DRAMA

Related Subjects: Acting, Literature, Poetry, Stage, Tragedy

1. All tragedies are finished by a death,
   All comedies are ended by a marriage.—BYRON, Don, Juan
   

2. We achieved a criticism of life without which the drama is nothing but evanescent showmanship.—JOHN GASSNER, Introduction: Twenty Best Plays
   

3. Athens crowned the theatre with glory while fighting for its existence against a host of enemies. Germany advanced stagecraft by leaps and bounds at a time when it suffered the miseries of inflation and national humiliation. America, struggling through a decade of economic distress, likewise affirmed the strength of the human spirit that often proves so painfully blind and bestial under the whiplash of accumulated errors.—JOHN GASSNER, Introduction: Twenty Best Plays
   

4. Life's moving-pictures, well-wrought plays,
   To others' grief attention raise.—MATTHEW GREEN, The Spleen
   

5. I would like to see the boys who really know how to write plays really write them, instead of throwing them together out of the shabby devices which they have come to believe are sure-fire. I would like them to remember, for instance, that nothing has ever been more sure-fire than truth and integrity.—WILLIAM SAROYAN, Preface: My Heart's In the Highlands
   

6. The play, I remember, pleased not the million; 'twas caviare to the general.—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
   

7. This writing of plays is a great matter, forming as it does the minds and affections of men in such sort that whatsoever they see done in show on
   the stage, they will presently be doing in earnest in the world, which is but a larger stage.—BERNARD SHAW, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets
   

8. As long as more people will pay admission to a theatre to see a naked body than to see a naked brain, the drama will languish.—BERNARD SHAW, When asked by a burlesque queen to supply a more graceful word than "strip­teaser" to the profession.
   

9. From time to time dramatic art gets a germinal impulse. There follows in the theatre a spring which flourishes into a glorious summer. This becomes stale almost before its arrival is generally recognized; and the sequel is not a new golden age, but a barren winter that may last any time from fifteen years to a hundred and fifty. Then comes a new impulse; and the cycle begins again.—BERNARD SHAW
   

10. Be patient. Our Playwright may show
    In some fifth act what this wild Drama means.—TENNYSON, The Play