; I don't consider him a true Pendleton though, any more than I ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... at the Comedy, and (like Mr. Pim) found, in its need, a home at The Playhouse. Miss Gladys Cooper has a charming way of withdrawing into a nursing home whenever I want a theatre, but I beg her not to make a habit of it. My plays can be spared ...
— Second Plays • A. A. Milne
... the drama the general English idea of the American stage is based chiefly on acquaintance with that noisy type of "musical comedy" of which so many specimens have in recent years been brought to England from the other side of the Atlantic. It is as if Americans judged English literature by Miss Marie Corelli and Guy Thorne. Those things are brought to England because they are opined by the managers to be ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... Perhaps Shakespear's tragedies would in some respects have been better if he had never written comedies at all; and in that case his comedies might well have been spared, though they must have cost us some regret. Racine, it is said, might have rivalled Moliere in comedy; but he gave up the cultivation of his comic talents to devote himself wholly to the tragic Muse. If, as the French tell us, he in consequence attained to the perfection of tragic composition, this was better than writing comedies as well as Moliere and tragedies as well as Crebillon. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... we should have tales as exciting, as romantic and pathetic as any I have set down concerning the Indian wars. But such stories are usually forgotten in the material interest of the affairs, and it is only when some tragedy or comedy arising from them finds chance record that we realize how full of human interest they are. The decay of steamboating and the rise of railroading is in itself a romance if it could be rightly seen, and if ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... my child, there was no other way in which you could honourably earn your dot in a single hour. To-morrow I shall take you back to the cure of Montreuil, who will, I trust, absolve us both. He will forgive you for playing in a comedy once in ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Macklin had been the most admired Shylock of his century. His specialty was the performance of character parts, often dialect roles, either broadly comic or cruel and ironic. The central figure of this, his best comedy, is such a part. It combines those features that the author could portray so effectively, the broad dialect, the callous selfishness, the hypocrisy, the passionate resistance to all appeals to sentiment and ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... of comedy and farce met the eye at every turn. Costumes the most remarkable, men the most varied and peculiar, and things the most incomprehensible and unexpected, presented themselves in endless succession. Here ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... crowded vestibule of London's most famous club restaurant. He was to a certain extent out of the picture among the crowd of this new generation of pleasure seekers, on the faces of whom opulence and acquisitiveness had already laid its branding hand. The Mecca alike of musical comedy and the Stock Exchange, the place, however, still preserved a curious attraction for the foreign element in London, so that when at last Naida appeared, she was exchanging courtesies with an Italian Duchess on one side and a ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hissed by the audience, who had always before applauded him. He burst into tears. He had been watching his dying wife, and had left her dead, as be came upon the stage. This was his apology for imperfection in his part. Poor Hood had also to unite comedy with tragedy,—not for a night, or a day, or a week, but for months and years. He had to give the comedy to the public, and keep the tragedy to himself; nor could he, if comedy failed him, plead with the public the tragedy of his circumstances. That was nothing to the public. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... gives them plenty of politics, plenty of rhetoric, plenty of discussion, political and moral, plenty of speculation, which in those days was novel, now and then a little scepticism. His "Alcestis" is melodrama verging on sentimental comedy, and heralding the sentimental comedy of Menander known to us in the versions of Terence. The chord of pathos he can touch well. His degradation, as the old school thought it, of the drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and what they deemed his pandering to vulgar taste, brought upon him the ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... positive, dogmatic way that he assures us that Peer Gynt is a poem, not a satire; The League of Youth a 'simple comedy and nothing more'; Emperor and Galilean an 'entirely realistic work'; that in Ghosts 'there is not a single opinion, a single utterance which can be laid to the account of the author.... My intention was to produce the impression in the mind of the reader that he was witnessing something ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... of what he says, Aristophanes has not always disdained this sort of low comedy—for instance, his ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... its first meaning and "boastful" in its second, a meaning well known in Berlin where, at the "Little Theatre," in a series of plays of all ages, the "Miles Gloriosus" of Plautus had just been presented—a boastful, conceited soldier, the "Miles Gloriosus," the chief character of the comedy. ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... 3. In comedy or in tragedy alike, which is meant to be still further removed from ordinary life, we find the dialogue fettered not only by metre, but by rhyme. We need not go to Dryden, and others, of our own ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... people want is a compromise between old tragedy and new comedy. Now, if some manager could have a love play, where the heroine goes into a slaughter house to talk love to the butcher, instead of a blacksmith shop or a brewery, it would take. A scene could be set for a slaughter house, ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... answered his lordship, slowly, "that a court is the best of dramatic schools. It is so real, too; there is much of tragedy and a great deal of comedy too—unconscious, a lot of it. I have always been rather keenly interested in the study of the people who came before me, particularly in criminal cases. It seems to me that there is still a wide ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... they look upon such empty persiflage as a testimony to the truth of their own praises. It is not then properly friendship at all when the one will not listen to the truth, and the other is prepared to lie. Nor would the servility of parasites in comedy have seemed humorous to us had there been no such things as braggart captains. "Is Thais really much obliged to me?" It would have been quite enough to answer "Much," but he must needs say "Immensely." Your servile flatterer always exaggerates what his victim wishes ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... days following the duel another incident occurred which was of a nature so startling that it drove the Sizer comedy from all minds. This time ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... solemn; whilst that in comedy, Cordax, was frivolous, and the siccinis, or dance of Satyrs, was often obscene. They danced to the music of the pipes, the tambour, the harp, castanets, cymbals, ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... insisted on accompanying him to see the latest acquisitions in the British Museum, and various other exhibitions, and went at night to the Prince of Wales's Theatre, where Sir Peter was infinitely delighted with an admirable little comedy by Mr. Robertson, admirably placed on the stage by Marie Wilton. The day after, when Gordon called on him at his hotel, he cleared his throat, and thus plunged at once into the ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of which he never thought. So he shrugged his shoulders, and dined again with Lady St. Craye, and began to have leisure to analyse the emotions with which she inspired him. He had not believed that he could be so attracted by a woman with whom he had played the entire comedy, from first glance to last tear—from meeting hands to severed hearts. Yet attracted he was, and strongly. He experienced a sort of resentment, a feeling that she had kept something from him, that she had reserves of which he knew nothing, that he, who in his blind complacency had imagined himself ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... the arts," he adds, "the artist can only reflect his own soul. His work, no matter how it may be dressed up, is of necessity contemporary with himself, being the reflection of his own mind. What do we admire in the 'Divine Comedy' unless it be the great soul of Dante? And the marbles of Michael Angelo, what do they represent to us that is at all extraordinary unless it be Michael Angelo himself? The artist either communicates his own life to his creations, or else ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... cabinet Boule, which I am certain that good M. Lester will surrender to you if you will show to him this letter. The cabinet is not only interesting in itself, but will be doubly so to you because of the part it has played in our little comedy. And I should like to know that it adorns a corner ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... masterpieces in that kind of Lamb, or Sterne, or Goldsmith, or Washington Irving. Granted freely; not humour of that special character. But very good humour nevertheless, the thoroughly popular humour of broad comedy and obvious farce—the humour that finds its account where absurd characters are placed in ridiculous situations, that delights in the oddities of the whimsical and eccentric, that irradiates stupidity and makes dulness amusing. ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... dramatic writers, who are supposed to draw a faithful picture of it. So we go to the theatre, and usually derive keen pleasure therefrom. But is pleasure all that we expect to find? What we should look for above everything in a comedy or a drama is a representation, exact as possible, of the manners and characters of the dramatis persona of the play; and perhaps the conditions under which the play was written do not allow such representation. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... wealthy, childless citizen is the most powerful of the Romans. The distress which follows and chastises extravagant luxury often reduces the great to use the most humiliating expedients. When they wish to borrow, they employ the base and supplicating style of the slaves in the comedy; but when they are called upon to pay, they assume the royal and tragic declamations of the grandsons of Hercules. If the demand is repeated, they readily procure some trusty sycophant to maintain a charge ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... drama or comedy of life is a journey on which the husband must take his wife within a year after their marriage. In the marriage-contract, written or verbal, there is a clause by which the husband assumes the obligation of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... end. Another twenty minutes and the hotel would loom up before them, and the little farce, comedy, or tragedy, whichever it might be, would be finished. The curtain would fall, and the two principal actors ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... 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 of ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... constable in Shakespeare's comedy, "Much Ado About Nothing": "To be a well-favor'd man is the gift of fortune, but to write and read ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... even that possibly she might never in all her life have looked so well as at this particular moment. It might have been that if her hour had struck I just happened to be present at the striking. What had occurred, all the same, was at the worst a notable comedy. ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... all that recalls the baser side of life. "Now, as in geometry, the oblique must be known as well as the right. So in the actions of our life, who seeth not the filthiness of evil, wanteth a great foil to perceive the beauty of virtue. This doth the comedy handle so ... as with hearing it we get, as it were, an experience.... So that the right use of comedy will, I think, by no body be blamed." No doubt, the moral aspect of comedy is here marked with what must be called immoderate stress. Here, too, as when he deals with the kindred ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... southward, sometimes bumping in eddies, sometimes swimming evenly in a stream of motionless ether, my head and heart grew as light as a boy's. I forgot all about the vexations of my job and saw only its joyful comedy. I didn't think that anything on earth could worry me again. Far to the left was a wedge of silver and beside it a cluster of toy houses. That must be Edinburgh, where reposed my portmanteau, and where a most efficient police force was now inquiring ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... peculiarity of their respective characters. When the entertainment was over, Sir Richard declared, that besides the pleasure of filling so many hungry bellies, and enjoying an hour of rich amusement, he had gleaned from them humour enough to form a good comedy, or at least ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Theatre. Authorities have taken little or no trouble to unearth his association with the plays and players of his time—the mid-period of the nineteenth century. Yet they all agree that, as illustration of "parlour comedy," his "Love in '76" is a satisfactory example of sprightliness and fresh inventiveness. For this reason, the small comedietta is included in the present collection. It challenges comparison with ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce
... be the feast of happiness in this beautiful world of ours, could folly end with youth. But youth is only the first act in the "Comedy of Errors." It is the pearly gate that opens to the ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... not all Cowley had to endure; the royal party seemed disposed to calumniate him. When Cowley was young he had hastily composed the comedy of "The Guardian;" a piece which served the cause of loyalty. After the Restoration, he rewrote it under the title of "Cutter of Coleman Street;" a comedy which may still be read with equal curiosity and interest: a spirited picture of the peculiar characters which appeared ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... and his "merced" together. The states-general also sent the correspondence to the Walloon provincial authorities, with an eloquent address, begging them to study well the pitiful part which La Motte had enacted in the private comedy then performing, and to behold as in a mirror their own position, if they did not recede ere it was ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... too excited to play the usual comedy, so flattering to most Englishmen, of pretending that she thought from his speech that he was a Frenchman. The French so well spoken from a man's mouth in London most marvellously enheartened her and encouraged her in the perilous enterprise of her career. She was candidly ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... boy; and so say I: but, prithee, what didst thou do with the comedy which I gave thee t'other day, that I ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... rash and headlong a course; therefore, at home and abroad, he assumed a gaiety he did not feel. So here in the episcopalian palace of Beorminster were three people, each one masking his real feelings in intercourse with the others. The bishop, his son and his scheming chaplain were actors in a comedy of life which—in the opinion of the last—might easily end up as a tragedy. No wonder their behaviour was constrained, no wonder they avoided one another. They were as men living over a powder magazine which the least spark would explode ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... verse is now with one consent allied To Tragedy, and rarely quits her side; Though mad Almanzor rhymed in Dryden's days, No sing-song hero rants in modern plays;— While modest Comedy her verse foregoes For jest and pun in very middling prose. Not that our Bens or Beaumonts show the worse, Or lose one point because they wrote in verse; But so Thalia pleases to appear,— Poor virgin!—damn'd some twenty times ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... its bitterness even the most fearful subjects, so that as the love of beauty retains its tenderness in the presence of death, this love of jest also retains its boldness, and the skeleton becomes one of the standard masques of the Italian comedy. When I was in Venice, in 1850, the most popular piece of the comic opera was "Death and the Cobbler," in which the point of the plot was the success of a village cobbler as a physician, in consequence of ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... theater manager. Having gained not only fame but a modest fortune, he retired in 1611 to live at ease in Stratford until his death in 1616. Besides the two long poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "Lucrece," which first won popularity for him, he has written thirty-seven plays, ranging from the lightest comedy, through romance and historical narrative, to the darkest tragedy. Whatever form his verse takes,—sonnet, song, or dramatic poetry,—it shows the touch of the master hand, the inspiration of the master mind. Of his plays ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... There can be little doubt, however, that Nupkins was drawn from a London Police Magistrate, and is, in fact, another portrait of the functionary whom he sketched specially for "Oliver Twist" under the name of Mr. Fang. Nupkins, however, is more in the comedy vein—ridiculed rather than gibbeted—than was Mr. Fang. We have only to compare the touches ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... Hence, child, says she, many a Newgate-bird becomes a great man, and we have ... several justices of the peace, officers of the trained band, and magistrates of the towns they live in, that have been burnt in the hand."[15] In Mrs. Behn's comedy The Widow Ranter, the same belief finds expression, for Friendly is made to say: "This country wants nothing but to be peopled with a well-born race to make it one of the best colonies in the world; but for want of a governor we are ruled by a council, some of ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... strength any use to him if his arms and legs are out of joint? Would you believe in the strength of a great firm that hired a company of actors from a theatre, and made the tragedian cashier and the low-comedy man head book-keeper? ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... Clarisse refrained from laughing aloud. For some time past the whole company had been deriving amusement from a comedy which was going on in the wings. Mignon, rendered frantic by his wife's caprice and annoyed at the thought that this man Fauchery brought nothing but a certain doubtful notoriety to his household, had conceived ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... the congress went on at Birmingham. The fat Italian from Tuscany read his paper; but as he, though judge in his own country and reformer here in England, was somewhat given to comedy, this morning was not so dull as that which had been devoted to Von Bauhr. After him Judge Staveley made a very elegant, and some said, a very eloquent speech; and so that day was done. Many other days also wore ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... livelier than it has been in later times, witnessed the appearance of several such works—diverse in kind but similar to one another in the universality of their popularity: "The Consolation of Philosophy," the "Divine Comedy," the "Imitation of Christ," the "Roman de la Rose," the "Ship of Fools." The favour enjoyed by the "Roman de la Rose," was in some ways the most extraordinary of all. In France, this work remained the dominant work of poetic literature, and "the source whence every rhymer ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... by his strangely worded, bewildering "Sartor Resartus," brought out his astonishing "History of the French Revolution"—a prose poem, an epic without a hero, revealing as by "flashes of lightning" the ghastly tragedy and comedy of that tremendous upheaval; and in 1845 he followed up the vein thus opened by his lifelike study of "Oliver Cromwell," which was better received by his English readers than the later "History of Friedrich II," marvel of careful research and graphic reproduction ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... other dramatists to be employed in making such additions as would give continual novelty to the old favorite. But of the plays published in our editions of Shakespeare's writings, it is probable that "The Comedy of Errors," and the three parts of "King Henry VI.," are only partially his, and should be classed among his early adaptations, and not among his early creations. The play of "Pericles" bears no marks of his mind, except in some scenes of transcendent power and beauty, which start up from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... person in the earnestness of her confession; looked again into those large appealing honest eyes, which seemed to be so incapable of lending their voucher to a lie. Surely it could not be that all those protestations and assurances were false,—mere comedy got up for the purpose of deluding him. That she was worldlily anxious to secure so great a prize as that which she was trying for was natural enough— was matter of course. But surely, surely there was genuine affection in that glance. Was it not likely to be genuine,—that feeling that ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... goes to Gill's, where he doth eat till one; Then sees a play till six;[546] and sups at seven; And, after supper, straight to bed is gone; And there till ten next day he doth remain; And then he dines; then sees a comedy; 10 And then he sups, and goes to bed again: Thus round he runs without variety, Save that sometimes he comes not to the play, But falls into a whore-house by ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... travelling-equipage stood in the courtyard. On it the concierge was hoisting trunks, and into it was being heaped a promiscuous variety of knick-knackery and wearing apparel. A country postilion—who, but for his dirt, would have looked more like a character in a comedy than a real live, serviceable post-boy—was standing in carpet slippers (having divested himself of his boots of office) harnessing three undersized gray Normandy mares to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... Rouen in 1606, the son of an official; was educated by the Jesuits, and practised unsuccessfully as a lawyer. His dramatic career began with the comedy of "Melite," but it was by his "Medee" that he first proved his tragic genius. "The Cid" appeared in 1636, and a series of masterpieces followed—"Horace," "Cinna," "Polyeucte," "Le Menteur." After a failure in "Pertharite" he retired from ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... large a pinch of snuff. But not a word did the great scholar speak. He would give up his last breath to promote the Return (provided the Hebrew manuscripts were not left behind in alien museums); but the humors of the enthusiasts were part of the great comedy in the only theatre he cared for. Mendel Hyams was another silent member. But he ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... my feet. I was in no mood for trifling, for that scream had shaken me. "Cut the comedy, Rubinoff." I growled. "Kill me, and let's have done ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... profane Ump singing Old Hundred and riding the Bay Eagle up and down in a bunch of frightened cattle, and it was a piece of comedy for the gods. I have heard Jud, with no more tune than a tom-tom, bellowing the doxology to a great audience of Polled-Angus muleys on the verge of a stampede. And I have sung myself, many a time, like a circuit rider with a ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... associations as this under the regime of the Fermier General and Madame Dupin are those of an altogether peaceful and homelike abode. In his Confessions Rousseau says: "We amused ourselves greatly in this fine spot. We made a great deal of music and acted comedies. I wrote a comedy, in fifteen days, entitled L'Engagement Temeraire, which will be found amongst my papers; it has not other merit than that of being lively. I composed several other little things: amongst others a poem ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... Come and eat your bit of mutton at my lodgings. Six o'clock, if you like—and some remarkably good claret, a present from one of the Faithful. You will? That's hearty! And do promise me to think no more of our little domestic comedy. Relieve your mind. Look at Wiseman's 'Recollections of ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... cobwebbed, and having the look of a cold-storage plant or a car barn fallen into disuse; dusty, neglected, almost eerie. Yet within it lurks Romance, and her sombre sister Tragedy, and their antic brother Comedy, the cut-up. ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... Left ignorant of the ironmaster's generous intentions, she attributed his ready deference to all her wishes to his ambition to become her husband, and even felt contempt for the readiness with which he had enacted his part in the humiliating comedy played before the duke, so thoroughly did she misjudge passionate, generous-hearted Philippe, whose only dream ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... prefixed to his own edition of that great man's works, throws out some unmannerly reflexions against Sir Richard, who was at that time in Scotland, as one of the commissioners on the forfeited estates. Upon Sir Richard's return to London, he dedicates to Mr. Congreve, Addison's Comedy, called the Drummer, in which he takes occasion very smartly to retort upon Tickell, and clears himself of the imputation laid to his charge, namely that of valuing himself upon Mr. Addison's ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... write, that I would begin again at once with a heavy heart at times, as to other duties, to the duty of being perfectly silly, perfectly extravagant, perfectly trivial, and as far as possible, amusing. I have sworn that Gertrude should not feel, wherever she is, that the comedy has gone out of our theatre. This, I am well aware, will be misunderstood. But I have long grasped that whatever we do we are misunderstood—small blame to other people; for, we know ourselves, our best motives are things we could neither explain nor defend. And I would ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... are assumed in turn by a single supernatural Spirit, who amid his endless improvisations is imagining himself living for the moment in this particular solar and social system. Death in such a universal monologue would be but a change of scene or of metre, while in the scramble of a real comedy it would be a change of actors. In either case every voice would be silenced sooner or later, and death would end each particular life, in ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... nearly the same judgment concerning them which they formed in reading them in the closet. And we are willing to admit, that admirable as they appear to us in many respects, they are not well adapted to become popular in this country. But the excellencies and unrivalled elegance of the French comedy, have been at all times universally admitted, while there is this great distinction between them and the tragedies of the French school, that however great the pleasure we may take in reading them, no one ever saw them well performed, without acknowledging, that until then, he had ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... police are Englishmen and good fellows, and they accept a situation which would rouse any continental gendarme to heroic indignation. Mayors, Aldermen, and Justices of the Peace are comic, and take it not quite so well. Beadles were so wholly dedicated to the purposes of comedy that I suppose they found their position unendurable and went to earth; at any rate it is very difficult to catch one in ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... lives on today in the anecdotes of his private life rather than in his princely actions. All the kings and heroes of the Rococo age therefore are rather material for the historical genre picture of the novel and the comedy, than for the genuine historical picture of the epic and the tragedy. One can fully characterize them only by painting a hundred individual traits expressive of their peculiarity and their caprice, and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... have mingled memories—all pleasant, but some touched with comedy. Gentle Madame Renan came with her famous husband and soon won all hearts. Oxford in mid-April was then, as always, a dream of gardens just coming into leaf, enchasing buildings of a silvery gray, and full to the brim of the old walls with the ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a letter this morning,"—a mail had just arrived; it brought no smile or tear for me,—no parallelogram of tragedy or comedy in stationery,—"such a pleasant one, from my uncle Miguel, at Florence, in Italy, you know. He is well, and quite rich, my father says; they have restored to him his property that he thought was all lost forever, and they have made him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... Persons began to leave money for this purpose in their wills, and by degrees a fondness for the frightful sport increased, for the Romans had no leaning towards the ideal, and delighted only in those pursuits which appealed to their coarse, strong, and, in its way, pious nature. Humor and comedy with them became burlesque, sometimes repulsive in its grotesqueness. Dramatic art grew up during this period. We have seen that dramatic exhibitions were introduced in the year 363, from Etruria, at a time of pestilence, but ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... Portsmouth (where the train stopped for good) before I could make my presence and my predicament known. This trivial incident had never been forgotten by my family—so much so, that I had often regretted the hilarious spirit of pure comedy at my own expense which had prompted me to ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... Mr. Waters, in apparent unconsciousness of the irony. "But I think the Church has made a mistake in condemning the theatre in toto. It appears to me that it might always have countenanced a certain order of comedy, in which the motive and plot are unobjectionable. Though I don't deny that there are moods when all laughter seems low and unworthy and incompatible with the most advanced state of being. And I confess," he went on, with a dreamy thoughtfulness, ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... things terminate as they may, either I will keep my word, or never again will cross the threshold of your palace. I have discovered some traces of the miscreant, and I trust that I shall amuse you to-morrow, at this time and in this place, with the representation of a comedy; but should it prove a tragedy instead, ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... been observed by an able and popular writer[2] of the present day, that the following proposition, though very generally received, is far from being a true one: "Tragedy improves and exalts the nature of man, while Comedy has a tendency to lower it." Now I profess also to believe rather in the converse of this proposition, and shall endeavour in this essay to establish that belief in the minds of my readers, by the same line of argument that originally ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... imitation, and which delights us less when seen at what is called the proper distance, where the two are indistinguishable, than when seen from just the point where all that is crudely mechanical hides the comedy of what is, absolutely, a deception. Losing, as we do, something of the particularity of these painted faces, we are able to enjoy all the better what it is certainly important we should appreciate, if we are truly to appreciate our ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... scarcely opened—forced speech recognizable by its various degrees of imbecility. The man, for instance, who asks you if you have been to a theatre lately when you have just deftly foisted upon the company the latest joke you heard in a musical comedy, has reached that stage of the disease when retirement is the only cure. Like quinine in fever districts, there is one drug which may ward off the icy fingers of the complaint—champagne—but it should be administered ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... comedy to watch in a little town. The warning gravity of the advocate for the Crown, the emotional eloquence of the advocate for the defence. The court sat listening to what appeared to be its duty in regard to the case of a girl named Barbro, and the ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... attempt to carry the enemy by stealth. The wit of the one had been matched by the other. And the two flotillas had gone wide enough in passing to escape mutual discovery. In a way it was a pirates' comedy but there were two spectators who foresaw a personal tragedy. They fled for the cabin and scuttled through a small door in a bulkhead which admitted them to the ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... evil of necessity exists; for evil being the opposite of good, where no evil is there no good can be. For just as in a comedy there are absurdities, which are in themselves bad, but yet add a certain attraction to the poem as a whole, so also one may blame evil regarded in itself, yet for the whole it is not without its use. So also God is the cause ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... reflection of the false sentiment of the Revolution, Mackenzie joined afterwards in writing tracts to dissuade the people from faith in the doctrines of the Revolutionists. Mackenzie wrote also a tragedy, "The Prince of Tunis," which was acted with success at Edinburgh, and a comedy, "The White Hypocrite," which was acted once only at Covent garden. He died at the age of eighty-six, on the 13th June, 1831, having for many years been regarded as an elder friend of their own craft by the men of letters who in his days gave dignity to Edinburgh society, and caused the ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... understanding into the following observation, which possesses a really deep meaning. It shows that he had an intuitive knowledge of the entire necessity with which, characters and motives being given, all actions take place. He makes it at the beginning of the prologue to his comedy Clitia. If, he says, the same men were to recur in the world in the way that the same circumstances recur, a hundred years would never elapse without our finding ourselves together once more, and doing the same things as ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... place; the people rose in their cause, the gates were shut, the ramparts were manned; and the cowardice of Peter was found equal to his arrogance and injustice. The military fame of Commentiolus [37] is the object of satire or comedy rather than of serious history, since he was even deficient in the vile and vulgar qualification of personal courage. His solemn councils, strange evolutions, and secret orders, always supplied an apology for flight or delay. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... a man who is proscribed on an unjust accusation, and pursued by the emissaries of the royal power. One might even, though this would be forcing the point, find an analogy in the fact that the elder woman (in both plays a strong and determined character) has in Scribe's comedy a cowardly suitor, while in Ibsen's tragedy, or melodrama, she has a cowardly husband. In every other respect the plays are as dissimilar as possible; yet it seems to me far from unlikely that an ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... thumbed the bloom off his narrative in my attempt to summarise it, the reader will allow that he knew how to write. He gives us the whole scene in the fewest possible touches: he wastes no words in describing the personages in his small comedy—comic idyll I had rather call it, for after a fashion it reminds me of the immortal chatter between Gorgo and Praxinoe in the fifteenth idyll of Theocritus. There the picture is: the honest opinionated country squire; ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... untroubled by an excess of sentimentality, Lilienblum, one of those deliberate, puritanic scholars that constitute the glory of Lithuanian Talmudism, was at once hero and actor in the intense drama performed in the Russian ghetto, which he himself described as the "Jewish tragi-comedy". ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... ourselves wore a picturesque and even a scenical exterior: but the inner life and its pulsations had not then been revealed. Great passions were required to stir the freezing waters; so that certain kinds of comedy, in which such passions are inappropriate, could not then exist. And partly to this case it was amongst the early Romans, united with the almost Asiatic seclusion from social meetings of female influence ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... House was crowded by about a hundred peers, a larger number than had voted even on the great day of the Exclusion Bill. The King, too, was present. His brother had been in the habit of attending the sittings of the Lords for amusement, and used often to say that a debate was as entertaining as a comedy. James came, not to be diverted, but in the hope that his presence might impose some restraint on the discussion. He was disappointed. The sense of the House was so strongly manifested that, after a closing speech, of great keenness, from Halifax, the courtiers did not venture to divide. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... plainness, a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids, the nasal tone of her voice,—all repelled; and I said to myself, 'We shall never get far.'" He adds: "I believe I fancied her too much interested in personal history; and her talk was a comedy in which dramatic justice was done to everybody's foibles. I remember she made me laugh more than I liked." But, "soon her wit had effaced the impression of her personal unattractiveness, and the eyes, which were ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... mysterious death of their chief in Amprior's house of Leny before Prestonpans (1745). Glenbuckie was mysteriously pistolled in the night. "The style and tone is unlike that of the Iliad ... It is rather akin to comedy of a rough farcical kind." But it was time for "comic relief." If the story of Dolon be comic, it is comic with the practical humour of the sagas. In an isolated nocturnal adventure and massacre we cannot expect the style of an heroic battle under ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... the utmost astonishment; 'what on earth is there in her to love? She's nothing but a bad translation of a modern French comedy, ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... Fontaine, is almost the same thing as to love Moliere; it is, to love nature, the whole of nature, humanity ingenuously depicted, a representation of the grand comedy "of a hundred different acts," unrolling itself, cutting itself up before our eyes into a thousand little scenes with the graces and freedoms that are so becoming, with weaknesses also, and liberties which are never found in the simple, manly genius of the master of masters. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... This comedy was well understood abroad. At the end of July and in the beginning of August interpellations were introduced in both Houses of the English Parliament, as to whether Her Majesty's Government found it possible to make diplomatic representations in defence of the persecuted Russian Jews for whom ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... to recommend the young actor as his only possible successor. On Iffland's death Devrient was summoned to Berlin, where he was for fifteen years the popular idol. He died there on the 30th of December 1832. Ludwig Devrient was equally great in comedy and tragedy. Falstaff, Franz Moor, Shylock, King Lear and Richard II. were among his best parts. Karl von Holtei in his Reminiscences has given a graphic picture of him and the "demoniac ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... dismayed, they found the young officer at home engaged in reading. The instant he saw and admitted them, he knew the errand on which they had come. Except for the grave question involved, that which followed would have been a delicious comedy. The lieutenant could not have treated a brother with greater cordiality and never did host shine more brilliantly. He fell to talking of war times, drew out Ruggles, interested the parson and gave some of his own stirring experiences. They remained two hours and went away charmed, ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... must go through with it and only trust that he might be believed, and once again that slight sense of the ludicrous came upon him. Tragedy was in the air; yet, as often happens in real life, it was being pushed to comedy point, and he grudged even the shadow of a jest at this important crisis in his dealings with Miss Clairville, who was now sitting at supper with the ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... of solemn comedy is worth relating, namely, the embassies despatched to Constantinople by the rival claimants to the dominion of Italy. It was probably towards the end of 477, or early in 478, that Zeno, then recently returned from exile after the usurpation of Basiliscus, ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... the whelks. The overlords of the sand patches, these; yet touch one on the back with a stone tied to a bit of string, and down he would go flat, motionless and feigning death. There was a lot of human nature lurking in the depths of the lagoon, comedy and tragedy. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... 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 ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... at the Englishes was nearly filled with guests when Paul Clitheroe arrived upon the scene. These guests were not sitting against the wall talking at each other; the room looked as if it were set for a scene in a modern society comedy. In the bay window, a bower of verdure, an extremely slender and diminutive lady was discoursing eloquently with the superabundant gesticulation of the successful society amateur; she was dilating upon the ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... of a Papist gossoon, the card-fancying Murtagh; and of late, though I kept it a strict secret, I had abandoned in a great measure the study of the beautiful Italian, and the recitation of the sonorous terzets of the Divine Comedy, in which at one time I took the greatest delight, in order to become acquainted with the broken speech, and yet more broken songs, of certain houseless wanderers whom I had met at a horse fair. Such an erratic course was certainly by no means in consonance with the sober and unvarying routine ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... of merit won't! My aim was to advance the ideal of American drama; that was all. The same money put into musical comedy would have nailed S. R. O. ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... political comedy going, he is engaged in a mediation between the master builders and the operatives, who have quarrelled about the unions, and an express came to him from ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... vacation. They were playing a comedy in which she had no part. So she had gone to Carmel to visit her ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... Venetians bore the name of Pantaleone, one of their favourite saints. Hence the application of the name to the characteristic Venetian hose. The "lean and slippered pantaloon" was originally one of the stock characters of the old Italian comedy. Torriano has pantalone, "a pantalone, a covetous and yet amorous old dotard, properly applyed in comedies unto a Venetian." Knickerbockers take their name from Diedrich Knickerbocker, the pseudonym under which Washington Irving wrote his History of Old New ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... touch of tragedy mingled in with the comedy of the situation in the spectacle of these Englishmen, belonging to a nation of proverbially generous feeders, stinting themselves and cutting the lardings and the sweetenings and the garnishments down to the limit that there might be a greater abundance of solid sustenance ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... shall condense into a few pages; although the comedy or mellow-drama—for it greatly mellowed and relaxed the muscles—required for its entire action a full hour. There was, indeed, a prologue, but the rest was mainly dialogue, in which Mr. Ham wonderfully personated all the different speakers, varying his tone, manner, attitude, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... from the commencement of the Chancery proceedings down to the commencement of this trial, had been a comedy of blunders. The very claim was an absurdity, every step in the great fraud was an absurdity, and every proceeding had some ridiculous absurdity to accompany it. It was not until the cross-examination of Baigent by Mr. Hawkins that the ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... a musical comedy, and laughed their way through it—Billy and Harrison had apparently no cares in the world, and Bob and Cecilia were caught up in the whirl of their high spirits, so that anything became a huge joke. The evening flew by on airy wings, ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... before Jenkins, the long-suffering maid, succeeded in settling her mistress to her satisfaction behind the curtains of her berth. The girls made no attempt to get into the dressing-room until the little comedy was over. They laughed until they were hysterical over each scene as it occurred. A comedy in three acts, Betty called it—the losing of the cold-cream bottle and the finding of same in madam's overshoe. The unavailing search ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... mistake for the future, but that sometimes, to remind them of adventures past, comical blunders would happen, and the one Antipholus and the one Dromio be mistaken for the other, making altogether a pleasant and diverting Comedy of Errors. ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... in Devonport; made his debut as Shylock in London at the Haymarket in 1837, achieved his greatest successes in Sadler's Wells by his representation of Shakespeare's plays and the works of eminent dramatists of the 18th century; was distinguished in comedy as well as tragedy, in which last he primarily appeared and established ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... (which I take to be the best comedy of his) he so much exposed the keeping part of the town, that the play was stopt when it had but thrice appeared on the stage; but the author took a becoming care, that the things that offended on the stage, were either ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Lansdowne at their head, was evidently brought forward under less creditable auspices, but could scarcely have gone on without the King's cognizance. We are much afraid that it was but a repetition of the old "Comedy of Errors," performed during the Regency, where the principal character trifled with both parties, till he had made more advantageous terms with the servants in his employ. The comedy, however, still proceeded, for the last act had yet ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... and how can this contradiction be solved, but by supposing that Le Sage incorporated a Spanish story which caught his fancy with the manuscript before him? 7thly, He allows that the story of Dona Laura de Guzman is taken from a Spanish comedy entitled, "Todo es enredos amor y el diablo son las mugeres." 8thly, He allows that the expression, "et je promets de vous faire tirer pied ou aile du premier ministre,"{B} is not French; it is in fact the translation of a Spanish proverb, "Agarrar pata o alon." 9thly, He ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... community of interests. We both belong to the class whose income ranges from $2,000 to $4,000 a year, of which we spend 38 per cent. on food; and we raise an average of 2-2/3 children to the family, and are both responsible for the wide prevalence of musical comedy on the American stage. But I have seen my neighbour twice in the last ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... maize and a small muskmelon form my noontide repast, and during its consumption quite a comedy is enacted down the street between a fat, paunchy vender of goodakoo and the shiny-skinned proprietor of a dhal-shop. The scene opens with a wordy controversy about something; scene two shows the fat goodakoo merchant advanced midway between his own and his adversary's premises, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... something. You will find their lives full of stirring, helpful, and lovely experiences, and in reading of these you will get courage and hope and faith to bear your own trials as they come. True stories suit you, and are the best, for there we get real tragedy and comedy, and the lessons ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... 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 ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... devoid of poetry, worked out for itself an original existence, with characteristic manners and customs which bear no signs of servile imitation. Art stripped off its ideality and produced form alone. We may seek in vain for plastic grace, the swing of comedy, dramatic action, musical genius, or the bold flight of ode and epic. On the other hand, the people are fertile in discoveries, and trained to scientific discussions which demand time and the midnight oil. All things bear the ear-mark of temporal enjoyment. There men look exclusively ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... her once again on the scene of past fatalities, must needs bring her some new evil, some undreamed of crisis in her life. Yet what would happen to her now? She asked herself. The play was played out. She had lived her life. For her tragedy and comedy were ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Riches, Folly, and Good Demeanaunce, were the persons of the drama. The comic character in the miracle plays had been the Devil, and he was retained in some of the moralities side by side with the abstract vice, who became the clown or fool of Shaksperian comedy. The "formal Vice, Iniquity," as Shakspere calls him, had it for his business to belabor the roaring Devil ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... learned that it was this discussion between the General and the dead man which had produced the shouts of laughter from the 24th Chasseurs at the head of the column, I thought it better that my regiment did not take part in this comedy which seemed to me to be as much contrary to discipline as the misdemeanors it was supposed to punish or prevent. I therefore turned my squadrons about, and setting off at the trot I left this unhelpful scene and, returning to the camp, I ordered them to dismount. My example ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... late. Haste; fare thee well! Hear'st thou not steps along the corridor? [EXIT GIACOMO.] I'm sorry for it; but the guards are waiting At his own gate, and such was my contrivance 75 That I might rid me both of him and them. I thought to act a solemn comedy Upon the painted scene of this new world, And to attain my own peculiar ends By some such plot of mingled good and ill 80 As others weave; but there arose a Power Which grasped and snapped the threads of my device And turned it to a net of ruin...Ha! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... elaborate analyses of plot and character and inform us that we are reading Meisterwerke of comic drama.[3] Our perplexity has perhaps become focused upon two leading questions; first: "What manner of drama is this after all? Is it comedy, farce, opera bouffe or mere extravaganza?" Second: "How was it done? What was the technique of acting employed to represent in particular ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... that one or the other had got hold of it. Of this priest it might truly be said, as was said of the priest of Thiers in the Forez, that chance had made him a choir-boy, but destiny had designed him for the profession of arms; and upon this one could build an interesting comedy of how chance and destiny are perpetually at issue, and how chance, having more initiative and not being so bound to routine, gets the better of ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... vanquishing of Hannibal was felt as a second subjugation of Italy, and all the exasperation and all the arrogance of the victor vented themselves especially on the Italian allies who were not Latin. Even the colourless Roman comedy of this period, well subjected as it was to police control, bears traces of this. When the subjugated towns of Capua and Atella were abandoned without restraint to the unbridled wit of the Roman farce, so that the latter town became its very stronghold, and when other writers of comedy ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... grant in a spirit of charity that these reproaches ought not to be wholly laid at the door of the native playwright. If it be true that he has been in the habit of producing plays invariably conventional in sentiment, trite in comedy, wrought on traditional lines, inculcating no philosophy, making no intellectual appeal whatever, may it not be that the attitude of the frequenters of the theatre has made it hard for him to do anything else? If he has until lately evaded in his theatrical work any attempt at a true ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... rankly, though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,—though it be with struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would be well, if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others, appear to have been exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected to a kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not contemplate. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... was comedy. Now and then came a flash of cockney humour, now and then some old lady, a character such as Charles Dickens might have drawn, would amuse them by her garrulous oddities. Once a woman came who was a member of the ballet at a ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... themselves, and (of course) wanted a wash. Also, they sat on their beds and produced pocket-combs, and ran them through their hair. In their dirt and rags these poor battered, breathless men began to try to be smart again. It was a tragedy and a comedy all in one. A Highlander, in a shrunk kilt and with long bare legs, had his head bound about with bandages till it looked like a great melon, and his sleeve dangled empty from his great-coat. Others of the Seaforths, ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... was called by him a comedy because its ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical translations ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... had been on the musical comedy stage and had had a rapid rise to a star part before her marriage to Lynn Moulton, the wealthy lawyer, almost twice her age. I knew also that she had given up the stage, apparently without a regret. Yet there was something ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... theatres of many different grades. Now this democracy shows itself not only in the composition of audiences but in their manifestations of approval. I do not mean that everyone in an audience always likes the same thing. Some outrageous "slap-stick" comedy rejoices one and offends another. A particularly foolish plot may satisfy in one place while it bores in another. But everywhere I find one thing that appeals to everybody—realism. Just as soon as there appears on the screen something that does not know how to pose and is forced by nature to ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... to secure all the Acts of "A Comedy of Errors" owing to the editions having been exhausted, and as numerous friends have expressed a desire to secure it entire, the author has concluded to publish it, supplemented by four ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... Business was good, factories were busy, and the theatres were crowded nightly, especially Keith's, where the latest military photo-play by Thomas Dixon and Charles T. Dazey—with Mary Pickford as the heroine and Charley Chaplin as the comedy relief—was ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett |
