Word Finder - tragedies

definition

A drama or similar work, in which the main character is brought to ruin or otherwise suffers the extreme consequences of some tragic flaw or weakness of character.

definition

The genre of such works, and the art of producing them.

definition

A disastrous event, especially one involving great loss of life or injury.

His story was the subject of an old epic and of several tragedies, but none of these has been preserved.

Next came the New England Tragedies (1868) and The Divine Tragedy (1871), which found no large public. In 1868-1869 the poet visited Europe, and was everywhere received with the greatest honour.

But in his plays, as in the early tragedies generally, the dramatic element was subordinate to the lyric element as represented by the chorus and the dance.

His other dramatic works are classical tragedies on the subjects of Antigone, Cleopatra, and Agrippina.

The pathos of such tragedies as the death of Gunnar and Hoskuld and the burning is interrupted by the humour of the Althing scenes and the intellectual interest of the legal proceedings.

Af ter the death of Holberg, the affectation of Gallicism had reappeared in Denmark; and the tragedies of Voltaire, with their stilted rhetoric, were the most popular dramas of the day.

The bloody tragedies which disfigured the end of his reign bear sad witness to this; they were a fit prelude to that period during the course of which, as Gregory of Tours said, barbarism was let loose.

Moreover, southern Italy and Sicily afforded many opportunities for witnessing representations of Greek comedies and tragedies.

It contains also an account of the metres used by Boetius in the Consolatio, and a list of the passages which he has borrowed from the tragedies of Seneca.

He put before him a scheme, which he cannot be said to have carried far, that of illustrating "the making of England" by a series of great historical tragedies.

The story of Athaliah forms the subject of one of Racine's best tragedies.

But it is not in the Silvae, nor in the epics and tragedies of the time, nor in the cultivated criticism of Quintilian that the age of Domitian lives for us.

As a dramatist Korner was remarkably prolific, but his comedies hardly touch the level of Kotzebue's and his tragedies, of which the best is Zriny (1814), are rhetorical imitations of Schiller's.

Nicolaus also wrote comedies and tragedies, paraphrased and wrote commentaries on parts of Aristotle, and was himself the author of philosophical treatises.

During his enforced retirement he composed tragedies, which were put on the stage during the reign of Claudius.

Quintilian asserts that he was far superior to any writer of tragedies he had known, and Tacitus expresses a high opinion of his literary abilities.

He continued to write tragedies till the age of eighty, when he exhibited a play in the same year as Accius, who was then thirty years of age.

After his removal to the Piombi at Venice in February 1821, he composed several Cantiche and the tragedies Ester d'Engaddi and Iginia d'Asti.

His writings are defective in virility and breadth of thought, and his tragedies display neither the insight into character nor the constructive power of a great dramatist.

Cassius is credited with satires, elegies, epigrams and tragedies.

Originally intended for the profession of a painter, he preferred writing tragedies until attracted to science by the influence of Nicolas de Lacaille.

The authors he recommends include " Aesop " and Sallust, the tragedies of Seneca and the epic poets, especially Virgil, whom he interprets in an allegorical sense.

The Latin poets to be studied include Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and (with certain limitations) Horace, Juvenal and Persius, as well as Plautus, Terence and the tragedies of Seneca; the prose authors recommended are Cicero, Livy and Sallust.

In 1813 he published Ensayos podticos, and between that date and his first exile several of his tragedies (the most notable being Alatar, 1814, and Lanuza, 1822) were put upon the stage.

His tragedies are perhaps less known now than his Fables (1813, 1815 and 1826), which are written in very graceful verse.

His eldest son, Emilien Lucien (1787-1863), wrote several tragedies, the leading roles in which were interpreted by Talma.

Reference is there made to Philostratus as the son of Verus, a rhetorician in Nero's time, who wrote tragedies, comedies and treatises.

German novels also exist on the subject, by Franz Horn, Oeklers, Laun and Schucking, tragedies by Klinemann, Haushofer and Zedlitz.

In plays by contemporary authors she created the characters of Judith and Cleopatra in the tragedies of Madame de Girardin, but perhaps her most successful appearance was in 1849 in Scribe and Legouve's Adrienne Lecouvreur, which was written for her.

Never was marriage so fruitful in tragedies as the wedding of Lord Hamilton and the princess Mary.

From this wedding, disturbed by quarrels over the queen's jewels and dowry, was to result the union of the crowns on the head of Margaret's great-grandson, James VI., after a century of tragedies and turmoil.

She foiled the attempts of the English ambassador to make her ratify the treaty of Edinburgh, and, while Lethington, no worse a prophet than Knox, predicted " strange tragedies," Mary came home.

He translated the Alcestis of Euripides and three of the plays of Sophocles; and wrote two original tragedies, Jephte and Christo in Passione.

And as though it were foreordained that no element of horror should be wanting from the history of the crusades, in 1212 there took place one of the most ghastly tragedies that has ever happened in the world - the Crusade of the Children.

Though essentially a soldier, he took considerable interest in literature, wrote epic poems, tragedies and annals, and translated plays of Sophocles.

The retreat, with all its confusion, its mistakes and its tragedies, remains an astonishing achievement.

Tragedies in the style of Seneca, rivalling Italian and French dramas of the epoch, were produced.

Finally, the bucolic poet Quita produced the tragedies Segunda Castro, Hermione and two others, but these imitations from the French, for all the taste they show, were stillborn, and in the absence of court patronage, which was exclusively bestowed on the Lisbon opera, then the best equipped in Europe, Portugal remained without a drama of its own.

He is the subject of tragedies by Ben Jonson and P. Crebillon, and of the Rome sauvee of Voltaire.

His lyrics and his pastoral of Granida are strongly marked by the influence of Tasso and Sannazaro; his later tragedies belong more exactly to the familiar tone of his native country.

The fate of Pentheus was the subject of lost tragedies by Thespis and Pacuvius.

Sophocles and Euripides (and in modern times Corneille) made the story the subject of tragedies, and its incidents were represented in numerous ancient works of art.

Beldiman copied a number of ancient chronicles, wrote a satire on the Greeks, and translated and adapted a number of French tragedies and dramas, in verse and prose.

Of the exceedingly numerous writings relative to Corneille we may mention the Recueil de dissertations'sur plusieurs tragedies de Corneille et de Racine of the abbe Granet (Paris, 1740), the criticisms already alluded to of Voltaire, La Harpe and Palissot, the well-known work of Guizot, first published as Vie de Corneille in 1813 and revised as Corneille et son temps in 1852, and the essays, repeated in his Portraits litte'raires, in Port-Royal, and in the Nouveaux Lundis of Sainte-Beuve.

He lived in Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies, comedies and errors, all in Islamic pentameter.

The tragedies of the past have left a deep and profoundly regrettable legacy of suffering.

The fortunes of Merope have furnished the subject of tragedies by Euripides (Cresphontes, not extant), Voltaire, Maffei and Matthew Arnold.

Neither the Petimetra nor the Lucrecia (1763), an original tragedy still more strictly in accordance with French conventions, was represented on the stage, and two subsequent tragedies, Hormesinda (1770) and Guzman el Bueno (1777), were played with no great success.

Niccolini blasted tyranny in his tragedies, the novelist Guerrazzi re-evoked the memories of the last struggle for Florentine freedom in LAssedio di Firenze, and Verdis operas bristled with political double entendres which escaped the censor but were understood and applauded by the audience.

The titles of his tragedies - Achilles, Aegisthus, Equus Trojanus, Hermione, Tereus - are all suggestive of subjects which were treated by the later tragic poets of Rome.