A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature |
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acquainted action admiration Agamemnon allowed altogether ancient appears Aristophanes Aristotle beauty Ben Jonson Cæsar Calderon character chorus circumstances Clytemnestra comic writers composition considered Corneille cothurnus critics degree dignity display dramatic art dramatic poet effect Electra elevation endeavours English entertainment Eschylus Eumenides Euripides everything exhibited expression favour feeling foreign French tragedy give Grecian Greek tragedy Greeks Hence heroes heroic honour human idea imagination imitation intrigue invention Italian Julius Cæsar labour language Lope de Vega manner masks means Menander merely Metastasio mind modern Molière moral nature never noble object observe old comedy opera Orestes original passion peculiar persons pieces Plautus players plays poet poetical poetry possess principles produce Racine representation resemblance respect Roman scene Shakspeare Shakspeare's Sophocles Spanish Spanish poetry species spectators spirit stage taste theatre theatrical thing tion tone tragic true unity verse Voltaire whole
Popular passages
Page 343 - Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts ; Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance ; Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i...
Page 186 - Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream : The genius, and the mortal instruments, Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.
Page 313 - Say, there be ; Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean ; so, o'er that art Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art That nature makes.
Page 291 - This fellow is wise enough to play the fool; And to do that well craves a kind of wit. 60 He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of persons, and the time, And, like the haggard, check at every feather That comes before his eye. This is a practice As full of labour as a wise man's art.
Page 364 - As, in a theatre, the eyes of men, After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, Are idly bent on him that enters next, Thinking his prattle to be tedious ; Even so, or with much more contempt, men's eyes Did scowl on Richard; no man cried, God save him...
Page 274 - O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide, Than public means, which public manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand...
Page 283 - North ; his human characters have not only such depth and precision that they cannot be arranged under classes, and are inexhaustible, even in conception: no, this Prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical world of spirits ; calls up the midnight ghost ; exhibits before us his witches amidst their unhallowed mysteries ; peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs : and these beings, existing only in imagination, possess...
Page 313 - You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race: this is an art Which does mend nature, — change it rather; but The art itself is nature.
Page 288 - ... we must see him in his relations with others; and it is here that most dramatic poets are deficient. Shakspeare makes each of his principal characters the glass in which the others are reflected, and in which we are enabled to discover what could not be immediately revealed to us.
Page 284 - Shakespear deserves our admiration for his characters, he is equally deserving of it for his exhibition of passion, taking this word in its widest signification, as including every mental condition, every tone from indifference or familiar mirth to the wildest rage and despair. He gives us the history of minds ; he lays open to us, in a single word, a whole series of preceding conditions.