WILLIAM ARCHER QUOTES
Scottish critic (1856-1924)
How many a world-embracing creed has sprung from a tiny contradiction in terms!
WILLIAM ARCHER
Masks Or Faces?: A Study in the Psychology of Acting
The drama is not dead but liveth, and contains the germs of better things.
WILLIAM ARCHER
About the Theatre
Paradox begets paradox; and we could scarcely have a wilder paradox than the assertion that none but a magnanimous man can act magnanimity, and that lovers alone can do justice to a love-scene.
WILLIAM ARCHER
Masks Or Faces?: A Study in the Psychology of Acting
Beware of epigram! It is one of Satan's favourite disguises.
WILLIAM ARCHER
Real Conversations
"Theocracy" has always been the synonym for a bleak and narrow, if not a fierce and blood-stained tyranny. Why seek to revive and rehabilitate a word of such a dismal connotation?
WILLIAM ARCHER
God and Mr. Wells
There are no rules for writing a play. It is easy, indeed, to lay down negative recommendations -- to instruct the beginner how not to do it. But most of these "don'ts" are rather obvious; and those which are not obvious are apt to be questionable. It is certain, for instance, that if you want your play to be acted anywhere else than in China, you must not plan it in sixteen acts of an hour apiece; but where is the tyro who needs a textbook to tell him that?
WILLIAM ARCHER
Play-making: A Manual of Craftsmanship
The art of theatrical story-telling is necessarily relative to the audience to whom the story is to be told. One must assume an audience of a certain status and characteristics before one can rationally discuss the best methods of appealing to its intelligence and its sympathies.
WILLIAM ARCHER
Play-making: A Manual of Craftsmanship
Fantastic plays, which assume an order of things more or less exempt from the limitations of physical reality, ought nevertheless to be logically faithful to their own assumptions.
WILLIAM ARCHER
Play-making: A Manual of Craftsmanship
In short, there is a pestilent congregation of influences fatal to drama, which has actually succumbed to them long ago, though there may be certain nervous twitchings in the dead limbs.
WILLIAM ARCHER
attributed, A Literary Manual of Foreign Quotations, Ancient and Modern
I am entirely convinced that the drama renounces its chief privilege and glory when it waives its claim to be a popular art, and is content to address itself to coteries, however "high-browed."
WILLIAM ARCHER
Play-making: A Manual of Craftsmanship
One thing, however, we may say with tolerable confidence: whatever may be the germ of a play--whether it be an anecdote, a situation, or what not--the play will be of small account as a work of art unless character, at a very early point, enters into and conditions its development. The story which is independent of character--which can be carried through by a given number of ready-made puppets--is essentially a trivial thing.
WILLIAM ARCHER
Play-making: A Manual of Craftsmanship
One of the first and most important things for a critic to learn is how to sleep undetected at the theatre.
WILLIAM ARCHER
attributed, The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Literary Quotations
To the average intellect, nothing is so alluring as a paradox. The reason is simple: in accepting a paradox, the average intellect feels that it has risen above the average. Any fool can believe what is possible and probable, but it demands no ordinary gifts, whether mental or spiritual, to believe what is absurd.
WILLIAM ARCHER
Masks Or Faces?: A Study in the Psychology of Acting
It may be said, with some truth, that only a pedant would attempt to establish an order of merit among the world's great dramatists, as if they were candidates in a competitive examination. The wiser course, no doubt, is to enjoy as many different forms of drama as we can, without troubling too much about questions of precedence.
WILLIAM ARCHER
The Old Drama and the New: An Essay in Re-valuation
The difference between a live play and a dead one is that in the former the characters control the plot, while in the latter the plot controls the characters.
WILLIAM ARCHER
Play-making: A Manual of Craftsmanship
Deeds, not words, are the demonstration and test of character.
WILLIAM ARCHER
Play-making: A Manual of Craftsmanship
People fail to realize the technical conditions of drama, and think that, in the case of so simple a matter as playwriting, everyone is as good a judge as his neighbor. With regard to music and painting, you will hear people modestly confess that they have no expert knowledge, though "they know what they like." With regard to drama, they are troubled with no such diffidence. They not only know what they like, but they know what you ought to like, and more especially what you ought to despise.
WILLIAM ARCHER
The Old Drama and the New: An Essay in Re-valuation
The dialogue, as a form of exposition, has this disadvantage, that it stimulates the pugnacious, or, more politely speaking, the chivalrous instinct in human nature. One of the disputants invariably goes as a lamb to the slaughter, and his pre-arranged massacre cannot but stir our sympathy. Thus a feeling of antagonism to the writer's argument is aroused by the very form. There is a cat-and-mouse cruelty about the Socratic method against which our sense of justice, nay, of humanity, rebels.
WILLIAM ARCHER
Masks Or Faces?: A Study in the Psychology of Acting
Speaking of provincial playhouses, I said they were usually sandwiched between two public-houses, from which they were distinguishable mainly by their flaunting posters and some hideous flare of gas. As for London theatres, I said they were at best like swagger restaurants.
WILLIAM ARCHER
Real Conversations
To me, it seems that mankind can never achieve its highest potentialities till it has thrown off the incubus of historic (and prehistoric) religion.
WILLIAM ARCHER
William Archer as Rationalist: A Collection of His Heterodox Writings