United States or Fiji ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In his Prologue, addressed to her, he gives a charming picture of the scene which led him to write his book: 'You, being of the age of fifteen years and in the week that you and I were wed, did pray me that I would please to be indulgent to your youth and to your small and ignorant service mewards, until that you should have seen and learned more, to the hastening whereof you did promise me to set all care and diligence, ... praying me humbly, in our bed as I remember, that for the love of God I would not correct you harshly before strangers nor before our own folk, 'but that I would correct you each night or from day to day in our chamber and show you the unseemly or foolish things done in the day or days past, and chastise you, if it pleased me, and then you would not fail to amend yourself according to my teaching and correction, and would do all in your power according to my will, as you said.
He is allowed to have been a scholar, and to have understood and practised the dramatic rules; but Dryden proves him to have likewise been an unbounded plagiary. Humour was his talent; and he had a happy turn for an epitaph; we cannot better conclude his character as a poet, than in the nervous lines of the Prologue quoted in the Life of Shakespear.
The various persons who figure in the "Canterbury Tales" are too well known for me to enlarge upon. Who can add anything to the Prologue in which Chaucer himself describes the varied characters and habits and appearance of the pilgrims to the shrine of Thomas
All the tales told by all the pilgrims were to be connected together by links; the reader was to take an interest in the movement and progress of the journey to and fro; and the poem was to have a middle as well as a beginning and an end: the beginning being the inimitable "Prologue" as it now stands; the middle the history of the pilgrims' doings at Canterbury; and the close their return and farewell celebration at the Tabard inn.
And in the last of the longer poems which seem assignable to this period of his life, he proves that one Latin poet at least Venus' clerk, whom in the "House of Fame" he behold standing on a pillar of her own Cyprian metal had been read as well as celebrated by him Of this poem, the fragmentary "Legend of Good Women," the "Prologue" possesses a peculiar biographical as well as literary interest.
But this is not the end of Mozart's opera as he wrote it, as readers of this book have been told. This prologue of "Mefistofele" plays in heaven. "In the heavens," says Theodore Marzials, the English translator of Boito's opera, out of deference to the religious sensibilities of the English people, to spare which he also changes "God" into "sprites," "spirits," "powers of good," and "angels."
It was the morning of October 21, 1805, the dawn of the greatest day in the naval history of Great Britain. Let us rapidly trace the events which led up to this scene, the prologue to the drama about to be played. The year 1805 was one of threatening peril to England.
Only take, for instance, the prologue to 'Every Man in his Humour. There, Jonson, with the most arrogant conceit, tries to make short work of various dramas of Shakspere's for instance, of his historical plays, in which he dared ... with three rusty swords, And help of some few foot and half-foot words, Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars, And in the tyring-house bring wounds to scars.
Les Ressources de Quinola, a comedy in a prologue and five acts, was presented at the Theatre de l'Odeon, Paris, March 19, 1842. Souverain published it in an octavo volume. Our playwright yet betrays the amateur touch. It is regrettable, too, for he chose an excellent theme and setting.
It is as impossible as it would be unwise to conceal from ourselves the fact that all the Continental nations look upon our present peace as but transitory, momentary; and on the Crimean war as but the prologue to a fearful drama all the more fearful because none knows its purpose, its plot, which character will be assumed by any given actor, and, least of all, the denouement of the whole.
Word Of The Day