"Playwright" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Palestine might have been photographed. But none of these aspects has anything to do with the photoplay. If we follow the play in a genuine attitude of theatrical interest, we must accept those cues for our attention which the playwright and the producers have prepared for us. But there is surely no lack of means by which our mind can be influenced and directed in the ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... a poet as an audience to a playwright; Keats realized this truth when he printed Endymion. He knew it was full of faults and that he could not revise it. But he also knew that its publication would set him free, and make it possible for him immediately to write something better. This seems to have been the case with Amy Lowell. ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... the most entertaining of old Ben's comedies, and, more than any other, would admit of being brought out anew, if under the management of a judicious and stage-understanding playwright; and an actor, who had studied Morose, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... who have had some success in other forms of writing—even the successful playwright—and those who never have written even a salable joke, all have to learn the slightly different form ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... of theatrical effect, is often found working rather away from it than toward it, and at a meaning and beauty beyond the limits of stage expression. This is because he is more dramatist than playwright, and will always produce and complete his work in its ideal integrity, even if, in so doing, he outruns the sympathy of his audience. This disposition may be traced not only in the plays it has banished from the ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... certain amount of truth, at the bottom of a much embellished legend. At any rate, if Fielding established himself in the country, it was not long before he returned to town; for early in 1736 we find him back again, and not merely a playwright, but lessee of the "Little Theatre" in the Haymarket. The plays which he produced here—satirico-political pieces, such as Pasquin and the Historical Register—were popular enough, but offended the Government; and in 1737 a new bill regulating ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... but his own will, the Marquis de Ligne had lived as though he were the autocrat of fate itself instead of one of its servants, and therefore was surprised when the venerable playwright prepared the unexpected denouement. In pursuance of this end, it was decreed by the imperious and incontrovertible dramatist of the human family that this crabbed, vicious, antiquated marionette should wend his way to the St. Charles on a particular evening. Since the day at the races, the eccentric ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... that at the moment when the reading public began rapidly to expand in England, Tonson should have made Shakespeare available in an attractive and convenient format; and it was a happy choice that brought Rowe to the editorship of these six volumes. As poet, playwright, and man of taste, Rowe was admirably fitted to introduce Shakespeare to a multitude of new readers. Relatively innocent of the technical duties of an editor though he was, he none the less was capable of accomplishing what proved to be his historic ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... or 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
... had wandered out into the night, so had his client, Mr. Learned Bore. This gentleman, a playwright, journalist and writer, had wandered forth in order, no doubt, to get inspiration. The source of any such inspiration as he might have derived from the calm night had been utterly destroyed by the ridiculous antics of the Lord Mayor of London; inspiration ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... still for fiction. We cannot afford to patronize these novelists as our ancestors did before us. Not prizes or endowments or coterie worship or, certainly, more advertising is what the American novelist requires, but a greater respect for his craft. The Elizabethan playwright was frequently despised of the learned world, and, if a favorite with the vulgar, not always a respected one. Strange that learned and vulgar alike should repeat the fallacy in dispraising the preeminently popular art of our own times! To Sir Francis Bacon "Hamlet" was presumably ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... story. Aeschylus' skill in this branch of his art is really extraordinary; the Chorus does take a part, and a vital part too, in the play. Again, the number of Greek actors was limited, whereas in a modern play their number is just as great as suits playwright's convenience or his capacity. The impression then of a Greek play is that it is a somewhat thin performance compared with the vivacity and complexity of the great Elizabethans. The plot, where it exists, seems very narrow in Attic drama; it could hardly be otherwise in a society which was ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... voters who are discontented, but they'd prefer to vote for Donnelly again rather than to vote for some one they know would be no better. You are known the world over. A good many people would never have known there was such a place as Herculaneum but for you. It is the home of the distinguished playwright." ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... personal sacrifice to the enamoured Pilate as the price 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 ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... New York City; playwright, author of "Chinese Lily." Once matron of Framingham reformatory for purpose of studying prison conditions. Arrested picketing Nov. 10, 1917, and sentenced to 30 days ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... wished to be a fault-finder I should say that the piece is too long, and seems all the longer because some of the characters are supposed to represent schoolboys, and a girl of thirteen. The adapter is Mr. BUCHANAN—a poet and a playwright. This gentleman, I believe, has made many other pieces (more or less) his own, with (more or less) success. He seems to have a knack of turning old plays into new ones. I live in hope that when I next visit this great Metropolis I shall find ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... though the first 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 New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... 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 his creditors and neglected ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... effect it's had already," he said. "Shaw is the only playwright clever enough to write dialogue that will hold any number of people in the theatre. The motion picture has made the public demand action. It has changed the plot and progress of ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... argued from the fact 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 had best ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... have yielded up their secrets to Mr. Wills, it is interesting to note in his poems, here the picturesque vision of the painter, here the psychology of the novelist, and here the playwright's sense of dramatic situation. Yet these things, which are the elements of his work of art though we arbitrarily separate them in criticism, are in the work itself blended and made one by the true imaginative and informing power. For Melchior is not a piece of poetic ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... we have produced thirty-two plays, of one-act and greater length, and of these twenty have been American. The emphasis of our interest has been placed on the American playwright, because we feel that no American theatre can be really successful unless it develops a native drama to present and interpret those emotions, ideas, characters, and conditions with which we, as Americans, are ...
— Washington Square Plays - Volume XX, The Drama League Series of Plays • Various
... 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, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... interesting as a revelation of himself. In his Autobiography he has related the origin of the piece. In the spring of 1774 there fell into his hands the recently published Memoires[166] of the French playwright Beaumarchais, which told a story that reawakened painful memories of his own past. Beaumarchais had two sisters in Madrid, one married to an architect; the other, named Marie, betrothed to Clavigo, a publicist of rising fame. On Clavigo's promotion to the post of royal archivist ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... 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 has ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... to earn a livelihood as an actor and playwright. Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn, the leading actors of their generation, made large fortunes. Shakspere himself made enough from his share in the profits of the Globe to retire with a competence, some seven years before his death, and purchase a handsome {103} property ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... imperfect monument of a time of poetical 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 the ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... 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 ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... 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 ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... intrigue, he varied the scenes, he shortened the monologues, he suppressed or reduced the chorus—in a word, the drama in his hands ceased to be oratorical or lyrical, and became at length dramatic. The advance was great; and it was achieved by a hack playwright scrambling for ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... 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 with ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... happy pension family. Then we decided to rent an apartment of our own, for the next year, and soon we were considering the leases of houses, and finally we arrived at the supreme audacity of negotiating for the purchase of one. We had a great friend in Versailles, Victorien Sardou, the novelist and playwright so honored by the people of France. His wonderful house at Marly le Roi was a constant joy to us, and made us always more eager for a permanent home of our own in the neighborhood. Sardou was as eager for the finding of our house as we were, and it was he who finally made it possible for us to ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... The playwright has always been a formidable rival to the novelist, insomuch that in a period of dramatic activity the novel, as our author remarks, can hardly maintain itself. But from the middle of the seventeenth century the stage had fallen low, while the formal and fantastic romance, the long-winded ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... yet sufficiently clear in my own mind to be available offhand, nor was it yet backed by so obvious a product of my own peculiar genius that I could venture to quote it. Moreover, my first impulse was only one of pity for the unlucky playwright, which I felt all the more constrained to express, because his burst of fury gave me the inward satisfaction of knowing that he recognised my great success, of which I was not ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... playwright's work, then, supposing that he possesses the requisite knowledge of life as it is lived to go on with, is to select or evolve from that knowledge the basic idea, plot or theme, which, skillfully displayed, will attract; and then to invent, ...
— How to Write a Play - Letters from Augier, Banville, Dennery, Dumas, Gondinet, - Labiche, Legouve, Pailleron, Sardou, Zola • Various
... of defending his friends, came vigorously to the defense of the playwright, to whom he was devoted and whose first nights he seldom missed. In the discussion which followed Charmian saw more clearly how peculiarly in tune her ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... through independence which, in the '90's, brought down upon him the relentless antagonism of the Theatrical Trust—a combine of managers that feared the advent of so individualistic a playwright and manager. They feared his ability to do so many things well, and they disliked the way the public supported him. This struggle, tempestuous and prolonged, ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... 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
... distinguished way. So distinguished looking was he that to meet him was to wonder why he had not made a great name for himself. An extraordinary mind he certainly had, and an insight into the reasons for things that is given only to genius. He had failed as a composer, failed as a playwright, failed as a singer, failed as an actor. He had been forced to take up the profession of putting on dramatic and musical plays, a profession that required vast knowledge and high talents and paid for them in niggardly ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... acquaintanceship, many whom he could find far from Slumber-land. His steps led to the apartment of a certain theatrical manager, whom he found engaged in a lively tournament of the chips, jousting with two leading men, one playwright, a composer and a merchant prince. The latter, of course, was winning. The host, contributing both chips and bottled cheer, was far from optimistic until the arrival of the ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... obvious conveniences for the playwright, and should greatly simplify the difficulties of stage-craft. Those introductory statements which are required to explain the opening conditions and need such adroit handling will no longer be necessary. You just put everybody ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... 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 ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... carefully, and building it all up before 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 ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... York Idea" at the Lyric Theatre, New York, on November 19, 1906, was one of the rare, distinguished events in the American Theatre. It revealed the fact that at last an American playwright had written a drama comparable with the very best European models, scintillating with clear, cold brilliancy, whose dialogue carried with it an exceptional literary style. It was a play that showed a vitality which will serve ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... himself; he never affects the fashion. No woman, whatever her age or position or her opinion about the crinoline fashion, could avoid wearing one. No effort to introduce a fashion of "rational dress" for women has ever yet succeeded. An artist, novelist, poet, or playwright of a school which is out of fashion fails and is lost. An opponent of the notions which are current can get no hearing. The fashion, therefore, operates a selection in which success and merit are often divorced from each other, but the selection is ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... 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 he knew that I was a rank outsider, ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... reaches The playwright's mouthing shams, And the long-winded speeches Grow brisk as epigrams. My heart, in sudden clover, With smiles adorns my face, For, when the Act is over, I need not keep my place. I'll chase my fears, like foxes, When ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... theatre engaged Sacchini to write an opera, he 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
... "He is a playwright, producer and manager all in one, isn't he?" asked Miriam. "I have seen ever so many pictures of him, and read a great deal about him. They say he is always on the lookout ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... pension of about L125, but also gave him the use of his library. The first results of this favour were adaptations of two plays from Rojas and Lope de Vega, which appeared some time during the first two or three years of the eighteenth century. Le Sage's reputation as a playwright and as a novelist rests, oddly enough, in each case on one work. As the author of "Tuscaret," produced in 1709, he contributed to the stage one of the best comedies in the French language; as author of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... to please his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, and the short Apology for Poetry, a very spirited piece of work, immediately provoked by a rather silly diatribe against the theatre by one Stephen Gosson, once a playwright himself, but turned Puritan clergyman. Both appear to have been written about the same time—that is to say, between 1579 and 1581; Sidney being then in London and in the society of Spenser and other men ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... 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 of literature; fiction, poetry, the ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... no doubt at all that if Balzac had lived, he might have turned out a successful playwright. When he began his career as a dramatic writer he was like a musician taking up an unfamiliar instrument, an organist who was trying the violin, or a painter working in an unknown medium. His last written play was his best. Fortunately, the plot did not ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... stirring life of the English people. The plays themselves, with the testimony of contemporaries and his business success, are strong evidence against the tradition that his life in London was wild and dissolute, like that of the typical actor and playwright ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... representing all classes of religious character, from the ecstasy of the saint to the gloom of the fanatic; yet his intellectual curiosity was not enough excited to explore and reproduce their experience. Do you say that the subject was foreign to the purpose of an Elizabethan playwright? The answer is, that Decker and Massinger attempted it, for a popular audience, in "The Virgin Martyr"; and though the tragedy of "The Virgin Martyr" is a huddled mass of beauties and deformities, its materials of incident and characters, could Shakespeare have been attracted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... and it was in one or the other of these houses that he gained his greatest triumphs, taking the leading part in almost every new play. He was specially famous for his impersonation of Richard III. and other Shakespearian characters, and it was in tragedy that he especially excelled. Every playwright of his day endeavoured to secure his services. He died on the 13th of March 1619. Richard Burbage was a painter as well as an actor. The Felton portrait of Shakespeare is attributed to him, and there is a portrait of a woman, undoubtedly by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... to the action. (The word "drama" signifies action.) The number of actors was subsequently increased to three, and Aeschylus in his later plays used this number. This restriction imposed upon the Greek playwright does not mean that he was limited to two or three characters in his play, but that only two, or at the most three, of these might take part in the action at once. The same actor might assume different parts. The introduction ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... excellence of a 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 independence and competence be in case ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... Mr. Seven Sachs was the arch-famous American actor-playwright, now nearing the end of a provincial tour, which had surpassed all records of provincial tours, and that he would be at the Theatre Royal, Hanbridge, next week. Edward Henry then remembered that the hoardings had been full of Mr. Seven Sachs ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... imagines how he would act under the same circumstances, and he imagines to such purpose that he generally finds the man he wants. I have often told Lyle that if he had not been a detective he would have made a great success as a poet or a playwright. ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... the young playwright who hears his own piece, At night, at night! He thinks that (ironic) applause will ne'er cease, At night, at night! His "little one-act thing" is stodgy and slow, But the Pit is good-natured, the youth's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... some dramatic scheme in which Sir Lumley Skeffington, an amateur playwright, had tried to engage Lamb's pen. Lamb's share of the speaking pantomime for the Sheridans has vanished. We do not even know if it were ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... without emotion, Packer, the stage-manager; but out in the dusky auditorium, Stewart Canby, the new playwright, began to tremble. ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... phenomenon—an entirely new idea to the stage. There are many examples of the "play within a play," but up to that time there had never been a play which showed the WRITING of a play: the processes which go on in the mind of a playwright, and how he uses his personal ...
— The Pot Boiler • Upton Sinclair
... said Ann demurely, "the Federation of Arts, National Society of Portrait Painters, Architectural League, Watercolor Society, Authors' League and the Prince who thinks he's a playwright." ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... gentle face of Irving, I could not help contrasting the two kinds of acting summed up in those two faces. The play was "Olivia," W.G. Wills' poor and stagey version of "The Vicar of Wakefield," in which, however, not even the lean intelligence of a modern playwright could quite banish the homely and gracious and tender charm of Goldsmith. As Dr. Primrose, Irving was almost at his best; that is to say, not at his greatest, but at his most equable level of good acting. ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas 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 ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... 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 reason why the eighteenth-century novelist did not know what to do ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... courtesies and dislike of coarse words he was curiously feminine. Intercourse with Beardsley, for example, had backed his humorous gentleness with a sort of challenging courage; his new intimacy with Lord Alfred Douglas, coming on the top of his triumph as a playwright, was lending him aggressive self-confidence. There was in him that [Greek: hubris] (insolent self-assurance) which the Greek feared, the pride which goeth before destruction. I regretted the change in him and was ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... bounds.[133] With the help of all these, and especially of the last, I shall apply this theory of criticism to Hamlet, not in the hope of saying anything new, but of bringing something to the support of the thesis, that, if Shakespeare was skilful as a playwright, he was even greater as a dramatist,—that, if his immediate business was to fill the theatre, his higher object was to create something which, by fulfilling the conditions and answering the requirements of modern ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Latin at school, he would never have survived to write the 'Novum Organon' and his sonnets to Queen Elizabeth. In that stern age they would have 'killed him—with wopping.' That Bacon should be a vamper and a playwright for no appreciable profit, that, having produced his deathless works, he should make no sign, has, in fact, staggered even the great credulity of Baconians. He MUST, they think, have made a sign in cipher. Out of the mass of the plays, anagrams ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... 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 all ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... John Wilkes, Joseph, and the girls. All of the boys are known to more or less of fame; none of them in his art has reached the renown of the father; but one has sent his name as far as that of the great playwright to whom they were pupils; wherever Shakspeare is quoted, John Wilkes Booth will be named, and infamously, like that Hubert in "King John," who would have murdered the ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... the most prolific, probably the most popular, and proportionally the most wealthy, playwright of French literary history. He was born on Christmas Eve, 1791, and died on the 20th of February, 1861. He lost both parents in early years, and for a time pretended to study law in Paris; but before he was twenty his dramatic vocation had declared itself unmistakably, though his first comedy, ...
— Bataille De Dames • Eugene Scribe and Ernest Legouve
... limitations became no more than mere geometrical expressions. "Pennamite," "Erie," and "Toledo" wars between the States, suggesting a world of bitterness and recrimination, are remembered today, if at all, only by the cartoonist and the playwright. The ancient false pride in mock values, so cherished in Europe, has quite departed from the provincial areas of the United States, and Americans can fly in a day, unwittingly, through many States. Problems that would have cost Europe ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... is Mr. Braithwaiter the playwright, a little to the left—the man, with the smooth grey hair and eyeglass. Mrs. Hamilton Beardsmore you know, of course; her husband is commanding ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... the marriage by two years only, and there were 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 ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... "He married Lady This-and-That." Also, I find I need much more knowledge of literature than I have. This country is divided off into a kind of glorious chessboard, each square being sacred to some immortal author, playwright, or poet. The artists press them close, without overcrowding; and history lies underneath—history ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... theatre, as you may well believe, that poets live and die most like the blithesome grasshoppers. The poor players, marvellous compounds of tin, feathers, and tiffany, fret but a brief hour; but the playwright, less considered alive, is sooner defunct. I have not Dodsley's Plays by me, but, if my memory does not deceive me, not one of them keeps the stage; nor did dear Charles Lamb make many in love with that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... adaptation by herself of her novel, Francois le Champi, was produced at the Odeon in the winter of 1849. Generally speaking, to make a good play out of a good novel, the playwright must begin by murdering the novel; and here, as in all George Sand's dramatic versions of her romances, we seem to miss the best part of the original. However, the curious simplicity of the piece, the rustic scenes and personages, here faithfully copied from reality, unlike ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... 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." It has been computed that the Punch writers, from first to last, have contributed no ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... 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 ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... as the price of His freedom, and when at the last she wept at His feet, where He was bound waiting for His cross, 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 the playwright had given his Christ to say—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 ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... A noted English playwright stated that "the theatre is literally making the minds of our urban population to-day. It is a huge factory of sentiment, of character, of points of honor, of conception, of conduct, of everything that finally determines ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... all the reviews hailing from Germany where the play was very soon produced compare Chesterton with Shaw and many of them say that he is the better playwright. "He means more to it," a Munich paper was translated as saying, "than the good old Shaw." Chesterton's superiority can hardly be entertained in the matter of technique. Actually what the critic meant was that he preferred the ideas of Chesterton to the ideas of Shaw. Both men were ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... boy. Clarissa is a masterpiece, there are fourteen volumes of her, and the most wooden-headed playwright would give you the whole of Clarissa in a single act. So long as I amuse you, what have you to complain of? That costume was positively lovely. Don't you like camillias? Would you rather have dahlias? No? Very good, chestnuts then, here's for you." (And probably ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... connected as well as it was derived, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for instance, being the novelist's cousin. He was educated at Eton and Leyden: but his branch of the family being decidedly impecunious, was thrown very much on his own resources. These were mainly drawn from literature, first as a playwright then as a novelist, journalism and miscellanies coming in. But he was called to the Bar: and though he probably did not make much money there, he obtained the poorly paid and hard-worked but rather important position of "Bow Street Magistrate," which meant that he ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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- ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... the mouths of Shakesperian commentators, is wont to interpret these lines as a protest against the contempt wherewith Elizabethan society regarded the professions of playwright and actor. We are asked to conceive that Shakespeare humbly desires the pity of his bosom friend because he is not put on the same level of social estimation with a brocaded gull or a prosperous stupid goldsmith of the Cheap. No, it is a ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... alone; and something as Mr. Hardy, in The Return of the Native, paints Egdon Heath—"Haggard Egdon"—in its shifting moods before he introduces a single human being upon the scene of their coming tragedy, it is quite possible for the modern playwright, with an artist to aid him, to show the audience the scene of his drama, to let its suggestive beauty, its emotional possibilities, charm or fire their fancies before the speech and action begin. So also, as Wagner and Mr. Herne have demonstrated, there can be a climax of the vacant ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... case of a master passion. When they first were married, he was struggling to be a dramatist. He was quite conscious that, in the trade of the writer, wealth was only to be achieved by the successful playwright. He believed that his was essentially the playwright's instinct. Although his plays met with abundance of good words, they did not attain production. It seemed as if they never would. When they began to be actually starving, she suggested ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... The women wore bandana handkerchiefs, and 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, and ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... some humour, and some pathos, and one good character of an Irishman, but the contrast between the elegance of the French theatre and the grossierete of the English struck us much. But this is the judgment of a disappointed playwright! ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... the belles-lettres writings of this period, mention should be made of a few poems of the fugitive kind which seem to have taken a permanent place in popular regard. John Howard Payne, a native of Long Island, a wandering actor and playwright, who died American consul at Tunis in 1852, wrote about 1820 for Covent Garden Theater an opera, entitled Clari, the libretto of which included the now famous song of Home, Sweet Home. Its literary pretensions were of ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... was a poet, playwright, founder of the Irish Review and a leader of the Irish Renaissance, but he is perhaps best known today for his outstanding books for children. He was awarded the Regina Medal in 1961 for his "distinguished contribution to children's ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... the case 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, ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... animatedly. Then she had 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, ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... to us. Certain it is that, during all of this time of varied occupation as a watch-maker and a soldier, he must have been courting the poetic Muse. There are some who speculate, without authority, on his having been a theatre-goer, and having become inspired as a playwright by the work of the American Company, in Philadelphia; especially by the good work of Douglass. Because of insufficient evidence, that is a question which remains unproven. Nevertheless, it is certain, from an extant letter written ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey
... living-room, where Mrs. 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 democracy ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... Heights sat upon a hill, among a grove of pines, the most romantic of all trees. Life, a powerful but clumsy dramatist, does not reject the most claptrap "situations," which a sophisticated playwright would discard as too obvious. For this sandy plateau, strewn with satiny pine-needles, was the very horizon that had looked so blue and beckoning from the little house by the pond. Not far away was the great Airedale estate, which ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... at every crossroad or entering the church door side by side. So the most solemn Miracles were scandalized by humorous Interludes, and into the most tragic of Shakespeare's scenes entered the fool and the jester. A Greek playwright might object to brutalizing scenes before a cultured audience, but the crowds who came to an Elizabethan play were of a temper to enjoy a Mohawk scalp dance. They were accustomed to violent scenes and sensations; they had witnessed the rack and ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... (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" ...
— The Lumley Autograph • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... Subsequent editors and critics, notably the Cambridge editors and the Rev. F. G. Fleay, in his "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 at the time of the writing of Macbeth: ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... and yet that emotion turns out to be not the emotion IN the drama, but rather the emotion FROM the drama,—a unique independent emotion of tension, otherwise a form of the characteristic aesthetic emotion with which we have been before engaged. The playwright who scornfully rejects the spectator supposed to be aesthetic, ideally contemplative and emotionally indifferent, is vindicated. There must be a vivid emotional effect, but it is the spectator's very own, and not a copy of the hero's emotion, ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... were T.W. Robertson, the playwright, and his friend and companion, E.P. Hingston. His literary executors were Horace Greeley and Richard H. Stoddard. In his will, he bequeathed among other things a large sum of money to his little valet, ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... stage was fostered, and attracted its daily audience, but rather as a dress rehearsal, its main purpose being to train the players for the court presentations at one of her Majesty's palaces. The secret spur to both players and playwright was the hope of being among the chosen for the festivities at Richmond, Whitehall, or Greenwich, as the Queen might fancy to hold ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... wrote it," said Bones. "That man, Ham, is one of the most brilliant geniuses in this or any other world. Aren't you? Speak up, old playwright. ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... its culmination by a series of interruptions or crises. The modern playwright tries to end his acts at an arresting or splendid moment, artfully delayed, and carefully prepared. He tries to end his play by a gradual knitting together of all the energies of his characters into a situation, happier or more haunting, ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... chiefly in this 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 ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... these—here do duty for all, and let us consider, for example, the mechanism of a modern cotton mill, or of a boot factory, or a Hoe printing press, or a plant for electric lighting. All these would be impossible if it had not been for inventive faculties as rare in their way as those of a playwright like Mr. Shaw. ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... direct action, because Sir William More was a good friend of hers, who had entertained her in his home. But she might enlist the aid of one of her noblemen who were interested in the drama. However this was, the young Earl of Oxford, himself a playwright and the patron of a troupe of boy-actors, came to the rescue of the theatre. He bought the lease of the building from Evans, and undertook to reorganize its affairs. To Hunnis's twelve Children of the Chapel he added the Children of St. Paul's Cathedral, making thus ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... the point of divination in detecting it. Never before had he pieced together so broken a chain. He could not resist the unique opportunity of setting a sensational scheme in a sensational framework. The dramatic instinct was strong in him; he felt like a playwright who has constructed a strong melodramatic plot, and has the Drury Lane stage suddenly offered him to present it on. It would be folly to deny himself the luxury, though the presence of Mr. Gladstone and the nature of the ceremony should ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... eminent French novelist and playwright, died suddenly yesterday evening while at dinner The cause of death was syncope due to failure of ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... influence of reactionary Judaeophobia compromised and crippled the second attempt at inner reforms in Judaism. Both movements soon passed out of existence, and their founders subsequently left Russia. Gordin went to America, and, renouncing his sins of youth, became a popular Yiddish playwright. Priluker settled in England, and entered the employ of the missionaries who were anxious to propagate Christianity among the Jews. A few years later, during 1884 and 1885, "New Israel" cropped up in a new shape, this time in Kishinev, where the puny "Congregation of ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... such a mood of ruthless gaiety. At the theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the whole first act, appeared, in the entr'acte, to feel no hesitation in condemning it. They spoke of French and Italian actors by name, laughed heartily over the playwright's conception of social usages, and made Mathilde feel as if her own unacknowledged enjoyment of the play was the guiltiest ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... 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 own, he pre-eminently was; if he desired ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... then ignored by the artistic quietism of Sophocles—as surely as it is outraged and degraded by the vulgar theatricalities of Euripides. Thomas Campbell was amused and scandalized by the fact that Webster (as he is pleased to express it) modestly compares himself to the playwright last mentioned; being apparently of opinion that "Hippolytus" and "Medea" may be reckoned equal or superior, as works of tragic art or examples of ethical elevation, to "The White Devil" and "The Duchess ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Since the news first got about that Orlando What's-his-name made L50,000 out of The Crimson Sponge, there has been a feeling that only through the medium of the stage can literary art find its true expression. The successful playwright is indeed a man to be envied. Leaving aside for the moment the question of super-tax, the prizes which fall to his lot are worth striving for. He sees his name (correctly spelt) on 'buses which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... 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 ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... 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
... disgrace 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 ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... of God. No tyranny could extort this service. No wealth could 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 with ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... something between a sigh and a groan every few minutes. About eleven the cards stopped, and Bella said she would read palms. She began with Mr. Harbison, because she declared he had a wonderful hand, full of possibilities; she said he should have been a great inventor or a playwright, and that his attitude to women was one of homage, respect, almost reverence. He had the courage to look at me, and if a glance could have killed he would ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... extravagance, all the while that women slave and children die of underfeeding and neglect. This feeling is intensified when he compares the thousands paid for a single hour of a prima donna's song or a playwright's wit with his own yearly wage laboriously earned. What supreme worth does art possess that it should be ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... the playwright Anton Klein of Mannheim. It was purposed to open the Singspiel theatre ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... there were, but they were small compared with the other. It was the third part of him, the Puritan, that was really at war with Shakespeare. He denounced that playwright almost exactly as any contemporary Puritan coming out of a conventicle in a steeple-crowned hat and stiff bands might have denounced the playwright coming out of the stage door of the old Globe Theatre. This is not a mere fancy; it is philosophically true. A legend has run ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... containing fine passages, are obscure and crabbed in style.[v-1] In 1598 appeared Marlowe's fragmentary Hero and Leander with Chapman's continuation. By this year he had established his position as a playwright, for Meres in his Palladis Tamia praises him both as a writer of tragedy and of comedy. We know from Henslowe's Diary that his earliest extant comedy The Blinde Begger of Alexandria was produced on February 12, 1596, and that ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... Prince Serge Wolkonsky, was certainly the most versatile man I have ever known: a playwright, an actor, an essayist, an orator, a lecturer, and admirable in each of these capacities. At a dinner given me, just before my departure from St. Petersburg, by the Russians who had taken part in the Chicago Exposition, I was somewhat troubled by the fact that the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... 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; ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... successful in some other epoch when some other literary form than the novel had happened to be in fashion. In France the novel tempted Victor Hugo, who was essentially a lyric poet, and the elder Dumas, who was essentially a playwright. There are not lacking signs of late that the drama is likely in the immediate future to assert a sharper rivalry with prose-fiction; and novelists like Sir James Barrie and the late Paul Hervieu have relinquished the easier narrative for the more difficult and more dangerous stage-play. ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... 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 ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... to this subject, there have been not a few scoffers and dissenters, even among people of distinction. Douglas Jerrold, the playwright, was one of these, for he declared that he disliked dining amidst the strains of a military band, because he could taste the brass in his soup. Charles Lamb, in his chapter on "Ears," remarked, that while a carpenter's hammer, on a warm summer day, caused him to "fret into ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... in Sorochintzy, government of Poltava, in 1809. His father was a Little Russian, or Ukrainian, landowner, who exhibited considerable talent as a playwright and actor. Gogol was educated at home until the age of ten, then went to Niezhin, where he entered the gymnasium in 1821. Here he edited a students' manuscript magazine called the Star, and later founded a students' theatre, ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... the playwright who does most harm; and Byron has fewer sins of this nature to answer for than Gay or Schiller. With the aid of scenery, fine dresses and music, and the very false notions they convey, they vitiate the public taste, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... that would be written in English and yet would be definitely Irish. In a few years he became one of the leaders in the Celtic revival. He worked incessantly for the cause, both as propagandist and playwright; and, though his mysticism at times seemed the product of a cult rather than a Celt, his symbolic dramas were acknowledged to be full of a haunting, other-world spirituality. (See Preface.) The Hour Glass (1904), his ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... immortality laboriously dragged about in a schoolboy's satchel. A precious recompense for your lavished blood to be wrapped round gingerbread by some Nuremberg chandler, or, if you have great luck, to be screwed upon stilts by a French playwright, and be made to move ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... appropriation of Victor Hugo's text; but I do not think it was, though it is possible that a faint reflection of a brilliant page, read in early youth, still lingered on the retina of M. Rostand's memory. If such were the case, it does not necessarily detract from the integrity of the conception or the playwright's presentment ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to be arrested for debt. He himself as a young man had been whipped at the 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, that is as a member of the lesser nobility.... In ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... him wholly a puppet for the final act. These little Earth histrionics are arranged no doubt for the weary gods, who hardly brook a mere mortal rising triumphantly above the malignant moods of the master playwright. ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... prologue, written many years later and apparently for a benefit performance of one of D'Urfey's plays, is sufficient evidence that the playwright was not highly regarded; but he was reputed to be a good natured man and, by the standards of the time, his twitting of Collier—whom he accused of having a better nose for smut than a clergyman should have—is not conspicuously vituperative. Even his attack on the political character ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... of weekly sermons—and planning his dream in marble; Phidias was cutting away the needless portions of the white stone of Pentelicus and liberating wondrous forms of beauty; Sophocles was revealing the possibilities of the stage; AEschylus was pointing out the way as a playwright; and the passion for physical beauty was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard |
