Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, CompleteVarious
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
THE GREAT UNACTABLES. It seems that the English Opera-house has been
taken for twelve nights, to give a free stage and fair play to EVERY
ENGLISH LIVING DRAMATIST. Considering that the Council of the Dramatic
Authors Theatre comprises at least half-a-dozen Shakspeares in their
own conceit, to say nothing of one or two Rowes (soft ones of course), a
sprinkling of Otways, with here and there a Massinger, we may calculate
pretty correctly how far the stage they have taken possession of is
likely to be free, or the play to be fair towards Every English living
Dramatist.
It appears that a small knot of very great geniuses have been, for some
time past, regularly sending certain bundles of paper, called Dramas,
round to the different metropolitan theatres, and as regularly receiving
them back again. Some of these geniuses, goaded to madness by this
unceremonious treatment, have been guilty of the insanity of printing
their plays; and, though the Rejected Addresses were a very good
squib, the rejected Dramas are much too ponderous a joke for the public
to take; so that, while in their manuscript form, they always produced
speedy returns from the managers, they, in their printed shape, caused
no returns to the publishers. It is true, that a personal acquaintance
of some of the authors with Nokes of the North Eastern Independent, or
some other equally-influential country print, may have gained for them,
now and then, an egregious puff, wherein the writers are said to be
equal to Goëthe, a cut above Sheridan Knowles, and the only successors
of Shakspeare; but we suspect that the mantle of the Elizabethan
poets, which is said to have descended on one of these gentry, would,
if inspected, turn out to be something more like Fitzballs Tagiioni or
Dibdin Pitts Macintosh.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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