histrionicsn.

1824 A. Vieusseux Italy & Italians 19th Cent. (new ed.) II. v. 249 Several critics..think that the commedie dell' arte are the remains of the old Roman histrionics or farces.

1829 Gentleman's Mag. Nov. 399/1 I am not a reader of histrionics, only a spectator.

1882 A. W. Ward Dickens i. 11 He loved the theatre and everything which savoured of histrionics.

1890 Times 10 Mar. 9/1 As a matter of common decorum or of satisfactory histrionics.

1920 Cent. Mag. May 90 As vivid in its facts and its narration as the recital of a drama of ancient Athens by a master of histrionics.

1926 E. B. Watson Sheridan to Robertson x. 222 Melodrama and not Shakespeare was, indeed, the style of histrionics best suited to the vast ‘legitimate’ houses.

1922 W. J. Locke Tale of Triona xvii. 247 He had indulged in no histrionics. He had not declaimed, and flung his arms about.

1931 F. L. Allen Only Yesterday vi. 130 Charles G. Dawes..entranced the newspaper-reading public with his picturesque language, his underslung pipe, and his broom-waving histrionics.

1954 Life 19 July 22/1 The air of a Chicago courtroom was humid with tears last week in a double show of female histrionics at the inquest into the mysterious death..of mail order heir Montgomery Ward Thorne.

1998 BBC Match of Day Mag. Apr. 95/4 Should the people tasked with officiating the game turn a blind eye to the histrionics simply because a player happens to be foreign.

2005 C. Brookmyre All Fun & Games until Somebody loses Eye (2006) 154 She'd just give him a few bullet points and get off before he could start the histrionics.

1931 Musical Times Dec. 1131/2 His singing..owed more to those characteristics of sturdy tone and straightforward phrasing..than to effects of histrionics or subtleties of tone-making and tone-building as elaborated by the true bel canto experts.

1942 Amer. Music Lover Feb. 221/2 Stevens is an intelligent singer as well as a musical one: she has a singularly appealing voice and the imagination for real vocal histrionics.

1979 D. Marsh & J. Swenson Rolling Stone Rec. Guide (1980) 440/2 The electricity of audience/performer interaction spurred [B. B.] King on to elaborate vocal and instrumental histrionics.

1996 Toronto Star (Nexis) 4 Jan. e9 While Gabrels is definitely a musician's musician, you'd never catch him indulging in guitar histrionics.

2009 B. Miles Brit. Invasion 32 He preferred that guitar sound over all others and in the late sixties actively disliked feedback and the psychedelic histrionics of Jimi Hendrix.