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I got off a number of things, poems, sketches, etc., but my great work turned out to be a comedy. I slaved at this all day and amused myself by rehearsing it in my lodgings all night. I incurred the odium of the landlady by coaxing the maid of all work to learn a part and act it with me. Finally I resolved to take a great step. I would go down to New York and get my comedy produced.
It was a score for the house, and they wanted all the scores they could get in these lean years. Perhaps, then, he had better. "Well played, Sheen," said he. There was a dead silence. A giggle from the fags' table showed that the comedy of the situation was not lost on the young mind. The head of the house looked troubled. This was awfully awkward. "Well played, Sheen," he said again.
This requirement was the more offensive, inasmuch as it was addressed exclusively to Prussia, while nothing was said to Spain, the principal in the business. Then ensued an incident proper for comedy, if it had not become the declared cause of tragedy. LXX., Franco-Prussian War, No. 3, pp. 5-8.
It was probably, as we have already said, external considerations alone that induced the poet to adhere in comedy so much as he did to the Greek originals; and this did not prevent him from far outstripping his successors and probably even the insipid originals in the freshness of his mirth and in the fulness of his living interest in the present; indeed in a certain sense he reverted to the paths of the Aristophanic comedy.
For almost all their serious Plays are written in it: which, though it be no Demonstration that therefore it ought to be so; yet, at least, the Practice first, and then the Continuation of it shews that it attained the end, which was, to Please. And if that cannot be compassed here, I will be the first who shall lay it down. I know, I am not so fitted, by nature, to write Comedy.
Years before, while following up the theory of the drama in his strict and strenuous fashion, he had convinced himself that 'Nathan' was a monstrosity; it was neither tragedy nor comedy nor tragi-comedy, and he was opposed to a mixture of types. In tragedy, so he had reasoned in his essay upon 'Naive and Sentimental Poetry', raisonnement is out of place; in comedy, pathos.
The ceremonies are precisely the same when a man has lost his wife, and they are only slightly varied when any other member of the family has died. What appeared not a little singular and indeed ludicrous in this funeral comedy was the contrast exhibited by the terrific lamentations and yells of one part of the company while the others were singing and dancing with all their might.
"Is that so?" "Yes." "That's fine." We cannot in words describe the peculiar tones of our hero or the singular expression upon his face, but he was playing for great fun. He held in reserve a great surprise for the senator's son, a grand climax and tableau was to close the scene, or rather, as Desmond classed it in his mind, grand comedy.
The first comedy of Corneille, "Melite," was followed by many others, which, though now considered unreadable, were better than anything then known. The appearance of the "Cid," in 1635, a drama constructed on the foundation of the old Spanish romances, constituted an era in the dramatic history of France.
The romantic note struck in these opening lines is continued throughout the comedy, in which, by little touches here and there, the scene is kept constantly before us of the rocky shore in the strong brilliant sun after the storm of the night, the temple with its kindly priestess, and the red-tiled country-house by the reeds of the lagoon, with the solitary pastures behind it dotted over with fennel.
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