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Shakespearean   Listen
adjective
Shakespearean  adj.  (Written also Shakespearian, Shakspearean, Shakspearian, Shaksperean, Shaksperian, etc)  Of, pertaining to, or in the style of, Shakespeare or his works.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Shakespearean" Quotes from Famous Books



... to us, has somewhat obscured Stevenson's true power, which is surely that of an arch-delineator of 'human nature' and of the devious ways of men. As we read him we feel that we have our finger on the pulse of the cruel politics of the world. He has the Shakespearean gift which makes us recognise that his pirates and his statesmen, with their violence and their murders and their perversions of justice, are swayed by the same interests and are pulling the same strings and playing on ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... description. But he was far better educated than the modern artisan. Not that a single quotation from Menander (1 Cor. xv. 33) shows him to be a good Greek scholar; an Englishman may quote 'One touch of nature makes the whole world kin' without being a Shakespearean. But he was well educated because he was the son of a strict Jew. A child in such a home would learn by heart large pieces of the Old Testament, and, at the Synagogue school, all the minutiae of the Jewish Law. The pupil was not allowed to write anything ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... What Shakespearean characters does Geoffrey of Monmouth introduce? How is Layamon's Brut related to Geoffrey's chronicle? Point out a likeness between the Brut and the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... Macbeth during the intermissions in the performance of the orchestra. Had an actor been engaged who was capable of playing Macbeth, and had a company been engaged to support him, the tragedy would doubtless have been well played. There was really little else wanting to make it a meritorious Shakespearean revival. ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various

... ("The Prohibition to Love"), written in 1834, is eminently symptomatic of the first stage. It is a coarser rendering of that bluntest of all Shakespearean plays, Measure for Measure; its sole subject is the pursuit of sensual pleasure, in which all indulge, and the ridiculing of those who appear to yearn for something higher. To detail the contents of the text—it cannot be called a poem—would serve no purpose; ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... could proclaim his boyish jaunt. The 'Well I never, sir,' even of a rural parishioner did in some sort minister to his vanity. An audience was a necessity to him. He regretted that his cloth forbade him to indulge in private theatricals, but he encouraged Shakespearean readings and often 'dressed up to please the children.' Sometimes of an evening he would perform upon the piano, indulging in a series of broken chords which he called improvisation, and upon these occasions he felt that he was a kind and thoughtful master when he set the drawing-room door open ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan

... whether I ought not to have rejected the cultural remarks on several of the plants, which I had added with a special reference to the horticultural character of "The Garden" newspaper. But I decided to retain them, on finding that they interested some readers, by whom the literary and Shakespearean ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... mere Shakespeare and Milton, Though Hubbard compels me to rave; If I should lay laurels to wilt on That foggy Shakespearean grave, How William would squirm ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various

... departments. We have only one—not quite entire but substantive—prose tale in Anglo-Saxon, the version of the famous story of Apollonius of Tyre, which was to be afterwards declined by Chaucer, but attempted by his friend and contemporary Gower, and to be enshrined in the most certain of the Shakespearean "doubtfuls," Pericles. It most honestly gives itself out as a translation (no doubt from the Latin though there was an early Greek original) and it deals briefly with the subject. But as an example of narrative ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... ultra-Shakespearean. "Fars" (whence "Persia") is the central Province of the grand old Empire now a mere wreck, "Rum" (which I write Roum, in order to avoid Jamaica) is the neo-Roman or Byzantine Empire, while "Yunan" is the classical Arab term for Greece (Ionia) which ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... is sufficiently near to the point in question, to make clear what I mean: the supremacy of Antony and Cleopatra in the Shakespearean aesthetic is yet jealously disputed, and it seems silly to the academic to put it up against a work like Hamlet. But it is the comparatively more obvious achievement of Hamlet, its surface intellectuality, which made it the favourite ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes

... literary testimonies that I consider the most striking evidence of the influence of Italian professional technique on English professional actors. It is a remarkable discovery made by the highly esteemed Shakespearean archaeologist, Edmund Malone, about a century ago, in Dulwich College, that mine of ancient English dramatic research, founded by the actor ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various

... fine Shakespearean temper when I carried her off up-stairs. Reserves were impossible between us; her right to any privacy in her own affairs had been given away from the start; that was one of the pleasing ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... charming, morbid, and magnificent poetry in dramatic form, Beddoes will survive to students, not to readers, of English poetry, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ebenezer Jones and Charles Wells. Charles Wells was certainly more of a dramatist, a writer of more sustained and Shakespearean blank verse; Ebenezer Jones had certainly a more personal passion to express in his rough and tumultuous way; but Beddoes, not less certainly, had more of actual poetical genius than either. And in the end only one thing counts: actual ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... resemble the traditional "skirling" of the pipes; but no Scotchman even could pretend to delight in the shrill notes of the cennamella. The former at least of these two popular instruments of southern Italy was well known to the omniscient author of the Shakespearean plays, for in Othello we have a direct allusion to the uncouth braying music still made to-day by these ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... resistless flood that deluged the world of literature with its glory. The succeeding poets are but survivors as by the ark, and, like the ancient dove, they gather and weave into garlands only the "flotsam" of beauty which floats on the bosom of the Shakespearean flood. ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor

... brooms, wove linen from the flax raised on our farm and made our own tallow candles. Mary, from what a thrifty and hard-working lot of ancestors you are descended! You inherit from your mother your love of work and from your father your love of books. Your father's uncle was a noted Shakespearean scholar." ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas

... might happen to symbolise to him at the time, and his judgments upon events and persons were striking, but they were frequently judgments upon creations of his own imagination, and were not in the least apposite to what was actually before him. The happy, artistic, Shakespearean temper, mirroring the world like a lake, was altogether ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford

... he bought up all the stove-pipe wire in the town, and tacked it to a rail fence between the house and a telegraph office. Then he went to a village eight miles distant and sent scraps of songs and Shakespearean quotations ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson

... old heathen novels that held its ground, that can be traced in more than one early monastic library, and that was translated into every vernacular—Anglo-Saxon first. This was the Romance of Apollonius of Tyre, from which comes the story of that Shakespearean ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle

... tastes came when "Gust" Adams,[17] one of the most celebrated tragedians of the day, began to play in Pittsburgh a round of Shakespearean characters. Thenceforth there was nothing for me but Shakespeare. I seemed to be able to memorize him almost without effort. Never before had I realized what magic lay in words. The rhythm and the melody all seemed to find a resting-place ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie

... cannot prevent the unfolding of your powers. From the plain fields and lowlands of Avon came the Shakespearean genius which has charmed the world. From among the rock-ribbed hills of New Hampshire sprang the greatest of American orators and statesmen, Daniel Webster. From the crowded ranks of toil, and homes to which luxury is a stranger, have often come the leaders and benefactors of our race. ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... of Theatrical Art in Ancient and Modern Times. Authorised Translation by Louise von Cossel. Vol. III, "The Shakespearean Period in ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams

... enthusiasm there was, as Sainte-Beuve confessed, an incredible amount of ignorance—so that Cromwell was supposed to be historical; and with a passionate delight in form there co-existed a strangely imperfect understanding of material—so that Hernani was supposed to be Shakespearean. To this ignorance and to this imperfect understanding Hugo owed a certain part of his authority; the other and greater he got from his unrivalled mastery of style, from his extraordinary skill as an artist in words. To the opposing faction his ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... was perhaps the grimmest of all the Shakespearean tragedies of the thirteenth century; and one would like to think that the Chartres window was a memorial of this Pierre, who was a cousin of France and an emperor without empire; but M. d'Armancourt insists that the window was given in memory not of this ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... contains the manuscript copy of Charles Macklin's COVENT GARDEN THEATRE, OR PASQUIN TURN'D DRAWCANSIR in two acts (Larpent 96) which is here reproduced in facsimile.[1] It is an interesting example of that mid-eighteenth-century phenomenon, the afterpiece, from a period when not only Shakespearean stock productions but new plays as well were accompanied by such farcical appendages.[2] This particular afterpiece is worth reproducing not only for its catalogue of the social foibles of the age, but as an illustration of ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin

... down to its very essence, and each with that germinal power that makes the reading of him one of the most stimulating things to be had from literature. His figures especially are apt and telling in the very minimum of words; they say it all, like the unsurpassable Shakespearean example of "the dyer's hand"; and the more you think of them, the more you see that not a word could ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... they were really following the traditions of the theatre as preserved by the pictures. The figures gained by hiding their legs, but Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus had not this advantage. They were princes and were like Shakespearean young men of the brilliant water-fly type, such as Osric. Misandro was also a prince. He was a swaggerer and behaved as badly as any paladin, but he was not a buffo. When they do the Nativita at Christmas a buffo is permitted, he accompanies the Shepherds as their servant, and I should like ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones

... draughtsman and engraver, about the end of the eighteenth century fabricated a pretended Shakespeare MSS., which as a literary forgery was the most remarkable of its time. Previous to his confessions it had been accepted by the Shakespearean scholars as unquestionably the work of the immortal bard. The following is a citation from ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... is almost Shakespearean," said my companion. "It suggests that great hand at least, though it has not the grit and virility of the more primitive bard. What triumph and fresh morning power in Shakespeare's lines that will occur to ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... terms about the instability of fortune and the advantages of a humble lot. Then there comes to him somehow into the very place on the heath where he is, his father, the blinded Gloucester, led by an old man. In that characteristic Shakespearean language,—the chief peculiarity of which is that the thoughts are bred either by the consonance or the contrasts of words,—Gloucester also speaks about the instability of fortune. He tells the old man who leads him ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy

... Cake heard Noyes say. "Such training as only he could give. Years of it, that's plain. And then to send her to me. A Shakespearean actress for me! To insult me ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... fateful day of Woerth, claimed to be a tenor, but was more correctly a tenorino, his voice possessing far more sweetness than power. He was already well-known and popular, for he had taken the part of Romeo in Gounod's well-known opera based on the Shakespearean play. Like many another singer, Victor Capoul might have become forgotten before very long, but a curious circumstance, having nothing to do with vocalism, diffused and perpetuated his name. He adopted a particular ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

... and expansion of style and harmony in the successive works of Shakespeare must in some indefinite degree be perceptible to the youngest as to the oldest, to the dullest as to the keenest of Shakespearean students. But to trace and verify the various shades and gradations of this progress, the ebb and flow of alternate influences, the delicate and infinite subtleties of change and growth discernible in the spirit and the speech of the greatest among poets, ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... legend of "Barlaam and Josaphat" was familiar in all the literatures of the Middle Ages. Combined with this in the plot is the tale of Abou Hassan from the "Arabian Nights," the main situations in which are turned to farcical purposes in the Induction to the Shakespearean "Taming of the Shrew." But with Calderon the theme is lifted altogether out of the atmosphere of comedy, and is worked up with poetic sentiment and a touch of mysticism into a symbolic drama of profound and ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... into the Mahometan Paradise along with the souls of men, the ass that carried Balaam is one, the dog of the Seven Sleepers the other. This is no small distinction. From what has been written about this beast might be compiled a library of great splendor and magnitude, rivalling that of the Shakespearean cult, and that which clusters about the Bible. It may be said, generally, that all literature is more ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... How well the Shakespearean tale agrees with the word of Scripture, in Hebrews xii. 7, 8: "If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not? But if ye be without chastisement, ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy

... in the imagined teeth of the tragedian, throwing an involuntary glance over my shoulder, "you 'll not catch me assisting at any more of your Shakespearean revivals. I would rather eat a pair of Welsh rarebits or a segment of mince-pie at midnight than sit through the finest tragedy that was ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... Jealousy has intrinsic merit. If he had written more works for the theater, he might have been remembered with Southerne and possibly with Otway. But for the scholar this tragedy will be chiefly interesting for the Shakespearean influences to be found in it. Evidently Payne held Shakespeare in great reverence, and the result is that The Fatal Jealousy is one of the earliest examples of the return to the Shakespearean norm in tragedy after the interlude of the heroic ...
— The Fatal Jealousie (1673) • Henry Nevil Payne

... methods of writing verse are entirely different. Tennyson’s blank verse seems at its best to combine the beauties of the Miltonic and the Wordsworthian line; while nothing is so rare in his work as a Shakespearean line. Now and then ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... our younger Americans have done with thorough success and not a little of exaltation. Note for instance the inadequacy of the old-style balladry to both its own opportunity and the otherwise-smothered fire of such a poem as Sidney Lanier's "Sunset," which is positively Shakespearean ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... arch of the South Bridge, is a huge mastiff, sauntering down the middle of the causeway, as if with his hands in his pockets; he is old, brindled, as big as a little Highland bull, and has the Shakespearean dewlaps shaking as ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various

... Schiller. Goethe's Goetz and Werther, Schiller's Brigands and Cabal and Love, were greeted as the promising forerunners of the national literature to come. Their subjects were German and modern, not French or classic; in their plan they affected Shakespearean liberty; in their language they were at once familiar, strong, and original; in their inspiration they were protests against the social prejudices and political abuses of the time, vehement outbursts ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... sit as Ajax defying the lightning, or as King Lear upon the blasted heath. One of them some time ago called on a popular painter who, happening at the moment to require his services, engaged him, and told him to begin by kneeling down in the attitude of prayer. 'Shall I be Biblical or Shakespearean, sir?' asked the veteran. 'Well—Shakespearean,' answered the artist, wondering by what subtle nuance of expression the model would convey the difference. 'All right, sir,' said the professor of posing, and ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... enough to David. At such times his language took an exasperating Shakespearean turn. He was abominably fond of posing as Lear or Jaques—as a man much buffeted, and acquainted with all the ugly secrets of life. Purcell stood generally for 'the enemy;' and to Purcell his half-mad fancy attributed most of his misfortunes. It was Purcell who had undermined his ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... not quite so happy as her sister expected. Her sum of spectacular bliss stood in Shakespearean plays which she had seen, and in "Monsieur Beaucaire," which she had not. A wild beast show with its inevitable accompaniment of dust and chokiness and noise would give her no pleasure at all, and the slight interest which had lain in the escort of the Vines with the amorous ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith

... London, England. The theatre being too small for this undertaking, we leased the Temperance Hall, largest in the city, and built our own stage. The programme was soon ready and contained the following, which was purely Shakespearean. An orchestra of thirty pieces played the overture and accompanied the several numbers. The Rialto, Bargain, and Trial scenes from the Merchant of Venice, four glees, a reading, and Locke's music to Macbeth's witches in character. Sergeant-Instructor Smith and his brother conducted the programme. ...
— A Soldier's Life - Being the Personal Reminiscences of Edwin G. Rundle • Edwin G. Rundle

... suggestive book in which Lady Pollock records her recollections of Macready it is said that once, after his retirement, on reading a London newspaper account of the production of a Shakespearean play, he remarked that "evidently the accessories swallow up the poetry and the action": and he proceeded, in a reminiscent and regretful mood, to speak as follows: "In my endeavour to give to Shakespeare all his attributes, to enrich ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... one thing, as are sculptor, painter, architect. Of detail criticism ("dry-as-dust" criticism, to use Carlyle's term) there is much, though none too much, which work requires scholarship and painstaking, and is necessary. Malone is a requirement of Shakespearean study. But, candidly, is verbal, textual criticism the largest, truest criticism? Dust is not man, though man is dust. No geologist's biography of the marble from Carrara, nor a biographer's sketch of the sculptor, will explain the statue, nor do justice to the artist's ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... In India, at the beginning of the Christian era, there was a development of drama of a high character. The one called the Clay-waggon (a child's toy) is described as of very great literary merit,—realistic, graphic, and Shakespearean in its artistic representation of life.[2078] Every drama which has that character must be in and of the mores. In the Clay-waggon the story is that of a Brahmin of the noblest character, who marries a courtesan, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... vices that are so unpopular that the mob may be easily persuaded to attack them. One of the chief differences between the two kinds of virtue, I fancy, is that while true virtue regards the mob-spirit as an enemy, simular virtue (if we may adopt the Shakespearean phrase) looks to the mob as its cousin and its ally. To be virtuous in the latter sense is obviously as easy as hunting rats or cats. Virtue of this kind is simply the eternal huntsman in man's breast with eyes aglint for a victim. It is Mr Murdstone's virtue—the persecutor's virtue. It is the ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd

... it was that he had to read, not only literature, but also history—often his own kind of history, that had not yet been written. If he wished to know the Shakespearean dramas as a product of the aristocratic and imperialist ideal in the glory and intoxication of its youth, he had to study, not only Shakespeare's poetry, but the cultural and social life of the Elizabethan people. And he could not ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearean." ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain

... literature, and we are moved by your ardent expressions of sympathy and friendship. You scarcely know what Lord Byron was to us at the dawn of our literature, how our greatest poets, Poushkin and Lermontov, were swayed by him. You scarcely know to what an extent the Shakespearean Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, has become a part of our literature, how near to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... (Tigris) and Furat (Euphrates) see vols. viii. 150- ix. 17. The topothesia is worse than Shakespearean. In Weber's Edit. of the "New Arabian Nights" (Adventures of Simoustapha, etc.), the rivers are called "Ilfara" ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... Religion were mummers, a word signifying one who makes and disguises himself to play the fool without speaking. They were dressed in an antic manner, dancing, mimicking, and showing postures." Mr. Wright also observes (in his work on the Mystery Plays of Chester, published by the Shakespearean Society) that the "chief effect seems to have been ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent

... admiration. Our cook told my mother (there is a servants' night, you know) that she and the housemaid were "just prood to be able to say it was oor young gentleman." To sup afterwards with these clothes on, and a wonderful lot of gaiety and Shakespearean jokes about the table, is something to live for. It is so nice to feel you have been dead three hundred years, and the sound of your laughter is faint and far off ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... my life I never knew anybody, save one woman and a little girl, who read Shakespeare in the original. I know a deal of Shakespeare, although I never read one of his plays, and never could witness a Shakespearean performance without having the fidgets. All the Shakespeare I have, I caught from being exposed to people who have ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... sentences. You can't have literature without 'em. I might have written those passages myself. In fact, I can hardly distinguish—" His face shook over it; she noticed the tremor of imminent revision. "Still, I think I should prefer 'babbling streams' here to 'purling streams.' Shakespearean." ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair

... their form and force." Malone, himself a lawyer, wrote: "His knowledge of legal terms is not merely such as might be acquired by the casual observation of even his all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of technical skill." Another lawyer and well-known Shakespearean, Richard Grant White, says: "No dramatist of the time, not even Beaumont, who was the younger son of a judge of the Common Pleas, and who after studying in the Inns of Court abandoned law for the drama, used legal phrases with Shakespeare's readiness and exactness. And the significance ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain

... "is: Blessings brighten as diplomas come on apace. Between trying not to miss any fun and doing my best to distinguish myself in the scholarly pursuits that my soul loves, I am well nigh distraught. Don't mind my Shakespearean English, please. I'm on the senior play committee, and I recite ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde

... in a Shakespearean play. I was told that all my wealthy hunting friends would join me at breakfast the next morning. I was up at seven o'clock and waiting for them. The hours dragged slowly by and no guests arrived. I was nearly famished, but did not dare eat until the company should be assembled. About ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)

... Welsh coast and had had an initiation into the lower-living parts of Birmingham and London to be skeptical about the existence of these poor, deluded virgins, lured from their humble respectable homes and thrust by Shakespearean procuresses, bawds, and bullies into an impure life. If they went to these places abroad it was probably with the hope of greater gains, better food, and stricter medical attention. However, he kept most of these thoughts to himself and his wife, the squire's daughter; who as ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... consideration but a few points of the myth—that the fairy-superstition and the elf-superstition were melted together in the popular pre-Shakespearean mind, and that Shakespeare himself, making a new division of the characteristics of the two, yet re-welded the whole into one realm by putting the Puck in subjection under ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

... lady rose, and, with tears raining down her face, said: "I have taught a Sunday-school class of sixteen young men for three years, and have not seen one of them converted. I believe I know why, and now confess my sin. Being a teacher in the city schools, I thought I must see a Shakespearean play, and went to the theater one night. I saw several of my class there, and they all seemed to be looking at me as if surprised. Next day I met some of them, and they confessed surprise that I was at the theater. ...
— The Art of Soul-Winning • J.W. Mahood

... man, now also a member of the "great majority"—a renowned Shakespearean critic, author and censor in the domain of belles-lettres—brought great trouble and humiliation upon himself by an amour with a ridiculously plain-looking and by no means young woman. He had naturally, perhaps, a penchant in that direction, for on the appearance of the Lydia ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... lover of Shakespearean tragedy to be just to the merits of Alfieri. There is a uniformity, or even a monotony, in these nineteen plays, whose characters are more or less alike, whose method of procedure is the same, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... the 'forties prophesied would be the highest class of poetry in the immediate future (which prophecy was fulfilled), does not interest Mr. De La Mare; maybe he feels that it has been done so well that he prefers to let it alone. His remarkable thirteen poems dealing with Shakespearean characters—where he attempts with considerable success to pluck out the heart of the mystery—are all descriptive. Perhaps the most original and ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... Mrs. Jameson, the Shakespearean commentator, has given us a penetrating example of the effect of inflection; "In her impersonation of the part of Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Siddons adopted successively three different intonations in giving the words 'We fail.' At first a quick ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... and in 1571 he "offered his account for the new buildings." In 1575 the fine carved oak screen was put up. Towards the cost of this contributions were made by the masters of the bench, the masters of "le Utter Barre," and other members of the society. In this hall took place the interesting Shakespearean performance recorded by John Manningham, barrister, in his diary (1601-2). "At our feast wee had a play called Twelve Night or what you will, much like the Commedy of Errores or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... parts in many shows that winter including Richard III and other Shakespearean plays. At the battle of Bosworth field where Richard cries: "A horse, a horse; my kingdom for a horse," the supers in the army were clattering their swords on the opposing shields in a great hubbub ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis

... we give one entertainment a month?" asked Mary Reynolds eagerly. "I am sure President Morton would let us have Greek Hall. We could give different kinds of entertainments. One month we could give a Shakespearean play and the next a Greek tragedy; then we could act a scenario, or have a musical revue or whatever we liked. We could make posters to advertise each one and state frankly on them that the proceeds were to go to the Harlowe House Club Reserve ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower

... reason why he was removed from Trinity College was the desire of Mr. William Redmond to have his son with him in London. Certainly John Redmond was there during the session of 1876, for on the introduction of Mr. Gladstone's second Home Rule Bill he recalled a finely apposite Shakespearean quotation which he had heard Butt use in a Home Rule debate of that year. In May 1880 his father procured him a clerkship in the House. The post to which he was assigned was that of attendant in the Vote Office, so that his days (and a great part of his nights) were spent in the two little ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... bewitcher of all sexes. There was Reginald Bug, a young Englishman, who loved her passionately for a few years; then the renowned Pierre Dentifrice from the Comedie Francaise; then Angelo Carlini, and Basto Caballero (founder of the Shakespearean Theatre in Barcelona); then Dimitri Chuggski, a very temperamental, highly strung Russian (it is in Volume VIII. of Edgar Sheepmeadow's "Beds and their Inmates" that he relates the story of Chuggski's desertion of Gretchen; he contends that he left her because she always ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward

... 5, 1887, when Verdi was seventy-four years old, "Otello" was produced at La Scala, Milan, amid indescribable enthusiasm. Six years later the musical world was again startled and overjoyed by the production of another Shakespearean opera, "Falstaff," composed in his eightieth year. In all, his operas number over thirty, most of them serious, all of ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower

... people of the present generation know, by personal experience, how nobly and incomparably Edwin Booth enriched the modern stage with his vivid portraitures of Shakespearean characters. The tragic fervor, the startling passion, and the impressive dignity with which he invested his various roles, have not been equaled, I daresay, by any actor on the English speaking stage since ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... exhausting emotionally as the Passion Play is said to be. I had the vision of a great period of Communist art, more especially of such open-air spectacles, which should have the grandeur and scope and eternal meaning of the plays of ancient Greece, the mediaeval mysteries, or the Shakespearean theatre. In building, writing, acting, even in painting, work would be done, as it once was, by groups, not by one hand or mind, and evolution would proceed slowly until once again the ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell

... one of the sources of Empson, which thus corresponds to Cousins or Cozens. In Neame we have a prosthetic n- due to the frequent occurrence of min eme (cf. the Shakespearean nuncle, Lear, i. 4). The names derived from cousin have been reinforced by those from Cuss, i.e. Constant or Constance (Chapter X). Thus Cussens is from the Mid. English dim. Cussin. Anglo-Sax. nefa, whence Mid. Eng. neve, neave, is cognate ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley

... stage name of Falconer, was an actor as well as a dramatist. He was "leading man" when I first saw him in the stock company of the Adelphi Theatre, Liverpool, and used to play the whole round of Shakespearean characters, his favourite parts being the popular ones of Macbeth, Hamlet, and Richard the Third. He was a dark-complexioned man of average height, somewhat spare in form and features. Though his performances were intellectual creations, we boys used to make somewhat unfavourable comparisons ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir

... shows a remarkable insight on the part of the painter into the character of Mrs. Siddons. She had not at that time played any of her great Shakespearean roles, but Reynolds seemed to anticipate her power. He followed her career with unfailing interest and always made a point of attending her first appearances and benefits, sitting among the musicians in the orchestra. When she prepared for the character of Lady Macbeth he helped her plan the ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... which has borrowed some traits from the octagon "Globe" theatre of Shakespeare's day; a Shakespeare library and portrait gallery are forming; and in due time these buildings, of stately dimensions and built solidly of brick, will constitute a Shakespearean centre which will attract to itself many mementoes now scattered about in various parts of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... What a tale—quite a Shakespearean ending, stage fairly littered with corpses," struck in Major Carstairs. "I wonder Tochatti didn't put the finishing touch by stabbing herself ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes

... assaults. "Your hands are too full of stones, and there are too many glass windows about," was the excuse of one editor, softening the return of a manuscript. But Berlioz did not fully know himself or appreciate the tendencies fermenting within him until in 1830 he became the victim of a grand Shakespearean passion. The great English dramatist wrought most powerfully on Victor Hugo and Hector Berlioz, and had much to do with their artistic development. Berlioz gives a very interesting account of his Shakespearean enthusiasm, which also involved ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris

... who writes on Shakespeare must owe much to his predecessors. Where I was conscious of a particular obligation, I have acknowledged it; but most of my reading of Shakespearean criticism was done many years ago, and I can only hope that I have not often reproduced as my ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... my door; for Mrs. B. has no less than three consecutive husbands in heaven—so potently has her woman-soul proved its capacity for leading people upward and on. Methinks I perceive a new and sinister meaning in the Shakespearean love-song:— ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... clear what I feel about the Shakespearean attitude? At bottom, it is absolutely sceptical. Deep yawns below Deep; and if we cannot read "the writing upon the wall," the reason may be that there is no writing there. Having lifted a corner of the Veil of Isis, having glanced once into that Death-Kingdom where ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... away; and during the last fifteen years of Elizabeth's reign national feelings found increasing expression in parliament and in popular literature. In all forms of literature, but especially in the Shakespearean drama, the keynote of the age was the evolution of a national spirit and technique, and their emancipation from the influence of classical and foreign models. In domestic politics a rift appeared between the monarchy and the nation. For one ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... The Shakespearean Sonnets are not a single or connected work like an ordinary play or poem. Their composition apparently extended over a considerable time, which may be fairly estimated as not less than four years. Read literally they seem to portray thoughts, modes or experiences ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson

... work; and his success indeed justified his means. He has been derided (by scholars) for "He Monsieur!" and "Ah Madame!"; but he could not write "O mon sieur" and "O ma dame;" although we can borrow from biblical and Shakespearean English, "O my lord!" and "O my lady!" "Bon Dieu! ma soeur" (which our translators English by "O heavens," Night xx.) is good French for Wa'llahi—by Allah; and "cinquante cavaliers bien faits" ("fifty handsome gentlemen on horseback") is a more familiar ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... eyebrowed with brown grease-paint; whose long, shapeless body, eloquent, expressive hands, and legs that were very good as legs go, taking them separately, but did not match, had been that night, his admirers declared, moved and possessed by the very spirit of Shakespearean Tragedy—"He was so great! Don't you ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... her niece, Genevieve Stebbins, and reared her from babyhood to a splendid womanhood. She contributed freely to entertainments for charity, by her Shakespearean readings and other recitations, and happily prepared whole parties for private theatricals. With such mental strain, she kept herself fit by Saturday outings, in which were graciously included some of her pupils. At times we went across ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe

... in the late "eighties," Lady Constance Leslie's two elder daughters, now Mrs. Crawshay and Lady Hope, developed a singular gift. They could improvise blank verse indefinitely, and with their father, Sir John Leslie, they acted little mock Shakespearean dramas in their ordinary clothes, and without any scenery or accessories. Every word was impromptu, and yet the even flow of blank verse never ceased. I always thought it a singularly clever performance, for Mrs. Crawshay can only have been nineteen then, and her sister eighteen. Mrs. ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... like the classic, and what is of the new. With the commercial we have of course no traffic; the classic is a place for those still learning what has already been said, a place for orientisation, for finding out where one stands. In this category are the Shakespearean performances at the theatre. In any case the classic is necessarily subordinate to the new literature, the literature of pioneering and discovery, the literature of ourselves. It is the school which prepares for the stepping forth ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... took place in a Presbyterian church in Edinburgh, and that, at a later period, he was twice arrested for debt. Mr. Ingpen holds that they also prove that Shelley "appeared on the boards of the Windsor Theatre as an actor in Shakespearean drama." But we have only William Whitton, the solicitor's words for this, and it is clear that he had been at no pains to investigate the matter. "It was mentioned to me yesterday," he wrote to Shelley's father in November, 1815, "that Mr. P.B. Shelley ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... with which the drop of light forms itself into a perfect sphere as it falls from his pen, belong indeed to a consummate master of the art of expression, which Adam of course was not; but the mental lucidity, justice, and balance, as well as the reserve of power, and the Shakespearean gaiety of touch, which made the old man one of the most delightful companions in the world, were ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... you don't camp in a Shakespearean dressing room for a year, tete-a-teting with some of the wisest actors ever, without learning a little. Sure I'm a mental case, a poor little A & A existing on your sweet charity, and don't think ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... the whole volume does he allow his prejudices, his opinions, his sentiments to crop out. We lose complete sight of the author in his work. With marvellous fidelity he explains the movements, the vices and the virtues of each party, and with Shakespearean tact, he conceals his identity, so that we are troubled with none of that Byronic vice of 'dipping one's ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore

... 'Mrs. Selwyn's Shakespearean quotation expresses all our sentiments, Mr. Borringer. Give us a faithful picture of the hero ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy

... sprang a leak; all thought of death. Then rose a cry "Land ho!" The storm abated, but the wind carried the Sea Adventure upon this shore and grounded her upon a reef. A certain R. Rich, gentleman, one of the voyagers, made and published a ballad upon the whole event. If it is hardly Shakespearean music, yet it ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston

... express his thanks to Dr. Appleton Morgan, President of the Shakespeare Society of New York; Miss H.C. Bartlett, the Shakespearean bibliophile; the New York Public Library and H.M. Leydenberg, assistant there; Gardner C. Teall; Frederic W. Erb, assistant librarian of Columbia University; the Council of the Grolier Club, Miss Ruth S. ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz

... in his brief career he has been a Shakespearean actor, Wall Street clerk, hay steward on a cattle-boat, vagabond, and business man, knowing poverty, hunger, and discomfort at times, but never, never losing the grin. Things began to move for him when he left a Denver high school back in 1900 for the purpose ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks

... Byzantine shoulder the esplanade thrust out on to the sand on the slender provocation of a bandstand, the man who had built his hotel with a roof covered with cupolas and minarets and had called it "Westward Ho!" must, Ellen thought, be lovely people, like Shakespearean fools. She liked it, too, when they came to the vulgarer part of the town and the place assumed the strange ceremented air that a pleasure city wears in winter. The houses had fallen back, and the ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... disgusted by Phil Benson, then perplexed. He would address her in stately Shakespearean phrases which, as a boy, he had heard from the gallery of the Academy of Music. He would quote poetry at her. She was impressed when he almost silenced the library-woman, in an argument as to whether Longfellow or Whittier was the better poet, by parroting ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... The manner of Hastings's advent in Montgomery is perhaps worthy of a few words, inasmuch as he came to stay. Hastings was an actor, who visited Montgomery one winter as a member of a company that had trustfully ventured into the provinces with a Shakespearean repertoire. Montgomery was favored in the hope that, being a college town, it would rally to the call of the serious drama. Unfortunately the college was otherwise engaged at the moment with a drama of more contemporaneous interest and authorship. An unusually severe January ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson

... Prussian. The mere English consonants are full of Cobbett. Dr. Johnson was our great man of letters when he said "stinks," not when he said "putrefaction." Take some common phrase like "raining cats and dogs," and note not only the extravagance of imagery (though that is very Shakespearean), but a jagged energy in the very spelling. Say "chats" and "chiens" and it is not the same. Perhaps the old national genius has survived the urban enslavement most spiritedly in our comic songs, admired by all men of travel and continental culture, by ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton

... very midst of her triumph; and there in the French capital, in the very face of bitter rivalry, she was able to prove her ability and make a name for herself. Later, in the United States she met with a most flattering reception, and for a season played with Edwin Booth in the Shakespearean repertoire. Duse first came into public notice about 1895, when her wonderful emotional power at once caused critics to compare her to Bernhardt, and not always to the advantage of the great French tragedienne. At one period her ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... are many photographs and paintings of celebrated actors and actresses in Shakespearean roles, as well as a very fine library. There is so much to be seen here—so much detail—that our friends only took a very hasty look about, and then went up into the tower to see the view. Stretched out ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson

... of his buried talents in the matter of skating, and now that the skating was over seemed disposed to prolong the partnership. The boisterous Bulmer playfully made a pass at him with his drawn sword, going forward with the lunge in the proper fencing fashion, and making a somewhat too familiar Shakespearean quotation about a rodent ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton

... are hearkening to a note which is not Shakespearean at all, not practical, not English. And we want ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... in the house we sat and talked in the first reception-room we entered, I noticed that outside the lattice a company of villagers was listening with no consciousness of intrusion, in full view of our host, to the sound of foreign speech. It was a Shakespearean scene. ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott



Words linked to "Shakespearean" :   Shakespearean sonnet, Shakespeare, scholarly person, scholar, student, Shakespearian



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