“ Remark this, governess: a Beauty is the living evidence of man's immortality; the one plain proof that he has a soul.
Eloise. It is not so bad then, after all?
Valsin. It is utterly bad. But of all people a Beauty is most conscious of her duality. Her whole life is based upon her absolute knowledge that her Self and her body are two. She sacrifices all things to her beauty because her beauty feeds her Self with a dreadful food which it has made her unable to live without.
Eloise. My little gentleman, you talk like a sentimental waiter. Your metaphors are all hot from the kitchen. ”

“ When on Inishmaan, Synge himself lived in just such a cottage as that which is the background for the tragedy of Maurya's sons. He wrote of this cottage, "The kitchen itself, where I will spend most of my time, is full of beauty and distinction. The red dresses of the women who cluster round the fire on their stools give a glow of almost Eastern richness, and the walls have been toned by the surf-smoke to a soft brown that blends with the gray earth-color of the floor. Many sorts of fishing-tackle, and the nets and oilskins of the men, are hung up on the walls or among the open rafters." ”

“ Pierrot. I tell you I will not stop in. I'm going out to find that girl. How do I know she isn't the very woman of my dreams?
Pierrette. Why are you always trying to picture an ideal woman?
Pierrot. Don't you ever picture an ideal man?
Pierrette. No, I try to be practical.
Pierrot. Women are so unimaginative! They are such pathetic, motherly things, and when they feel extra motherly they say, "I'm in love." All that is so sordid and petty. I (p. 083) want a woman I can set on a pedestal, and just look up at her and love her. ”

“ You were at the mercy of anybody with a pinch of brains: adventurers like Mazarin, like Fouquet, like Law, or that little commoner, the woman Fish, who called herself Pompadour and took France—France, merely!—from your King, and used it to her own pleasure. Then, at last, after the swindlers had well plucked you—at last, unfortunate creatures, the People got you! Citizeness, the People had starved: be assured they will eat you to the bone—and then eat the bone! You are helpless because you have learned nothing and forgotten everything. ”

“ A high-backed oak settle, as though afraid of the cold moonlight, has turned its back on the window and warms its old timbers at the fire. In the middle of the room stands a table with a red cover; there are chairs on either side of it. On the hob, a kettle is keeping itself warm; whilst overhead, on the hood of the chimney-piece, a small lamp is turned very low.
A figure flits past the window and, with a click of the latch, Pierrette enters. She hangs up her cloak by the door, gives a little shiver and runs to warm herself for a moment. ”

“ Eloise [not at all displeased; pretending carelessness] . Ah, you have heard that she is beautiful?
Valsin. Far worse: that she is a Beauty. Let nothing ever tempt you, my dear, into setting up in that line. For you are very well-appearing, I assure you; and if you had been surrounded with all the disadvantages of the d'Anville, who knows but that you might have become as famous a Beauty as she? What makes a Beauty is not the sumptuous sculpture alone, but a very peculiar arrogance—not in the least arrogance of mind, my little governess. ”

“ The Intruder and Riders to the Sea are indubitably tragedies, but Fortune and Men's Eyes, dealing, as it does, with the tragic theme of love's disillusionment, belongs not at all with the plays of Maeterlinck and Synge, shadowed, as they are, by death. And though the deaths are many and bloody in A Night at an Inn, the unreality of the romance is so strong that there is no such wrenching of the human sympathies as we associate with tragedy. The Pierrot of the Minute is superficially a Harlequinade, but Dowson's insistence on the theme of satiety brings it narrowly within the range of satire. ”

“ Every gift of the Welsh would seem to promise the realization (p. 180) some day of a great national drama, for they have not only the gift of poetry and the power to seize the symbol—short cut through experience—which can, even as the crutch of Ibsen's Little Eyolf, lift a play into greatness; they have, also, natures profoundly emotional and yet intellectually critical. They are, humanly speaking, perfect tools for the achievement of great drama. ”

“ This new-comer is of a startling gold-and-ivory beauty; a beauty quite literally striking, for at the very first glance the whole force of it hits the beholder like a snowball in the eye; a beauty so obvious, so completed, so rounded, that it is painful; a beauty to rivet the unenvious stare of women, but from the full blast of which either king or man-peasant would stagger away to the confessional. The egregious luster of it is not breathed upon even by its overspreading of sullen revolt, as its possessor carelessly arranges the garments in the portmanteau. ”

“ The myths of the old Norse Gods, used by Richard Wagner for his music dramas, contain much unmined dramatic gold. John Masefield and Sigurjónsson have converted Saga material to the uses of the drama. In old English literature, in Widsith, in the Battle of Brunanburh, the seeking dramatist may find. The romances of the Middle Ages, the fairy lore of all peoples, and the old Hindu animal fables are fertile in suggestion to the intending dramatist. What a wonderful one-act play, steeped in the mellow atmosphere of the Renaissance in Italy, might be made out of Browning's My Last Duchess! ”

“ Catherine, after a searching glance at him, draws herself up. Vavasour draws himself up, too, and then stoops to pick up some peat which he puts on the fire, and crosses over to left and sits down on the settle near the chimney, without having embraced her. Catherine's face is flushed, her eyes wild under the pretty white cap she wears, a black Welsh beaver above it. She is dressed in a scarlet cloak, under this a tight bodice and short, full skirt, bright stockings, and clogs with brass tips. ”

“ Scenery isn't there to be looked at, it's really there to be forgotten. The drama is a fire, the scenery is the air that lifts the fire and makes it bright.... The audience that is always conscious of the back drop is paying a doubtful compliment to the painter.... Even costumes should be the handiwork of the scenic artist. Yes, and if possible, he should build the very furniture." [11] Robert Edmond Jones has not only designed settings and costumes for poetic and fantastic forms of drama, but he has also been called upon to plan the productions of realistic modern plays. ”

“ Dost think to become a great player at once?
Will [impatiently] . Oh, I care not for the playing. Let me but be in London, to see the people there and be near the theatre. I'll be the players' servant, I'll hold the nobles' horses in the street—I'll do anything!
Peele [seriously] . And go with us all over England on hard journeys to play to ignorant rustics?
Will. Anywhere—I'll follow on to the world's end—only take me with you to London! [As he speaks Giles and Mistress Shakespeare, a kindly faced woman of middle age, dressed in housewife's cap and gown, appear at the door.] ”

“ Beauty and the Jacobin is rich in comedy; so is Lady Gregory's Spreading the News, and in both, the situations change imperceptibly from comedy to farce and from farce back to comedy.
The laws of the structure of the one-act play are in the nature of dramatic art no less flexible. It can be said that in order to secure that singleness of impression that is as essential to the one-act play as to the short-story, a single well sustained theme is necessary, a theme announced in some fashion early in the play. ”

“ The highest point of interest, like the beginning of the plot, is to be found in the play of the Little Man's personality, at the point where he is left alone with the Baby, now a typhus suspect, and after an instant's wavering, bends all his puny energies to pacifying its uneasy cry. ”

“ With their love for music, for beauty, for the significance of their land and its folklore, their inherent romance in the difficult art of living, they have transformed ugliness into beauty, turned loneliness into speech, and ever recalled life to its only permanent possessions in wonder and romance. ”

“ In all his writings he emphasizes the importance of having one individual with complete authority and complete knowledge in charge of coordinating and subordinating the various arts that go to make the production of a play a symmetrical whole, his theory being that there is no one art that can be called to the exclusion of all others the Art of the Theatre: not the acting, not the play, not the setting, not the dance; but that all these properly harmonized through the personality of the director become the Art of the Theatre. ”

“ Valsin. To Eloise d'Anville the most interesting thing about a rose-bush has always been that Eloise d'Anville could smell it. Moonlight becomes important when it falls upon her face; sunset is worthy when she grows rosy in it. To her mind, the universe was set in motion to be the background for a decoration, and she is the decoration. ”

“ Crawshaw. You take such extraordinary views of things. You must look facts in the face, Richard. This is a modern world, and we are modern people living in it. Take the matter-of-fact view. You may like or dislike the name of—ah—Wurzel-Flummery, but you can't get away from the fact that fifty thousand pounds is not to be sneezed at.
Richard [wistfully] . I don't know why people shouldn't sneeze at money sometimes. I should like to start a society for sneezing at fifty thousand pounds. We'd have to begin in a small way, of course; we'd begin by sneezing at five pounds—and work up.... ”

“ A Night at an Inn is one of Dunsany's contributions to the revival of romance in our generation. In an article published ten years ago, called Romance and the Modern Stage, he wrote: "Romance is so inseparable from life that all we need, to obtain romantic drama, is for the dramatist to find any age or any country where life is not too thickly veiled and cloaked with puzzles and conventions, in fact to find a people that is not in the agonies of self-consciousness. ”

“ At one time the theatre sent out, in a circular addressed to aspiring authors who showed promise, the following counsel: "A play to be suitable for performance at the Abbey should contain some criticism of life, founded on the experience or personal observation of the writer, or some vision of life, of Irish life by preference, important from its beauty or from some excellence of style, and this intellectual quality is not more necessary to tragedy than to the gayest comedy." ”

“ Service. Yea, truly, one evening as the sun was setting a woman clad in long gray robes entered the Palace gates and meeting the Princess on the terrace walk led her down among the cypresses. They sat long together in the twilight and ever since Douce-cœur is changed. No smile curves her lips, the sunlight is gone from her face, and she goes always with veiled (p. 248) head, and sad unseeing eyes. I heard but now her companions are to be sent away. Joy, Laughter, Song and Dance, all to be banished. This is the Gray Woman's doing, but why, no man can say.
Poetry. ”

“ In Miss Horniman's own words, her interest was in a Civilized Theatre. "A Civilized Theatre," she has written, "means that a city has something of cultivation in it, something to make literature grow; a real theatre, not a mere amusing toy. What we want is the opportunity for our men and women, our boys and girls to get a chance to see the works of the greatest dramatists of modern times, as well as the classics, for their pleasure as well as their cultivation.... ”

“ B. Iden Payne, who directed productions at the Gaiety Theatre for some time, says: "In all Harold Brighouse's plays there is in the acting more laughter than one would expect from the reading." A number of Brighouse's plays have been published; in the introduction to the latest volume, [36] he writes: "In another age than ours play-books were a favorite, if not the only form of light reading.... The reader mentally producing a play from the book in his hand looks through a magic casement at what he gloriously will instead of through a proscenium arch at the handiwork of a mere human producer." ”

“ Maurice Browne, The Temple of a Living Art. The Drama, Chicago, 1913, No. 12, p. 168: "Nor is this just a question of stage jargon; that man or woman who would establish an Art Theatre that is an Art Theatre and not a pet rabbit fed by hand, must be able to design it, to ventilate it, to decorate it, to equip its stage, to light it (and to handle its lighting himself, or his electricians will not listen to him) , to plan his costumes and scenery, aye, and at a shift, to make them with his own hand." ”

“ As has been said, every artistic consideration that calls for singleness of impression in the short-story is of equal importance in determining the unified structure of the one-act play. For the reason that a one-act play is almost never given by itself, if for no other, its effect will be dissipated if plot, characterization, or atmosphere fails in unity. ”

“ A rich man, who spends his money thoughtfully, is serving his country as nobly as anybody.
Margaret. Yes, dear. Then you think we could have that second car and the house in Curzon Street?
Crawshaw. We must not be led away. Fifty thousand pounds, properly invested, is only two thousand a year. When you have deducted the income-tax—and the tax on unearned income is extremely high just now—
(p. 121)
Margaret. Oh, but surely if we have to call ourselves Wurzel-Flummery it would count as earned income.
Crawshaw. I fear not. Strictly speaking, all money is earned. ”

“ It makes a virtue of economy of means. It aims to produce a single dramatic effect with the greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis. The method of the one-act play at its best is similar to the method employed by Browning in his dramatic monologues. The author must suggest the entire history of a soul by seizing it at some crisis of its career and forcing the spectator to look upon it from an unexpected and suggestive point of view. A one-act play in exhibiting the present should imply the past and intimate the future. ”