Charles Di Tocca: A Tragedy
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Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in verse drama and plays written in verse
- Literature students studying American literary history and marginal dramatic works
- Literary enthusiasts who enjoy tragedy and are willing to try reading verse drama
- Readers who want to learn English verse and dramatic language through a short play
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer tightly plotted realistic fiction close to contemporary life
- Beginners unfamiliar with verse and verse drama who may find it difficult
- Readers seeking full stage directions or modern dramatic theory
Reading tips
- Read through the whole play first to grasp the main line of conflict, then revisit key soliloquies to savor the rhythm of the verse
- Read some dialogue aloud to feel how the verse shifts between colloquial and lyrical registers
- Learn about the background of early twentieth-century American verse drama before reading to reduce unfamiliarity
- Compare it with other verse tragedies to observe similarities and differences in character motivation and tragic structure
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.
