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| Frank J. Wilstach, comp. A Dictionary of Similes. 1916. |
| Play |
| A bad play is like a cabbage,—all leaves. —Anonymous | 1 |
| A play is like a cigar, it requires judicious puffing. —Anonymous | 2 |
| Most plays are like pills; if you swallow them whole they are sweet; but, if they are chewed, like a pill, you will, like the critic, find them bitter. —Anonymous | 3 |
| A play is like a cigar; if it is a failure no amount of puffing will make it draw, but if it is a success, everybody wants a box. —Henry J. Byron | 4 |
| 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, Though we’re in Lent, I doubt you’re still for flesh. Satire’s the sauce, high-seasoned, sharp, and rough. Kind masks and beaux, I hope you’re pepper-proof? Wit is the wine; but ’tis so scarce the true Poets, like vintners, balderdash and brew. Your surly scenes, where rant and bloodshed join, Are butcher’s meat, a battle’s a sirlorn. Your scenes of love, so flowing, soft and chaste, Are water-gruel without salt or taste. —George Farquhar | 5 |
| A play is like a picture: the actors are the colors, and they must blend with one another if a perfect work is to be produced. —Joseph Jefferson | 6 |
| A play, like a bill, is of no value till it is accepted; nor indeed when it is, very often. —Sir Walter Scott | 7 |
| Plays are exactly like Portraits Drawn in the Garb and Fashion of the time when Painted. You see one Habit in the time of King Charles I.; another quite different from that, both for Men and Woman, in Queen Elizabeths time; another under Henry the Eighth different from both; and so backward all various. —James Wright (Historia Histrionica) | 8 |
| For plays, like women, by the world are thought, When you speak kindly of ’em, very naught. —William Wycherley | 9 |
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