Pastiche and prejudice

Writing of Lamennais, Renan says: “Il créa avec des réminiscences de la Bible et du langage ecclésiastique cette manière harmonieuse et grandiose qui réalise le phénomène unique...

When we had convoyed him in safety to Leicester Fields, and he had descended from his coach at the door, he straightway engaged in a conference with the door-keeper, who is a no...

“It is for the like of you that these Shakespeare Memorialists are sending their strolling players around the country, to set the goodwives wondering about Shakespeare, as they...

“And that, I venture to suggest, ma’am,” he respectably continued, “is why your worthy husband has been so much more fortunate in the world than myself. We are both respectable,...

It was a remarkably happy invention. You may see that for yourselves at the Coliseum, generally, though true clown-lovers follow it about all over the map wherever it is to be s...

And so it is, precisely, with criticism. For criticism is also “creative.” But it does not create images of people or their lives; it creates thought, ideas, concepts. That is,...

But there is one thing for which I envy the general playgoer above all. I mean his freedom and pungency of criticism. Anonymity gives him irresponsibility, and, his resentment a...

And that reminds me. As I sat at the Hammersmith Lyric listening to the dialogue between Peachum and Mrs. Peachum on the question whether Polly was Macheath’s wife or his mistre...

In any case, we ought to be able now, if ever, to put it to the “acid test.” The leading nations of the world have just fought the biggest of all their wars. Has the promised se...

But is this treating the play fairly? Is it just a story, the story of Carlotta and Diaz? Suppose we look at it in another way, suppose we consider it as a study of modern love,...

Assuredly we of to-day can see more in _Hamlet_ than its first audience could. But the curve of “posterity” is really a zig-zag. Each generation selects from a classic what suit...

and its intuition and expression assume a special type in accordance with the medium it delights in, and necessarily develop certain capacities and acknowledge, however tacitly,...

Let me explain. One of our more notable comedians (I purposely put it thus vaguely, partly out of discretion, partly with a bid for that interest which the mystery of anonymity...

All this, of course, is as plain as a pikestaff. The Futurist aim is simply to run counter to tradition, to go by rule of contrary, to say No when everybody for centuries has be...

Lemaître died where, whenever he could, he had lived, at Tavers in the Loiret, the heart of France. He was always writing about Tavers, though he never named it by its name. In...

Now that the _Literary Supplement_ costs 6_d._, one feels entitled to examine one’s relation to it with a certain sense of solemnity. But I well know what mine is, before examin...

We are to understand that it was the domination and the selfishness of man that created the lamentable type of nineteenth-century “old maid.” But who were unkindest to Miss Ward...