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Updated: June 3, 2025
Fiction rests on the same level as reality. Do not people discuss seriously the objective value of certain myths, and of metaphysical theories? the action of a novel or drama as though it were a matter of real events? the character of the dramatis personae as though they were living flesh and blood? The fixed imagination moves in an elastic frame.
As usual, the personages who head the dramatis personæ are not the best. Bertram, though less of a nincompoop than Waverley, is not very much; Lucy is a less lively ange de candeur than Rose, and nothing else; and Julia's genteel-comedy missishness does not do much more than pair off with Flora's tragedy-queen air.
What we should look for above everything in a comedy or a drama is a representation, exact as possible, of the manners and characters of the dramatis persona of the play; and perhaps the conditions under which the play was written do not allow such representation. The exact and studied portrayal of a character demands from the author long preparation, and cannot be accomplished in a few hours.
In nothing, perhaps, is its vividness more displayed than in the reality of its impersonations. The dramatis persons are not shadowy abstractions, moving far above us in a mystical world, or lay figures ticketed with certain names, but solid men and women of our own flesh and blood, living in our own everyday world, and of like passions with ourselves.
It was a considerable time after his wife's death that Browning's study of the impostor of the spiritualist circles, "Mr Sludge the Medium," appeared in the Dramatis Personae of 1864; the date of its composition is Rome, 1859-60; but the observations which that study sums up were accumulated during earlier years, and if Mr Sludge is not a portrait of Home, that eminent member of the tribe of Sludge no doubt supplied suggestions for the poet's character-study.
The auction, of course, was postponed for a week that is, until after the old man's funeral and the consequence was that circumstances, affecting the fate of our dramatis personae had time to be developed, which would otherwise have occurred too late to be available for the purposes of our narrative.
I felt as if I could have fought even unto the death; and I was likely to do so; for he was, according to the vulgar phrase, "putting my head into Chancery," when the gentle Columbine flew to my assistance. God bless the women; they are always on the side of the weak and the oppressed. The battle now became general; the dramatis personae ranged on either side. The manager interfered in vain.
Following Olga came a period of what Bertram called "one night stands," so frequently were the dramatis personæ below stairs changed. Gretchen drank. Christine knew only four words of English: salt, good-by, no, and yes; and Billy found need occasionally of using other words. Mary was impertinent and lazy. Jennie could not even boil a potato properly, much less cook a dinner.
"One of them is a woman," said Meschines. "They look very weary," remarked Freeman. Miriam fixed her eyes on the approaching pair for a moment, and then said, "They are Senor de Mendoza and Grace Parsloe." And so, indeed, they were; and thus, in this lonely spot, all the dramatis personae of this history found themselves united.
He was out of keeping with the rest of the Personæ Dramatis. There was as little link between him and them as betwixt himself and the audience. He was a third estate, dry, repulsive, and unsocial to all. Individually considered, his execution was masterly. But comedy is not this unbending thing; for this reason, that the same degree of credibility is not required of it as to serious scenes.
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