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essay
- In English literature: Effect of religion and science on early Stuart prose
  The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628). Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane State), and
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novel
- In novel: Character
  The inferior novelist tends to be preoccupied with plot; to the superior novelist the convolutions of the human personality, under the stress of artfully selected experience, are the chief fascination. Without character it was once accepted that there could be no fiction. In the…
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In dramatic literature: Common elements of drama
…detach the idea of a character from the situation in which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example,…
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In dramatic literature: Into the 16th and 17th centuries
Second, basic types of comic character derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the…
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theatrical production
- In theatrical production: The actor as character
  Another aspect of the dramatic performer’s work has to do with the portrayal of characters, both as individuals and as types. In portraying an individual character, the performer adopts a fictional framework and acts according to the text’s demands. When playing Macbeth, for instance,…
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- In theatre: Production aspects of Expressionist theatre
  Characters were frequently presented as fragments of a unified consciousness. Crowds were often not differentiated but were used in mass to express or underline the power of the protagonist’s position. Expressionist roles often required actors to express aspects of character through the use of isolated…
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tragedy
- In tragedy: Classical theories
  …soul of a tragedy, with character in second place. The goal of tragedy is not suffering but the knowledge that issues from it, as the denouement issues from a plot. The most powerful elements of emotional interest in tragedy, according to Aristotle, are reversal of intention or situation (peripeteia) and…
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Dickens
- In Charles Dickens: Novels from Bleak House to Little Dorrit of Charles Dickens
  “Dickensian” characterization continues in the sharply defined and simplified grotesque or comic figures, such as Chadband in Bleak House or Mrs. Sparsit in Hard Times, but large-scale figures of this type are less frequent (the Gamps and Micawbers belong to the first half of his career).…
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Shakespeare
- In William Shakespeare: Romantic critics
  …supreme as a creator of character. Maurice Morgann wrote such character-based analyses as appear in his book An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777), where Falstaff is envisaged as larger than life, a humane wit and humorist who is no coward or liar in fact but…
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