David: A Tragedy
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Literature students studying American literary history and the verse drama tradition
- Poetry lovers interested in English-language verse tragedy
- Teachers needing public-domain English drama texts for teaching
- Readers who want free access to classic English works for textual analysis
Not a good fit for
- Casual readers who prefer fast-paced plots and accessible storytelling
- Beginners with weak English reading skills not yet comfortable with verse
- Researchers who need detailed annotations and scholarly introductions
Reading tips
- Read through once to grasp the plot, then a second time to attend to verse rhythm and diction
- Take notes on character relationships and key monologues to trace the tragic conflict
- Read alongside background material on American literature from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century
- Use the ebook search function to locate recurring images or phrasing
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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About the author
Cale Young Rice (1872–1943) was an American poet and playwright. Public information about him is limited, and the details of his life are difficult to set out, but the eleven works by him held in this collection show that he wrote steadily in both poetry and verse drama. Poems such as Sea Poems, Many Gods and Nirvana Days take the sea, faith and Eastern philosophical reflection as their themes, with concise language and a lyrical, meditative quality; plays such as David: A Tragedy, Yolanda of Cyprus, Porzia and The Immortal Lure draw mainly on historical or legendary stories, using verse dialogue to develop their characters' emotions and conflicts of fate. His writing combines romantic imagination with a search for the meaning of life, and his works hold a place in early twentieth-century American letters, remaining of interest to readers studying the poetry and verse drama of that period.
