Elizabethan Playwrights: A Short History of the English Drama from Mediaeval Times to the Closing of the Theatres in 1642

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Harper & Brothers, 1925 - English drama - 335 pages

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Page 260 - Ah Ben! Say how, or when Shall we thy guests Meet at those lyric feasts Made at the Sun, The Dog, the Triple Tun, Where we such clusters had As made us nobly wild, not mad; And yet each verse of thine Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.
Page 119 - How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times), who, in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding...
Page 285 - Farewell ! a long farewell, to all my greatness ! This is the state of man : to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hopes ; to-morrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honours thick upon him ; The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, And, when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, And then he falls, as I do.
Page 138 - Our revels now are ended... These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air, And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind: we are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep..
Page 83 - From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, We'll lead you to the stately tent of War...
Page 20 - As to the beginning of the said gild, be it known that, once on a time, a play setting forth the goodness of the Lord's Prayer was played in the city of York; in which play all manner of vices and sins were held up to scorn, and the virtues were held up to praise.
Page 119 - How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his 180 tomb, he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times), who in the tragedian that represents his person imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.
Page 179 - Few of the university pen play well ; they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down — ay, and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow ; he brought up Horace, giving the poets a pill ; but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge, that made him bewray his credit.
Page 212 - A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy...
Page 122 - This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and true chivalry...

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