Portal:Literature/Did you know/Week 11

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

... that "My Last Duchess" is a much anthologized dramatic monologue by Victorian poet Robert Browning (pictured), and that the deceased duchess of the title is most likely based on Lucrezia di Cosimo de' Medici (1544-1562)?

...that the tragic ending of Shakespeare's King Lear was found to be so distasteful that it was replaced on stage for over 150 years by Nahum Tate's adaptation, with a happy ending and a love story?

... that Matt Beaumont's e (2000) is a novel consisting entirely of inter-office e-mails?

... that the Loeb Classical Library, named after American banker and philanthropist James Loeb, is a series of books, today published by the Harvard University Press, which presents important works of ancient Greek and Latin Literature in a way designed to make the text accessible to the broadest possible audience, by presenting the original Greek or Latin text on each left-hand leaf, and a fairly literal translation on the facing page?

... that Equus is a 1973 stage play by Peter Shaffer about a 17-year-old boy who is brought to a mental health facility for treatment by a psychiatrist because he has blinded six horses with a spike?

... that Carmen Laforet, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Álvaro Cunqueiro, Lucía Etxebarría, and Eduardo Lago are recipients of the Premio Nadal?

... that fl. is used by (literary) historians as an abbreviation for "floruit" (Latin for "flourished"), to indicate periods when persons were influential, and that it is normally used only when dates of birth or death are unknown?

... that Tituba, the first woman accused of being a witch during the Salem witch trials of 1692, is the protagonist of the novel, Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem (1986) by Maryse Condé, and that she also features prominently in the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller?