John Palmer eBooks
eBooks di John Palmer editi da Forgotten Books
Comedy. E-book. Formato PDF John Palmer - Forgotten Books, 2017 -
Of comic figures we must meet — Rosalind and Mrs. Pinchwife, Falstaff and Harpagon, Xan thias and Lady F roth. Let us begin where the light is clearest. Let us begin with Moliere. There was a short period in' the history of Europe when everybody talked like a French man. It was largely owing to Voltaire. Cather ine of Russia read Voltaire upon taxation. Frederick of Prussia corresponded with the man himself. Bolingbroke made him free of English society. The advantage of French as a civilised language is that it enables almost anybody to explain the universe in a quarter of an hour. Under the clarifying in?uence of the Gallic idiom even an Englishman can settle problems with an epigram, bringing to a decisive end the squabbles of ten centuries in a statement as clear as a sum in simple practice. Among the many English people of the eighteenth century who realised the advantages of thinking in French was Horace Walpole and among the many clear things his habit of thinking in French enabled him to say was a celebrated and well-worn aphorism concerning comedy and tragedy.
The Comedy of Manners. E-book. Formato PDF John Palmer - Forgotten Books, 2017 -
The present volume is an attempt to fill a gap in English dramatic criticism and, if it be possible, to reform our point of view as to the drama of the Restoration. It would be impudently ungracious to claim that this is pioneer work of the backwoods. Mr. George Street, Mr. Edmund Gosse and other critical essayists upon the period in general, and the Restoration dramatists in particular, have already prepared the way for an estimate of these men and their work, viewed in perspective with their period, measured by standards of morality and taste which they themselves would have ac cepted. But this is the first attempt by a writer who has an 5106 digested the historical evidence to put right the injustice of over two centuries. Since Jeremy Collier discovered that the Restoration dramatists were profane, wicked, and subversive of good manners, nearly every printed opinion, with, one or two celebrated and conspicuous exceptions, leaves the impression that these writers have been! Measured by standards they would neither have'