Word: feathertop
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...Scarecrow," a four-act "tragedy of the ludicrous," is based on Hawthorne's "Feathertop," the scene lying in a small Massachusetts town, at the end of the seventeenth century. The first act opens in a blacksmith shop and the other three are at the home of Justice Merton...
...Scarecrow" is based on Hawthorne's tale of "Feathertop," but is in no way a dramatization of it. "Starting with the same basic theme," Mr. MacKaye writes in his introduction to the published play, "I have sought to elaborate it, by my own treatment, to a different and more inclusive issue." He builds from Hawthorne's satire of coxcombry and charlatanism, "a tragedy of the ludicrous." In Hawthorne, "the scarecrow Feathertop is ridiculous, as the emblem of a superficial fop;" in Mr. MacKaye's play, "the scarecrow Ravensbane is pitiful, as the emblem of human bathos." The play...
...kind are hard to draw; and yet it has so much that is striking, even startling, in it that a theatrical sensation is by no means out of the question. "The Scarecrow" is a prose "tragedy of the indicrous," based upon a suggestion derived from Hawthorne's "Feathertop"; but the purely satirical purpose of the original story is replaced by an ethical significance vastly more profound; and an action that begins in grotesque comedy closes in genuine tragedy. The seen is laid in New England in the days of witchcraft, and the story turns on the transformation by a witch...
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