Today in Literature History

[Trainer17]

Pretty much. It was a character development exploration draft. She never wanted it to be published. And she never wanted to publish another book because she knew it would never be as good as TKAMB.



Good! Maybe you can put it to use one day!




.//////////.
But I'm younger than you.

It doesn't matter! I'm learning a lot of things from you :'3

[Noblejanobii]

It doesn't matter! I'm learning a lot of things from you :'3

.///////. Well that's good! It's the purpose of this thread to provide fun facts to people.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1980, the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock died. Now I know what you're thinking, "Alfred Hitchcock isn't an author." And you would be correct, he's not. However, Hitchcock is most famous for boring from many different books to create his amazing movies and popularized many novels across the world through his works.

[Trainer17]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1980, the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock died. Now I know what you're thinking, "Alfred Hitchcock isn't an author." And you would be correct, he's not. However, Hitchcock is most famous for boring from many different books to create his amazing movies and popularized many novels across the world through his works.

Oh wowie. Now I didn't know that xD I never have seen his movies, but one name comes to mind. Mr & Mrs Smith anyone? :'3

[Ganyu]

Still not really convinced at the relevance to literature history but w/e. He works with writers, so I guess, he's more of an editor/publisher figure lol.

[Noblejanobii]

Today In Literature History…

You know how often times people create some amazing works while in prison? Well, this was also true back in the 1640s. On this day, in 1642, a man by the name of Richard Lovelace was imprisoned following his presentation of the Kentish Petition to the Parliament. The Kentish Petition was the most famed of the Kent petitions of the early 1640s and it supported the established Church, requested Parliament to reach an accommodation with the King and, most pointedly, condemned the militia ordinance of 5 March 1642 as the exercise of 'arbitrary power', as it unilaterally gave control of the militia to Parliament. This was a crucial constitutional point since, unlike statutes, parliamentary ordinances did not carry the consent of the King, and their use was interpreted by the growing body of royalist opinion as a tyrannical usurpation of the power of the Crown. After its presentation to Parliament, Lovelace was sent to Gatehouse Prison where wrote one of his most famous works, To Althea, from Prison. You might even recognize the final stanza's first line:
"Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage".
The poem is quoted in the sixth chapter of Charlotte Brontë's novel Villette, and may have inspired the scenario of Emily Brontë's much-admired poem The Prisoner.
While it is unknown who exactly "Althea" was, there are two theories. One, it was just a made up woman, or two, (and evidence suggests this is more likely) it was a woman named Lucy Sacheverell. Sacheverell's identity is somewhat of a mystery when it came to my research, but the few sources I could find that had an identity for you labeled her as Lovelace's fiancé.
The purpose of the whole scandal, from the petition to the poem, was to argue for the repeal of Clergy Act 1640. It was eventually repealed by Clergy Act 1661.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

It's everyone's favorite bard! On this day in 1594, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew was entered in the Stationers' Register by printer Peter Short. As early as 1538, Henry VIII had issued a proclamation against "naughty printed books," and the creation of the Stationers' Company was yet another attempt to regulate and censor the "many false, scandalous, seditious, and libelous" books that were emerging from the private presses. While this play may seem truly innocent, it can be interpreted in many ways. My favorite is when the ending speech is given sarcastically. Despite many aspects of the story having been borrowed, there was no flogging a dead horse in Shakespeare's Shrew, perhaps thanks to Kate's famous knuckle-under at the end. Her speech is often delivered as if ironic, or as if a new strategy in the battle of the sexes before a blinking, jaw-dropped and totally disarmed Petruchio. The closing lines:

...I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?
Come, come, you froward and unable worms!
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown;
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband's foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready; may it do him ease.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…


On this day in 1810 Lord Byron swam the Hellespont, in emulation of Leander's legendary swims to visit his beloved Hero. Byron was twenty-two, and ten months into his two-year tour of the Mediterranean. He was not yet famous for his poetry or his profligacy, although he had just finished the first draft of Childe Harold, and had just ended, while in Malta, his first serious affair. This was with Constance Spencer Smith, a twenty-six-year-old married woman who was no Hero, but who had dazzled Byron with her beauty, mystery and unattainability. She had once been arrested on orders of Napoleon (for unclear reasons), and had escaped from prison by way of another enflamed twenty-two-year-old nobleman (plus a rope ladder, a boy's costume, a carriage and a boat). Byron at one point attempted to defend her honor in a sunrise duel.

Notwithstanding, the poem Byron wrote after the Hellespont swim shows him capable of poking fun at not only Romanticism but himself:
Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos

If, in the month of dark December,
Leander, who was nightly wont
(What maid will not the tale remember?)
To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!

If, when the wintry tempest roared,
He sped to Hero, nothing I loath,
And thus of old thy current poured,
Fair Venus! how I pity both!

For me, degenerate modern wretch,
Though in the genial month of May,
My dripping limbs I faintly stretch,
And think I've done a feat today.

But since he crossed the rapid tide,
According to the doubtful story,
To woo and Lord knows what beside,
And swam for Love, as I for Glory;

'Twere hard to say who fared the best;
Sad mortals thus the gods still plague you!
He lost his labour, I my jest;
For he was drowned, and I've the ague.
The swim took Byron two tries, but he bested the one mile, the cold waters and the strong current -- he reckoned that he traveled over three miles downstream during the crossing -- in an hour and ten minutes. "Did it with little difficulty," he said in his journal entry; "I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical," he wrote in one letter home.

[Noblejanobii]

Pretty much the same status as the quote thread, this thread is on hiatus until at least next week or the week following as I can barely muster the time and energy to find some cool facts for this thread. I promise to come back soon, but in the mean time, if y'all have any cool facts that you want to post about this day in literature history, go for it!

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1593 Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council issued a warrant for the arrest of Christopher Marlowe on charges of spreading "blasphemous and damnable opinions." Five days earlier Marlowe's roommate and fellow playwright, Thomas Kyd, had also been arrested on similar charges; under torture (apparently a set piece on the rack called "scraping the conscience"), Kyd had claimed that the offending documents in his possession were in fact Marlowe's. While prosecutors prepared for trial Marlowe was allowed out on bail; the day before his scheduled court appearance, and at just twenty-nine years of age, Marlowe was killed in a drunken brawl in Deptford, a dagger through his eye.

Though sensational enough, these facts do not nearly cover the controversial life and death of the poet-playwright who, many say, had the talent of Shakespeare. Marlowe was certainly a drinker, a hothead, and one often in trouble with the law; it is now also known that he had been recruited to be a secret agent while in his Cambridge days. Records show that the same Privy Council which arrested him for blasphemy in 1593 intervened six years earlier to explain to University authorities that Marlowe had cut classes to be of service to Her Majesty on "matters touching the benefit of his country." And it seems that Marlowe died not in a tavern but in a government safe house, in the company of other spies and spy-runners, some of whom had the personality and perhaps the motive to kill him.

Add to this Marlowe's free-thinking, as evidenced by his association with the so-called "School of Night" group, and in such plays as Doctor Faustus. Add also his free-loving, as in such lines as "Come live with me and be my love, / And we will all the pleasures prove." Allow, if you like, the more recent theory that Marlowe's hugger-mugger burial in an unmarked grave was a ruse, and that Marlowe was in a group of spies conducted across the Channel the day after his faked murder, and that he went on to not only write as well as Shakespeare but to become "Shakespeare." In any case, he remains a fascinating figure, as testified by the number of recent books and movies: Dead Man in Deptford, by Anthony Burgess (1995); The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, by Charles Nicoll (1992); and Much Ado About Something (a documentary film, 2000). Why Angelina Jolie sports Marlowe's motto -- "That which nourishes me destroys me" -- as a sub-navel tattoo still remains, for some, a mystery.

The last moments on earth for Faustus, the nourishing over and the destroying about to begin:

[The clock strikes twelve.]

It strikes, it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell!
O soul, be chang'd into small water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!

[Thunder. Enter DEVILS.]

O, mercy, heaven! look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while!
Ugly hell, gape not! come not, Lucifer!
I'll burn my books!--O Mephistophilis!

[Exeunt DEVILS with FAUSTUS.]