Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A part of a dramatic representation shown pantomimically, chiefly for the sake of exhibiting more of the story than could be otherwise included, but sometimes merely emblematical. Dumb-shows were very common in the earlier English dramas.
- noun Gesture without words; pantomime: as, to tell a story in dumb-show.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Alternative spelling of
dumb show .
Etymologies
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Examples
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She was so good that even director Rob Ashford's ill-advised decision to add a tricksy dumb-show not in the text, making explicit the homosexual embrace she witnessed, failed to do much damage.
James Turrell's Skyspace Offers a Meditation on Light and Time 2009
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‘I am here; if you have aught to say let me hear it; my time is too brief to be consumed in childish dumb-show.’
Redgauntlet 2008
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I can't speak for anyone else, but this kabuki theater dumb-show has only made me angrier.
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I can't speak for anyone else, but this kabuki theater dumb-show has only made me angrier.
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"He is a proper man's picture, but alas! who can converse with a dumb-show?"
Shakespeare's Insult 19 September 2006 kradical 2006
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They and I were locked in a dumb-show that neither could stand.
vor f��nfzehn Jahren 2006
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They and I were locked in a dumb-show that neither could stand.
2 good 2 be 4 gotten 2006
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The room became to Dick like a picture in a dream; all that he could remember of it afterwards being the look of the fiddlers going to sleep, as humming-tops sleep, by increasing their motion and hum, together with the figures of grandfather James and old Simon Crumpler sitting by the chimney-corner, talking and nodding in dumb-show, and beating the air to their emphatic sentences like people near a threshing machine.
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What this interpretation fails to take into account is that the dumb-show stage monster is able to communicate through his gestures, something utterly impossible for Mary Shelley's creature.
Patriarchal Fantasy and the Fecal Child in Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein_ and its Adaptations 2003
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Nor is this dexterity of dumb-show omitted, when he concludes his imitation in these three lines: —
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