A Short History Of The English Drama Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from English Drama In the following pages, an endeavour is made to tell, in scale and with a due regard to proportion, the story of English drama from its beginnings in the miracle play and morality to the performance of Sheridan's Critic, in the year 1779. A con cluding chapter presents a sketch of the course of the drama since that time, in outline and by way of suggestion, and no more. To have completed the book on the same scale would have demanded another volume. But a better reason for the course here pursued is to be found in the circumstance that, by the time of Sheridan, almost the last vestige of the original dramatic impulse had been lost, the impulse that begot Mar lowe and Shakespeare and carried the great traditions of their art over the Restoration and into the next century; and when the modern revival came, inspired by a renewed appreciation of the great Elizabethans, it was manifestly not a revival on the stage, but in a new species of literature, the drama of the study, as different from the original parent stock as the novel is dif ferent from it or from the drama capable of successful presenta tion on the stage. 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.