Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 7, 2025
In place of the "bloody tragedies of burning, murdering, and ravishing," of which the provinces had so long been the theatre, it was resolved that, "Rhetoric's sweet comedies, amorous jests, and farces," should gladden all eyes and hearts.
This humane and ingenious gentleman, by profession a player, is known likewise as the author of several farces and vaudevilles, and of the executions at Lyons. It is asserted, that many of the inhabitants of this unfortunate city expiated under the Guillotine the crime of having formerly hissed Collot's successful attempts on the stage.
And these were the kind of foundations which Burke had been laying, while Fox was yet a Tory, while Sheridan was writing farces, and while Grey was a schoolboy.
The works of Sir Arthur Pinero afford many examples of interest very skilfully carried forward. In his farces let no one despise the technical lessons to be learnt from a good farce there is always an adventure afoot, whose development we eagerly anticipate.
The theatre apparently has not, for we read that at that period "a very great majority of the standard plays and farces on the stage depend mostly for their piquancy and their power of interesting an audience upon intrigues with married women, elopements, seductions, bribery, cheating, and fraud of every description . . . . Stage costume, too, wherever there is half a chance, is usually made as lascivious and immodest as possible; and a freedom and impropriety prevails among the characters of the piece which would be kicked out of private society the instant it would have the audacity to make its appearance there."
The shepherds had naturally an important part assigned to them, and the whole was pervaded by the pastoral feeling which distinguishes them remarkably from the Spanish autos. But the best productions of this author are his farces, which approach much nearer to the style of true comedy than the plays published under that name.
Would you not suppose these persons had been whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny? and that this lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was the bull's-eye and centre-point of all the universe? And yet it is not so.
"While he thus lay drunk, a boy crawled through the door to ask his blessing, whereupon the priest swore horribly and waved him off, 'Not to-day, not to-day those farces!
The signal for the next act is a deafening clicking noise made by one of the stage hands on two sticks, which gradually rises to a shattering crescendo as the curtain is drawn aside. It must be understood that the theatre that I am describing was set apart for national drama. In others there are topical farces and laughter is continuous; but I did not visit any.
It has been praised by the poets, and its service is that it makes one forget! The theatre, its comedies and farces and cunning amusements all designed to help me to forget! Art with its seductions is to obsess the soul with foreign thoughts! Women who languish upon one's eyes and tempt with their beauties, they also would steal away our memories. I will have none of them.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking