Elbert Hubbard Quotes

The popular definition of tragedy is heavy drama in which everyone is killed in the last act, comedy being light drama in which everyone is married in the last act.

If you look at the timing of many of the Greek dramas from the theatrical point of view, it's all off, and I think the reason for that is that music played a very important part.

I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20.

I've always wanted to do a Shakespeare play.

'Heartbreak House' was a lot of fun for me. I must have missed that day at school. I'd never read it or seen it. It's one of those things that a lot of people are familiar with.

'The Merchant of Venice' is a straightforward, clear story, while 'The Winter's Tale,' as a general rule, is hard to present because there is so much plot.

Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.

I was in the play 'Fat Pig in the West End,' which is a comedy but has dramatic moments.

The rules of drama are very much separate from the properties of life. I think that's especially true of Shakespeare.

I fell in love with 19th-century Russian plays.

I would love to do Shakespeare, either onstage or on film.

If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the worldis provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.

I come from a very expressive family, so it's really not surprising that we became actors. There was a lot of real-life drama in our house. Some of it was drama, some of it was comedy and some of it was comic-tragedy.

As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.

Fate cast me to play the role of an ugly duckling with no promise of swanning. . . . I have played my life as a comedy rather than the tragedy many would have made of it.

When I'm editing, I try to bring out some dramatic structure. I think it is about theater in some way; it is a little play.

God always comes up with a third act twist -- and we won't know until we die whether the play was a comedy or a tragedy.

Let us have no ranting tragedies. Too many charactersNot a tolerable woman's part in the play.

A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

The more serious the situation, the funnier the comedy can be. The greatest comedy plays against the greatest tragedy. Comedy is a red rubber ball and if you throw it against a soft, funny wall, it will not come back. But if you throw it against the hard wall of ultimate reality, it will bounce back and be very lively. Very, very few people understand this.

On the golf course, a man may be the dogged victim of inexorable fate, be struck down by an appalling stroke of tragedy, become the hero of unbelievable melodrama, or the clown in a side-splitting comedy.

It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves.

Love in France is a comedy; in England a tragedy; in Italy an opera seria; and in Germany a melodrama.

Shakespeare put no children in his plays for a reason," Sir Godfrey muttered, glaring at Alf and Binnie. "You're forgetting the Little Prince," Polly reminded him. "Who he had the good sense to kill off in the second act," snapped Sir Godfrey.

Like hungry guests, a sitting audience looks / Plays are like suppers; poets are the cooks / The founder's you; the table is this place / The carvers we; the prologue is the grace / Each act a course, each scene, a different dish.