Oswald Crawfurd
Published: 2015-07-09
Total Pages: 324
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Excerpt from English Comic Dramatists The idea which underlies true and pure comedy is, as the present writer understands it, that it should furnish cause for mocking but not ungenial laughter by a representation, in the guise of a fable - interesting dramatically - of the various actions, motives, humours, follies, inconsistencies, absurdities, pretensions, and hypocrisies of human life. In doing this, which, as man's literary capacity and his faculty of imagination go, seems to be a most difficult and rarely well-done thing, if the mirror be truly held up to nature, the result - after allowing for some slight conventional distortion of the image in accordance with accepted stage traditions - is Comedy, whether it be after the grand fashion set by Shakspere, or in the mode of Moliere, or in that of Congreve and Sheridan. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.