United States or Falkland Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
By far the cleverest as well as the most pleasing scene in the play is that introducing a game of bowls, during which Lisander courts Violetta in long-drawn metaphor. Part at least of this brilliant double-edged word-play must be quoted, even though the verse-capping may at times pass the bounds of strict decorum: The unprinted dramas founded on the Arcadia need not detain us long.
There is hardly any character, and except in a few pieces, such as Lodge's Margarite of America, there is little attempt to utilise new scenes and conditions. But the whole class has special interest for us in one peculiarity which makes it perhaps unreadable to any but students, and that is its saturation with the Elizabethan conceit and word-play which is sometimes called Euphuism.
Her word-play was always too quick for him, and this reply held him in puzzled silence while she extended her hand and added, with the faintest inflection of sadness in her voice: "Before we bid each other goodbye, I want at least to thank you for having once thought of me as you did." The touch of her hand, the moving softness of her look, thrilled a vulnerable fibre in Rosedale.
The situation presented itself to him as an extremely refined and yet tragic phase of the religious difficulty, and it gave him intellectual pleasure to draw it out in words. Lady Charlotte sat listening, enjoying her nephew's crisp phrases, but also gradually gaining a perception of the human reality behind this word-play of Hugh's.
The first commenced: "What a strange way of proposing! You begin by giving me two black eyes to prove you've forgotten me. I am so different in other people's eyes as well as in my own it would be unfair to accept you. You are in love with a shadow." The word-play about her eyes seemed to savour of the "Half-and-Half." She struck it out.
Sanine scratched the nape of his neck, and crossed his legs. "Ah! of what good is it if they bloom here, since there is no one worthy to pluck them?" replied Lida. "Aha!" thought Sanine, suddenly becoming interested, "so that's what she's driving at!" This word-play, where sentiment and grossness were so obviously involved, he found extremely diverting. "Is it possible?" "Why, of course!
Greene, Rymer, Dryden, Warburton and Doctor Johnson used collectively or individually the following expressions in describing the work of the author of "Hamlet": conceit, overreach, word-play, extravagance, overdone, absurdity, obscurity, puerility, bombast, idiocy, untruth, improbability, drivel.
Those two either hate each other lovingly, or love hatefully, I know not which, they are so biting, yet so friendly to each other's cleverness, though their style of word-play is so different: Monsieur Doltaire's like a bodkin-point, Captain Moray's like a musket-stock a-clubbing. Be not surprised to see the British at our gates any day.
Under this process, high-sounding generalities, put in the mouths of speakers in the dialogues, the whole word-play set forth with exquisite grace and charm, are shown by a rigid sifting to resolve themselves into nebulous and baseless figments, the mere simulacra of true knowledge.
Thus planting his foot on firmest certainty, Plato leaps off into a glorious sea of clouds. Flashes of insight and sublime allegory mix with fantastic theory and word-play. The vast range of his thought we will touch only at two points. In the Symposium and the Phaedrus he discusses in his most brilliant vein the problem of love.
Word Of The Day