An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit |
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admiration Aristophanes Athens audience Aventurières Bacchanalian beautiful brain cast Célimène Centenarian civilization colour Comedy of Manners Comic idea Comic Muse Comic perception Comic poet Comic spirit conceive Congreve Congreve's Court creature critics cultivated women delicacy delight dialogue Duke Pasquier Dulness dupe École des Femmes English esteem Eunuchus farce feelings Femmes Savantes figure flash Folly fool French genius German gives Goethe Greek grotesque Harpagon Heinrich Heine honour human humour humourist hypocrites idea of Comedy intellectual irony Italian Jonathan Wild ladies laugh Le Tartuffe licence light literary live look matter ments Millamant Mirabel Misanthrope Molière's moral natural never Orgon painted person Phormio play plot Plutarch poetic political popular professor pure Comedy Puritan quick Rabelais realism rivals satire satirist scene sentimental Shakespeare sober social society sound sense stage style Tartuffe taste Terence thought tion touch wife witty writers
Popular passages
Page 34 - To think of a whirlwind, though 'twere in a whirlwind, were a case of more steady contemplation, a very tranquillity of mind and mansion. A fellow that lives in a windmill has not a more whimsical dwelling than the heart of a man that is lodged in a woman.
Page 12 - It will at any rate hardly be questioned that it is unwholesome for men and women to see themselves as they are, if they are no better than they should be: and they will not, when they have improved in manners, care much to see themselves as they once were.
Page 40 - And to love Comedy you must know the real world, and know men and women well enough not to expect too much of them, though you may still hope for good.
Page 34 - Here she comes, i'faith, full sail, with her fan spread and her streamers out, and a shoal of fools for tenders ; ha, no, I cry her mercy ! Mrs.
Page 59 - They abound, and the organization directing their machinery to shoot them in the wake of the leading article and the popular sentiment is good. But the comic differs from them in addressing the wits for laughter; and the sluggish wits want some training to respond to it, whether in public life or private, and particularly when the feelings are excited. The sense of the comic is much blunted by habits of punning and of using humoristic phrase, the trick of employing Johnsonian polysyllables to treat...
Page 28 - His moral does not hang like a tail, or preach from one character incessantly cocking an eye at the audience, as in recent realistic French Plays, but is in the heart of his work, throbbing with every pulsation of an organic structure. If Life is likened to the comedy of Moliere, there is no scandal in the comparison.
Page 27 - Never did man wield so shrieking a scourge upon vice; but his consummate self-mastery is not shaken while administering it. Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are made each to whip himself and his class— the false pietists, and the insanely covetous. Moliere has only set them in motion. He strips Folly to the skin, displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer her better clothing, with the lesson Chrysale reads to Philaminte and B61ise.
Page 21 - Bacchanalian, have a sentimental objection to face the study or the actual world. They take up disdain of it, when its truths appear humiliating: when the facts are not immediately forced on them, they take up the pride of incredulity. They live in a hazy atmosphere that they suppose an ideal one.
Page 76 - Irony is the humor of satire; it may be savage, as in Swift, with a moral object, or sedate, as in Gibbon, with a malicious. The foppish irony fretting to be seen, and the irony which leers, that you shall not mistake its intention, are failures in satiric effort pretending to the treasures of ambiguity.
Page 84 - Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible...