Frank J. Wilstach, comp. A Dictionary of Similes. 1916.
Play
A bad play is like a cabbage,—all leaves.
—Anonymous
A play is like a cigar, it requires judicious puffing.
—Anonymous
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
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
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
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
A play, like a bill, is of no value till it is accepted; nor indeed when it is, very often.
—Sir Walter Scott
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)
For plays, like women, by the world are thought,
When you speak kindly of ’em, very naught.
—William Wycherley