A Book About the Theater

Thus we see that only a few novels are really fit to be dramatized, and that even these are often dramatized ineffectively because the playwright has followed the story-teller t...

In England the development of pantomime was upon different lines, due to the influence of the Italian comedy-of-masks, with its unchanging figures of Pantaleone, Columbina, and...

The overcoming of difficulty is one of the elements of the pleasure which we take in any art, and part of our enjoyment of a sonnet, for example, must be ascribed to the apparen...

Here, then, is the fatal difference between a novel and a play; a novel may have a plot, but a plot is not necessary, and it can get along with a minimum of story; whereas a pla...

The true art of dancing is entirely free from all apparent effort. No matter how difficult may be the feat that is accomplished, it must seem easy. Every gesture must be express...

It is not to be wondered at that the Italian scholars of the Renascence followed the precept of Horace and the practise of Seneca. They were far more at home in Latin than they...

"Autobiography," said Longfellow--altho the remark does not seem especially characteristic of this gentle poet--"is what biography ought to be." And in the long list of alluring...

Bizet wrote other operas besides 'Carmen,' and if these other operas have vanished from the stage, the reason may be that the librettos to which they were composed were not as i...

At the apex of his inflated prosperity Haverly invaded Germany with his mastodonic organization; and one result of his visit was probably still further to confuse the Teutonic m...

The art of play-writing, like the art of story-telling, and, indeed, like all the other arts, demands both a native gift and an acquired craft. Its basic principles are the same...

Sooner or later some modern magician, in advance over his rivals, will take this final step, and the curtain will rise on a stage with a box-set realistically reproducing a hand...

In her charming and instructive account of the ingenious puppet-shows with which her son Maurice used to amuse himself and her guests at Nohant half a century ago, George Sand r...

Perhaps even a third instance of this possibility of explaining the glorious past by the humble present may not be out of place. A few years ago Edward Harrigan put together a v...

It may not be fanciful to infer that the immediate suggestion for this spectacle was derived from the contemporary vogue of the silhouette itself, this portrait in solid black t...

Another of Shakspere's tragedies has become almost impossible in our modern playhouses, because the stage-manager does not dare to do without the spectacular effects that the st...

In other words, women seem to be less often dowered than men with what Tyndall called "scientific imagination," with the ability to put together a whole in which the several par...

A similar development took place also in the landscape scenes; the foreground was raised irregularly, so that the persons of the play might climb up. Practicable bridges were sw...

Produced by Chris Curnow, Ernest Schaal, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by Th...

These newspaper notices are sometimes careless, they are sometimes perfunctory, and they are sometimes cruel; and occasionally they are careful, conscientious, and clever, done...