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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
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former schoolmates of the title character in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Unaware of the true reason they have been summoned, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are commissioned to spy on Hamlet.
Minor figures in Shakespeare, the pair are the central characters in Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (produced 1966; film 1990). Stoppard's characters play games, tell jokes, and have philosophical discussions in the intervals of time between the scenes in which they figure in Shakespeare's play. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead addresses such issues as free will, death, and personal identity, as the characters, much more fully developed by Stoppard than by Shakespeare, are still often mistaken for one another.
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Othello
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a Moorish general in the service of Venice in Shakespeare's Othello. Driven by jealousy that has been skillfully manipulated, Othello takes the life of Desdemona, his doting wife, and then his own.
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Othello
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tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written in 1603–04 and published in 1622 in a quarto edition from a transcript of an authorial manuscript. The text published in the First Folio of 1623 seems to have been based on a version revised by Shakespeare himself that sticks close to the original almost line by line but introduces numerous substitutions of words and phrases, as though Shakespeare copied it over himself and rewrote as he copied. The play derives its plot from Giambattista Giraldi's De gli Hecatommithi (1565), which Shakespeare appears to have known in the Italian original; it was available to him in French but had not been translated into English.
The play is set in motion when Othello, a heroic black general in the service of Venice, appoints Cassio and not Iago as his chief lieutenant. Jealous of Othello's success and envious of Cassio, Iago plots Othello's downfall by falsely implicating Othello's wife, Desdemona, and Cassio in a love affair. With the unwitting aid of Emilia, his wife, and the willing help of Roderigo, a fellow malcontent, Iago carries out his plan. Making use of a handkerchief belonging to Desdemona and found by Emilia when Othello has unwittingly dropped it, Iago persuades Othello that Desdemona has given the handkerchief to Cassio as a love token. Iago also induces Othello to eavesdrop on a conversation between himself and Cassio that is in fact about Cassio's mistress, Bianca, but which Othello is led to believe concerns Cassio's infatuation with Desdemona. These slender “proofs” confirm what Othello has been all too inclined to believe—that, as an older black man, he is no longer attractive to his young white Venetian wife. Overcome with jealousy, Othello kills Desdemona. When he learns from Emilia, too late, that his wife is blameless, he asks to be remembered as one who “loved not wisely but too well” and kills himself.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Much Ado About Nothing
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comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written probably in 1598–99 and printed in a quarto edition from the author's own manuscript in 1600. The play takes an ancient theme—that of a woman falsely accused of unfaithfulness—to brilliant comedic heights. Shakespeare used as his main source for the Claudio-Hero plot a story from Matteo Bandello's Novelle (1554–73); he also may have consulted Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. The Beatrice-Benedick plot is essentially Shakespeare's own, though he must have had in mind his own story of wife taming in The Taming of the Shrew.
Shakespeare sets up a contrast between the conventional Claudio and Hero, who have the usual expectations of each other, and Beatrice and Benedick, who are highly skeptical of romance and courtship and, seemingly, each other. Claudio is deceived by the jealous Don John into believing that Hero is prepared to abandon him for Claudio's friend and mentor, Don Pedro. This malicious fiction is soon dispelled, but Claudio seems not to have learned his lesson; he believes Don John a second time, and on a much more serious charge—that Hero is actually sleeping with other men, even on the night before her impending wedding to Claudio. Supported by Don Pedro, who also accepts the story (based on seeming visual evidence), Claudio publicly rejects Hero at the wedding ceremony. She is so shamed that her family is obliged to report that she is dead. Don John's plot is eventually unveiled by the bumbling constable Dogberry and his comically inept fellow constable, but not before the story of Hero has taken a nearly tragic turn. Claudio's slanders of Hero have so outraged her cousin Beatrice that she turns to Benedick, pleading with him to kill Claudio. Former friends are near the point of mayhem until the revelations of the night watch prove the villainy of Don John and the innocence of Hero.
Meanwhile, Beatrice and Benedick carry on “a kind of merry war” that tests their wits in clever but crushing repartees. Both have a reputation for being scornful and wary of marriage. Though attracted to each other for many reasons, they find it virtually impossible to get beyond the game of one-upping each other. Eventually their friends have to intervene with a virtuous ruse designed to trick each of them into believing that the other is hopelessly but secretly suffering the pangs of love. The ruse works because it is essentially true. At the play's end, both couples are united.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Oberon
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king of the fairies in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Oberon's conflict with his wife, Titania, sets the play's action in motion. The character of Oberon was derived largely from Lord Berners's prose translation of the medieval French poem Huon de Bordeaux, though it also contains elements of Greek mythology—i.e., of the story of Zeus in apposition to Hera and to mortals.
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King John
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chronicle play in five acts by William Shakespeare, written perhaps in 1594–96 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from an authorial manuscript that may have been copied and supplied with some theatrical touches. The source of the play was a two-part drama generally known as The Troublesome Raigne of John King of England. This earlier play, first printed in 1591, was based on the chronicles of Raphael Holinshed and Edward Hall; Shakespeare also consulted some chronicle materials, as well as John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563), known as The Book of Martyrs. Shakespeare made few changes to the plot in his version, but the dialogue and insights about the characters are all his own.
The title figure provides the central focus of the play and is surrounded by many contrasting characters—each able to influence him, each bringing irresolvable and individual problems into dramatic focus. Chief among these characters are John's domineering mother, Queen Eleanor (formerly Eleanor of Aquitaine), and Philip the Bastard, who supports the king and yet mocks all political and moral pretensions.
As the play begins, King John, with the aid of his mother, has usurped the royal title of his nephew Arthur; the king of France, on threat of war, has demanded that Arthur be placed on the throne. Two brothers, Philip and Robert Faulconbridge, enter arguing over their inheritance. Eleanor recognizes the resemblance between Philip and her late son King Richard Coeur-de-lion. After Philip agrees to drop all claim to the Faulconbridge lands, his mother admits that he is indeed Richard's son. Thereafter, the Bastard, newly knighted as Sir Richard Plantagenet, becomes John's staunchest military commander in the war against France.
As the fighting rages on, a compromise is arranged in which Lewis, the dauphin, heir to the French throne, marries John's niece Blanche. This expediency fails to end the war, however, with armies led by Eleanor and Arthur's combatant mother, Constance, at the forefront. An English victory delivers young Arthur into the hands of King John. This success soon turns against John, however, when he finds that Arthur is too dangerous a presence because he has become a rallying point for John's political enemies. John orders Hubert de Burgh to kill the captive Arthur. After Hubert finds that he cannot carry out such an inhumane command and allows the child to survive, Arthur dies in a tragic fall while trying to escape. Cardinal Pandulph, having urged the French to support the papacy against the rebellious John, does succeed in encouraging a French invasion of England only to discover, when John has reluctantly submitted to the papacy, that the French dauphin will not agree to call off his invading forces. The war thus becomes an exercise in futility on all sides. John, increasingly weak and uncertain, grows ill. Only the Bastard fights on until news comes that John has been poisoned by a traitorous monk. After Prince Henry arrives to care for his dying father and accept his imminent accession to the throne, the Bastard at last accepts that peace is at hand and pledges fealty to the new king.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Children of Paul's
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troupe of boy actors, one of the children's companies popular in Elizabethan England. Affiliated with St. Paul's Cathedral, the group performed in a biblical play as early as 1378. The theatrical company as such was formed under the direction (1577–82) of Sebastian Westcott. The Children of Paul's frequently performed at court, often in plays written exclusively for their production. The troupe's repertoire included John Marston's What You Will, George Chapman's Bussy d'Ambois, and John Lyly's Sapho and Phao. The Children of Paul's also staged plays in the cathedral's courtyard and school hall. Their last recorded performance was in July 1606 before James I and King Christian of Denmark.
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Measure for Measure
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a “dark” comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about 1603–04 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from a transcript of an authorial draft. The play examines the complex interplay of mercy and justice. Shakespeare adapted the story from Epitia, a tragedy by Italian dramatist Giambattista Giraldi (also called Cinthio), and especially from a two-part play by George Whetstone titled Promos and Cassandra (1578).
The play opens with Vincentio, the benevolent duke of Vienna, commissioning his deputy Angelo to govern the city while he travels to Poland. In actuality, the duke remains in Vienna disguised as a friar in order to watch what unfolds. Following the letter of the law, Angelo passes the death sentence on Claudio, a nobleman convicted for impregnating his betrothed, Juliet. Claudio's sister Isabella, a novice in a nunnery, pleads his case to Angelo. This new deputy ruler, a man of stern and rigorous self-control, finds to his consternation and amazement that he lusts after Isabella; her virgin purity awakens in him a desire that more profligate sexual opportunities could not. Hating himself for doing so, he offers to spare Claudio's life if Isabella will have sex with him. She refuses and is further outraged when her brother begs her to reconsider. On the advice of the disguised Vincentio, Isabella schedules the rendezvous but secretly arranges for her place to be taken by Mariana, the woman Angelo was once engaged to marry but whom he then disavowed because her dowry had been lost. Afterward, Angelo reneges on his promise to save Claudio, fearing that the young man knows too much and is therefore dangerous. Vincentio, reemerging at last from his supposed journey, presides over a finale in which Angelo is discredited and ordered to marry Mariana. Claudio, having been saved from execution by the secret substitution of one who has died in prison, is allowed to marry Juliet. Lucio, an engaging but irresponsible woman chaser and scandalmonger, is reproved by Vincentio and obliged to marry a whore with whom he has had a child. The rascally underworld figures (the bawd Mistress Overdone, her pimp Pompey, and her customer Froth) who have exploited the sexual freedom of Vienna despite the wonderfully inept policing attempts of Constable Elbow are finally brought to justice, partly through the careful supervision of the magistrate Escalus. Vincentio asks Isabella to give up her idea of being a nun in order to become his wife. (Whether she accepts is today a matter of theatrical choice.)
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Richard II
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chronicle play in five acts by William Shakespeare, written in 1595–96 and published in a quarto edition in 1597 and in the First Folio of 1623. The quarto edition omits the deposition scene in Act IV, almost certainly as a result of censorship. The play is the first in a sequence of four history plays (the other three being Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, and Henry V) known collectively as the “second tetralogy,” treating major events in English history of the late 14th and early 15th centuries. The story of Richard II was taken mainly from Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles. While much of the play is true to the facts of Richard's life, Shakespeare's account of his murder rests on no reliable authority.
Richard begins the play as an extravagant, self-indulgent king. He exiles two feuding noblemen, Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke, seemingly because Mowbray has been implicated along with Richard himself in the murder of Richard's uncle Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, while Bolingbroke, Richard's first cousin, is a threat to the king because he is intent on avenging the death of Gloucester. When John of Gaunt, Bolingbroke's father, dies, Richard seizes his properties to finance a war against the Irish. The seizure gives Bolingbroke an excuse to invade England with his own armies; he insists that his return in arms is solely to regain his illegally seized dukedom. Powerful earls, especially the Earl of Northumberland and his family, support Bolingbroke because of their intense disapproval of Richard's invasion of baronial rights. Richard's last surviving uncle, Edmund of Langley, duke of York, serves as regent while the king is fighting in Ireland. York, however, recognizes that change is inevitable and swears allegiance to Bolingbroke. York's son, the Duke of Aumerle, remains loyal to Richard despite his father's change of allegiance.
Unable to defeat Bolingbroke militarily, Richard reluctantly agrees to surrender and abdicate the throne. In prison—lonely, miserable, and forgotten—he soliloquizes on the meaning of his suffering. From this moment of truth, he rediscovers pride, trust, and courage, so that, when he is murdered, he dies with access to strength and an ascending spirit. Bolingbroke, now King Henry IV, performs his first royal act (and displays his pragmatic approach to governing) by acquiescing to the Duchess of York's pleas for Aumerle's life while the zealous York demands his “disloyal” son's execution. The play ends with Henry inquiring about his own wastrel son, Prince Hal, and swearing to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to atone for his part in Richard's murder.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Regan
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the king's deceitful middle daughter in Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear.
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Troilus and Cressida
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Troilus and Cressida (Act V, scene II), engraving by L. Schiavonelli after a painting by …drama in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about 1601–02 and printed in a quarto edition in two different “states” in 1609, probably from the author's working draft. The editors of the First Folio of 1623 may have had copyright difficulties in obtaining permission to include this play in their collection; it is anomalously placed between the histories and the tragedies, almost entirely without pagination. Its genre is indeed anomalous; many scholars prefer to classify it with the “problem plays” or the “dark” comedies. Based on George Chapman's translation of the Iliad and on 15th-century accounts of the Trojan War by John Lydgate and William Caxton, Troilus and Cressida is an often cynical exploration of the causes of strife between and within the Greek and Trojan armies—the betrayal of love, the absence of heroism, and the emptiness of honour. The play was also influenced by Geoffrey Chaucer's love poem Troilus and Criseyde, although Shakespeare's treatment of the lovers and his attitude toward their dilemma is in sharp contrast to Chaucer's.
Cressida, a Trojan woman whose father has defected to the Greeks, pledges her love to Troilus, one of King Priam's sons. However, when her father demands her presence in the Greek camp, she reluctantly accepts the attentions of Diomedes, the Greek officer who has been sent to escort her to the Greek side. Given her situation in an enemy camp and being an attractive woman among sex-starved warriors, she has few choices. The love between Troilus and Cressida, begun on such a hopeful note, is at last overwhelmed by the circumstances of war that they cannot control. Meanwhile, the war itself is presented in all its seamy aspects, since it is at bottom a senseless war fought over the possession of Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta but now the mistress of the Trojan prince Paris. Their one scene together presents Helen and Paris as vapid and self-centred. Other figures fare no less well. The legendary Greek hero Achilles is depicted as petulant and greedy for honour, so much so that he brutally massacres the great Hector when that warrior is unarmed. Hector, for his part, is at once the wisest of the Trojans and a captive of his own sense of honour that obliges him to go into battle when his wife and family all warn him of ominous prognostications. The Greek general Agamemnon is given to long-winded speeches; so is old Nestor. Ulysses, the most astute of the Greek generals, is right-minded about many things but also cynical and calculating. Ajax, another Greek officer, is an oaf, easily put upon by his colleagues. Thersites, a deformed Greek, comments wryly on the actions of the other characters, while Pandarus, the bawdy go-between of the lovers, enjoys watching their degradation. The drama ends on a note of complete moral and political disintegration.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Weird Sisters
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Macbeth visits the Weird Sisters (Three Witches) on the blasted heath; title page by John Gilbert …the creatures who prophesy the destinies of the main characters in Shakespeare's Macbeth. The term Weird Sisters was first used by Scots writers as a sobriquet for the Fates of Greek and Roman mythology. Through its appearance in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, the expression passed to William Shakespeare.
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Viola
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a shipwrecked young woman, later disguised as the young man Cesario, in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Viola-Cesario stands at the centre of the play as Shakespeare's example of reason, intelligence, self-control, and mature love. For her moral stature and wit, Viola ranks with Portia and Rosalind, two other great female characters in Shakespeare's comedies.
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Cordelia
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the king's youngest and only honourable daughter in Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear. Her enduring love for Lear is evident at their tender and emotional reunion near the end of the play, when she cries,Was this a faceTo be opposed against the warring winds?To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder?In the most terrible and nimble strokeOf quick, cross lightning? To watch—poor perdu!—With this thin helm? Mine enemy's dog,Though he had bit me, should have stood that nightAgainst my fire; and wast thou fain, poor father,To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlornIn short and musty straw? Alack, alack!'Tis wonder that thy life and wits at onceHad not concluded all.
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Merry Wives of Windsor, The
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comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written sometime between 1597 and 1601 (probably near the earlier of these dates), that centres on the comic romantic misadventures of Falstaff. The Merry Wives of Windsor was published in a quarto edition in 1602 from a reported and abbreviated text. The First Folio version of 1623 is from a transcript by Ralph Crane (scrivener of the King's Men) of an authorial manuscript.
Although it contains elements of Plautus's comedies and Italian novelle, The Merry Wives of Windsor does not have a known source. The play differs from Shakespeare's other comedies of this period in that it is set not in an imaginary country but in Windsor and the small-town rural life of Shakespeare's own day.
Shakespeare's ploy in this engaging comedy is to introduce the character of Falstaff, already a household name in London in the late 1590s, into a nonhistorical plot where he occupies a very different role from that of the Henry IV plays. Along with him, Shakespeare also imports some other characters who appear in the Henry IV plays, such as Pistol, Bardolph, Nym, Mistress Quickly, and Justice Shallow. They are all in a delightfully new environment. Falstaff takes a fancy to two married women, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, who are said to control their own financial affairs and thus to be moderately wealthy. He writes identical love letters to them, hoping to swindle some money from them while also enjoying them as sexual partners. He tries to engage the assistance of Pistol and Nym but is scorned by them. When he discharges them from his service, they go off and inform the husbands of Mistresses Page and Ford of Falstaff's plot. The wives compare their letters and resolve to trick the “greasy knight.” Twice the wives fool Falstaff, and this results in his being dumped in a muddy ditch and, later, disguised as a witch and beaten. The trickery of the two women also serves to frustrate the jealous behaviour of Master Ford. Mistress Ford lets her husband in on the joke at last, and the two couples, Pages and Fords, happily plan one more ruse at Falstaff's expense.
A secondary plot centres on the wooing of the Pages' charming daughter Anne. Doctor Caius, Slender, and Fenton are rivals for Anne's affection. To great comic effect, all three suitors use Caius's servant Mistress Quickly to argue their case to young Anne. Slender is favoured by Master Page, who devises a plan for Slender and Anne to elope after the play's climactic scene. Mistress Page, who favours Caius as a son-in-law, devises a similar plan.
In the climactic scene, set in Windsor Forest, Falstaff dresses himself absurdly as Herne the Hunter, complete with stag's horns, expecting an assignation. The women and their husbands, however, have arranged for a group of friends, including Anne Page, in witch and fairy costumes, to frighten and tease him. The marriage plans conceived by Master and Mistress Page are foiled when Anne elopes with the suitor of her choice, Fenton. All identities are revealed at the end, and, in an atmosphere of good humour, Fenton is welcomed into the Page family and Falstaff is forgiven.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Caesar, Julius
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Roman general and statesman in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Shakespeare's portrayal of the celebrated Roman ruler is an ambiguous one, stressing Caesar's weaknesses as well as his noble qualities. Cassius reveals the feelings of the conspirators when he describes Caesar in this way:Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow worldLike a Colossus, and we petty menWalk under his huge legs and peep aboutTo find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Though Caesar is decidedly uneasy about the signs of his impending death, he ultimately responds to his wife's concerns with a much-quoted statement: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once.”
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Two Gentlemen of Verona, The
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an early play in five acts by William Shakespeare, written perhaps in 1590–94 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from an authorial manuscript. It is a pastoral story about two young friends who travel to Milan, where they are educated in courtly behaviour.
The main source of the play's plot was a translation of a long Spanish prose romance titled Los siete libros de la Diana (1559?; The Seven Books of the Diana) by Jorge de Montemayor. Shakespeare is thought to have adapted the relationship of the two gentlemen of the title and the ending of the play from various possible sources, including Richard Edwards's play Damon and Pythias (1565), Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale in The Canterbury Tales, and especially the story of Titus and Gisippus in Sir Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour (1531).
Valentine (one of the two gentlemen of the title) opens the play by chiding his closest friend, Proteus (the other gentleman), for remaining idly at home with his beloved Julia rather than venturing to Milan with him. Shortly thereafter Proteus's plans change, because of his father's insistence, and he too heads for Milan after proclaiming his undying love and fidelity to Julia.
Mayhem erupts in the third act after the fickle Proteus arrives in Milan and abruptly becomes enamoured with Silvia, the Duke's fair daughter, with whom Valentine plans secretly to elope. Proteus treacherously betrays Valentine's plan to the Duke, who promptly banishes Valentine. The Duke is assisted in all this by Thurio, a wealthy and most unwelcome suitor to Silvia. Concurrently, Julia disguises herself as a boy and travels to Milan to be reunited with Proteus, only to discover him wooing Silvia for himself.
As the love entanglements ensue, the setting shifts from the civilized city to the forest. Silvia sets out to find Valentine, who has been captured by bandits and has agreed to become their leader. Silvia is accosted by the outlaws but is rescued by Proteus, who has been relentlessly following her with his page, the still-disguised Julia. Proteus then attempts to rape Silvia but is prevented by Valentine. The latter shames Proteus into penitence for his ruthless actions and inconstancy. In an extreme show of forgiveness, Valentine offers to give up Silvia for Proteus, causing Julia to faint and her identity to be revealed. In the end, the men resolve to marry their original loves and live in “mutual happiness.”
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Friar Laurence
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a well-intentioned but foolish Franciscan priest in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
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Pericles
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play in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about 1606–08 and published in a quarto edition in 1609, a defective and at times nearly unintelligible text that shows signs of having been memorially reconstructed. The editors of the First Folio of 1623 did not include Pericles in that edition, which suggests that they did not think it to be all or substantially by Shakespeare. The play was based on the Classical tale of Apollonius of Tyre as told in Book VIII of Confessio amantis by John Gower and in The Pattern of Painful Adventures by Laurence Twine.
The spirit of Gower opens the play and sets the stage with the title character in Antioch seeking to marry the princess. Pericles, however, discovers the truth about King Antiochus's incestuous love for his own daughter and flees, leaving the loyal Helicanus to rule Tyre in his absence. After aiding the starving people of Tarsus, Pericles is shipwrecked near Pentapolis, where he wins the hand of the beautiful Thaisa, daughter of King Simonides. As the couple sail back to Tyre, Thaisa gives birth to Marina during a violent storm. Pericles, believing his wife has died in childbirth, buries her at sea, but she is rescued and joins the temple of the goddess Diana at Ephesus. Pericles leaves his newborn daughter with Cleon, the governor of Tarsus, and his wife, Dionyza.
Marina, grown to young womanhood, is hated by Dionyza, who orders her murder. Instead, she is kidnapped by pirates and sold to a brothel, where she earns her keep by singing and doing needlework. Marina is reunited with her father when he is brought to her, mute and sick from years of grief. Pericles then has a vision of Diana, who sends them to Ephesus to be reunited with Thaisa.
The play is episodic, highly symbolic, and filled with imagery of the stormy seas. The most significant recurring theme is the proper relationship between parent and child, especially between father and daughter. Shakespeare returned to this theme often in his other late plays.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Romeo
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son of the Montagues who is the ardent, poetic protagonist in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Romeo's lovesick speech at Juliet's balcony is a classic of love literature.
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Romeo and Juliet
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play by William Shakespeare, written about 1594–96 and first published in an unauthorized quarto in 1597. An authorized quarto appeared in 1599, substantially longer and more reliable. A third quarto, based on the second, was used by the editors of the First Folio of 1623. The characters of Romeo and Juliet have been depicted in literature, music, dance, and theatre. The appeal of the young hero and heroine—whose families, the Montagues and the Capulets, respectively, are implacable enemies—is such that they have become, in the popular imagination, the representative type of star-crossed lovers.
Shakespeare's principal source for the plot was The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), a long narrative poem by the English poet Arthur Brooke, who had based his poem on a French translation of a tale by the Italian Matteo Bandello.
Shakespeare sets the scene in Verona, Italy. Juliet and Romeo meet and fall instantly in love at a masked ball of the Capulets, and they profess their love when Romeo, unwilling to leave, climbs the wall into the orchard garden of her family's house and finds her alone at her window. Because their well-to-do families are enemies, the two are married secretly by Friar Laurence. When Tybalt, a Capulet, seeks out Romeo in revenge for the insult of Romeo's having dared to shower his attentions on Juliet, an ensuing scuffle ends in the death of Romeo's dearest friend, Mercutio. Impelled by a code of honour among men, Romeo kills Tybalt and is banished to Mantua by the Prince of Verona, who has been insistent that the family feuding cease. When Juliet's father, unaware that Juliet is already secretly married, arranges a marriage with the eminently eligible Count Paris, the young bride seeks out Friar Laurence for assistance in her desperate situation. He gives her a potion that will make her appear to be dead and proposes that she take it and that Romeo rescue her. She complies. Romeo, however, unaware of the friar's scheme because a letter has failed to reach him, returns to Verona on hearing of Juliet's apparent death. He encounters a grieving Paris at Juliet's tomb, reluctantly kills him when Paris attempts to prevent Romeo from entering the tomb, and finds Juliet in the burial vault. There he gives her a last kiss and kills himself with poison. Juliet awakens, sees the dead Romeo, and kills herself. The families learn what has happened and end their feud.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Rosalind
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a witty and intelligent young woman, the daughter of the deposed Duke Senior, in Shakespeare's As You Like It. One of Shakespeare's most notable female characters, Rosalind (disguised as a young man named Ganymede) offers wise counsel to the lovesick Orlando: “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” She lends the proper weight to her words by seeming a comradely male but brings an uncommon maturity to the subject of love by presenting a female perspective. Thus, she can observe: “Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.”
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Taming of the Shrew, The
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comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written sometime in 1590–94 and first printed in the First Folio of 1623. The play describes the volatile courtship between the shrewish Katharina (Kate) and the canny Petruchio, who is determined to subdue Katharina's legendary temper and win her dowry. The main story is offered as a play within a play; the frame plot consists of an initial two-scene “induction” in which a whimsical lord decides to play a practical joke on a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, by inducing him to believe that he is in fact a nobleman who has suffered from amnesia and is only now awaking from it. The main body of the play is presented to Sly as an entertainment for his delectation.
The source of the Petruchio-Katharina plot is unknown, although a number of analogues exist in ballads about the “taming” of shrewish women. The play's other plot involving Bianca and her many suitors was derived from George Gascoigne's comedy Supposes (1566), itself a translation of I suppositi (1509) by Ludovico Ariosto.
Following the induction, the play opens in Padua, where several eligible bachelors have gathered to claim the hand of Bianca, the youngest daughter of the wealthy Baptista. But Baptista has stated that Bianca will not be wed before her older sister, Katharina. The plot of “the taming of the shrew” then begins when Petruchio arrives in Padua in search of a rich wife. His friend Hortensio sets Petruchio's sights on Katharina (the shrew). Although Katharina responds hostilely to Petruchio, he woos, wins, and tames her by the sheer force of his manly insistence and by his wit; Katharina is attracted to Petruchio in spite of herself, since clearly he is her match in a way that other men could not be. After their bizarre marriage ceremony, in which Petruchio dresses in a wild fashion and abuses the priest, Katharina's taming continues. In order to show her a picture of her own willfulness, Petruchio obliges her to forgo food, sleep, and fancy clothing. He abuses his own servants, notably Grumio, as a way of demonstrating how unattractive a sharp temper can be. Katharina learns, however reluctantly, that the only way she can find peace is to agree with anything that Petruchio says and do whatever he insists. At the play's end, Petruchio wins a bet from the other gentlemen that Katharina will be more obedient than their new wives. To show that she is indeed now more obedient, on Petruchio's orders Katharina delivers a short sermon on the virtues of wifely obedience.
The play's other plot follows the competition between Hortensio, Gremio, and Lucentio for Bianca's hand in marriage. The only serious candidate is Lucentio, the son of a wealthy Florentine gentleman. He is so smitten with Bianca's charms that he exchanges places with his clever servant, Tranio, in order to gain access to the woman he loves. He does so disguised as a tutor. So does the less-successful Hortensio. Gremio has nothing to recommend his suit except his wealth; he is an old man, unattractive to Bianca. In order to fend off this claim of wealth (since Baptista has vowed to bestow Bianca on the suitor with the greatest wealth), Tranio poses as the son of a wealthy gentleman and steps into the competition for Bianca's hand. Needing a father to prove his claim, Tranio persuades a pedant (or merchant) from Mantua to play the role. This ruse fools Baptista, and so the formal arrangements for the marriage proceed. Tranio's tricks are eventually exposed, but not before Lucentio and Bianca have taken the occasion to marry in secret. Hortensio, in the meantime, has forsaken his pursuit of Bianca and married a wealthy widow. In the play's final scene, both Bianca and Hortensio's new wife ironically prove to be shrewish.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Titus Andronicus
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an early, experimental tragedy by William Shakespeare, written sometime in 1589–92 and published in a quarto edition from an incomplete draft in 1594. The First Folio version was prepared from a copy of the quarto, with additions from a manuscript that had been used as a promptbook. The play's crude, melodramatic style and its numerous savage incidents led many critics to believe it was not written by Shakespeare. Modern criticism, however, tends to regard the play as authentic. Although not ranked with Shakespeare's other great Roman plays, Titus Andronicus relates its story of revenge and political strife with a uniformity of tone and consistency of dramatic structure. Sources for the story include Euripides' Hecuba, Seneca's Thyestes and Troades, and parts of Ovid and Plutarch. More important, an 18th-century chapbook titled The History of Titus Andronicus, though clearly too late to have served as Shakespeare's source, may well have been derived from a closely similar prose version that Shakespeare could have known.
Titus Andronicus returns to Rome after having defeated the Goths, bringing with him Queen Tamora, whose eldest son he sacrifices to the gods. The late emperor's son Saturninus is supposed to marry Titus's daughter Lavinia; however, when his brother Bassianus runs away with her instead, Saturninus marries Tamora. Saturninus and Tamora then plot revenge against Titus. Lavinia is raped and mutilated by Tamora's sadistic sons Demetrius and Chiron, who cut off her hands and cut out her tongue so that she will be unable to testify against them. She nonetheless manages, by holding a stick in her mouth and guiding it with the stumps of her hands, to reveal the names of her ravishers. Titus now emerges as the revenger who must bring Tamora's brutal family to account. Tamora takes as her lover a black man named Aaron the Moor; between them they produce a mulatto child of whom Aaron is intensely proud. Titus's garish revenge begins as he puts on the guise of madness. He pretends to accept Demetrius and Chiron as the personifications of Rape and Murder, invites them into his house, and murders them, with Lavinia holding a basin to catch their blood. Titus then prepares a feast in which, acting as cook, he serves up to Tamora her own sons baked in a dish. Titus kills Lavinia to end her shame, stabs Tamora, and is cut down by Saturninus, at which Titus's son Lucius responds by delivering Saturninus a fatal blow. Aaron the Moor is to be executed as well for his villainies. The blood-filled stage is presided over finally by Lucius and Titus's brother, Marcus, as the sole survivors of Titus's much-wronged family.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Twelfth Night
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comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about 1600–02 and printed in the First Folio of 1623 from a transcript of an authorial draft or possibly a playbook. One of Shakespeare's finest comedies, Twelfth Night precedes the great tragedies and problem plays in order of composition. The original source appears to have been the story Apollonius and Silla in Barnabe Riche's Riche His Farewell to Military Profession (1581), based in turn on a number of Continental versions that included an Italian comedy called Gl'ingannati (1531; “The Deceived”), published anonymously, and a story in Matteo Bandello's Novelle (1554–73).
Twins Sebastian and Viola are separated during a shipwreck off the coast of Illyria; each believes the other dead. Viola disguises herself as a boy named Cesario and enters the service of Duke Orsino, who thinks he is in love with the lady Olivia. Orsino sends Viola-Cesario to plead his cause to Olivia, who promptly falls in love with the messenger. Viola, meanwhile, is in love with Orsino, and, when her twin, Sebastian, is rediscovered, many comic situations of mistaken identity ensue. There is a satiric subplot involving the members of Lady Olivia's household—Feste the jester, Maria, Olivia's uncle Sir Toby Belch, and Sir Toby's friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek—who scheme to undermine the high-minded, pompous Malvolio by planting a love letter purportedly written by Olivia to Malvolio urging him to show his affection for her by smiling constantly and dressing himself in cross-garters and yellow. Malvolio is thoroughly discomfited and even locked up for a time as a supposed madman—a fate ironically suited to one who has set himself up as the apostle of sobriety and decorum. Malvolio's animosity toward merriment is a challenge not only to the merrymakers but to the play's more serious characters as well; all must learn to embrace life's joys before those joys are overtaken by aging and death. At the play's end, Malvolio is the only solitary figure among the pairs of happy lovers.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Two Noble Kinsmen, The
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tragicomedy in five acts by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. The play was probably written and first performed about 1612–14. It was published in quarto in 1634 with a title page identifying Fletcher and Shakespeare as joint authors. It was included in the second folio of works by Fletcher and Francis Beaumont in 1679, and scholars have long debated the extent of Shakespeare's contribution. One commonly held theory is that he wrote all or most of Act I and Act V, with Fletcher responsible for most of the three intervening acts. The primary source for the story was The Knight's Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but earlier plays concerning the friendship of Palamon and Arcite are known to have been performed. The playwrights may also have been familiar with Chaucer's source, Giovanni Boccaccio's Teseida delle nozze di Emilia.
Theseus, duke of Athens, is preparing to marry Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, accompanied by her sister, Emilia, and his friend, Pirithous, when he is called upon to wage war on the corrupt Theban king, Creon. Palamon and Arcite, two noble nephews of Creon, are captured. As they languish in prison, their protestations of eternal friendship stop the instant they glimpse Emilia through a window, and they quarrel over her. Arcite is unexpectedly released and banished, but he returns in disguise; Palamon escapes with the help of the lovelorn Jailer's Daughter. The youths continue quarreling over Emilia, and, when Emilia is unable to choose between them, Theseus announces a tournament for her hand—the loser to be executed. Arcite wins but is killed in a fall from his horse. Before he dies, the two young noblemen are reconciled, and Arcite bequeaths his bride to his friend. Meanwhile, the abandoned Jailer's Daughter, distraught from love for Palamon and fear for her father's safety, goes mad. She is saved by a devoted but unnamed Wooer, who courts her disguised as Palamon.
The theme of love versus friendship is evident throughout the play, as is the recurring chivalric ideal, demonstrated by the cousins' generosity of spirit even as they prepare to fight to the death.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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boron carbide
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(B4C), crystalline compound of boron and carbon. It is an extremely hard, synthetically produced material that is used in abrasive and wear-resistant products, in lightweight composite materials, and in control rods for nuclear power generation.
With a Mohs hardness between 9 and 10, boron carbide is one of the hardest synthetic substances known, being exceeded only by cubic boron nitride and diamond. As an abrasive, it is used in powdered form in the lapping (fine abrading) of metal and ceramic products, though its low oxidation temperature of 400–500° C (750–930° F) makes it unable to withstand the heat of grinding hardened tool steels. Because of its hardness, together with its very low density, it has found application as a reinforcing agent for aluminum in military armour and high-performance bicycles, and its wear resistance has caused it to be employed in sandblasting nozzles and pump seals. A neutron absorber, boron carbide is used in powdered or solidified form to control the rate of fission in nuclear reactors.
Boron carbide is produced by reducing boron oxide with carbon at high temperatures in an electric furnace. After grinding, the black powder is solidified by pressing at temperatures exceeding 2,000° C (3,630° F). Its melting point is approximately 2,350° C (4,260° F).
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Juliet
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daughter of the Capulets who is one of the two “star-crossed” lovers in Shakespeare's tragedy Romeo and Juliet. Juliet's musing on the balcony—O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?Deny thy father and refuse thy name!Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,And I'll no longer be a Capulet.
—is overheard by Romeo and sets in motion one of the most famous love stories in Western literature.
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Antony and Cleopatra
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tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written in 1606–07 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from an authorial draft in a more finished state than most of his working papers or possibly from a transcript of those papers not yet prepared as a playbook. It is considered one of Shakespeare's richest and most moving works. The principal source of the play was Sir Thomas North's Parallel Lives (1579), an English version of Plutarch's Bioi parallēloi.
The story concerns Mark Antony, Roman military leader and triumvir, who is besottedly in love with Cleopatra, queen of Egypt and former mistress of Pompey and Julius Caesar. Summoned to Rome upon the death of his wife, Fulvia, who had openly antagonized his fellow triumvir Octavius, Antony heals the residual political rift by marrying Octavius's sister, Octavia. Word of the event enrages Cleopatra. Renewed contention with Octavius and desire for Cleopatra, however, send Antony back to his lover's arms. When the rivalry erupts into warfare, Cleopatra accompanies Antony to the Battle of Actium, where her presence proves militarily disastrous. She heads back to Egypt, and Antony follows, pursued by Octavius. Anticipating the eventual outcome, Antony's friend and loyal officer Enobarbus deserts him and joins Octavius. At Alexandria, Octavius eventually defeats Antony. Cleopatra, fearing for her life in light of Antony's increasingly erratic behaviour, sends a false report of her suicide, which prompts Antony to wound himself mortally. Carried by his soldiers to the queen's hiding place in one of her monuments, he dies in her arms. Rather than submit to Roman conquest, the grieving Cleopatra arranges to have a poisonous snake delivered to her in a basket of figs. Attended by her faithful servants Charmian and Iras, she kills herself.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Freeman, Bud
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American jazz musician, who, along with Coleman Hawkins, was one of the first tenor saxophonists in jazz.
Freeman was one of the young musicians inspired by New Orleans ensembles and the innovations of Louis Armstrong to synthesize the Chicago style in the late 1920s. By the 1930s he was working in New York City, typically in the company of ex-Chicagoans, especially Eddie Condon, in whose band Freeman recorded a noted solo, “The Eel” (1933). By then he had developed a fluent, romantic style featuring sinuous legato melodies. His tenor saxophone sound was especially distinctive—full and smooth, with a rough edge and a large vibrato—and he played with a robust, at times almost violent swing. Along with a Chicago friend, drummer Dave Tough, Freeman played in the big bands of Tommy Dorsey (1936–38) and Benny Goodman (1938) before embarking on a freelance career as bandleader and soloist.
Freeman led a U.S. Army dance band based in the Aleutian Islands during World War II, then lived in New York and Chile. He often reunited with Condon and other former Chicagoans in concert. Among his notable albums are The Bud Freeman All-Stars and the 1957 Cootie Williams–Rex Stewart album, The Big Challenge, which brought together Freeman and his great tenor saxophone rival, Coleman Hawkins. After touring with the World's Greatest Jazz Band (1969–71), Freeman lived in England (1974–80) and performed there and in Europe; thereafter he was based again in Chicago. He wrote two short volumes of reminiscences, You Don't Look Like a Musician (1974) and If You Know of a Better Life, Please Tell Me (1976), and an autobiography, Crazeology (with Robert Wolf, 1989).
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Haden, Charlie
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American bass virtuoso and bandleader, known particularly as a pioneer of free jazz in the 1960s. He remains among the most influential bassists in the jazz world.
From age two Haden sang with his family's country music band on Midwestern radio and television programs. After graduating from high school in Missouri, he moved to Los Angeles and began to play jazz with saxophonist Art Pepper and others. While working (1957–59) in pianist Paul Bley's group, Haden began playing free jazz with saxophonist Ornette Coleman, providing accompaniment with lines derived from Coleman's phrasing. Haden was a member of the quartet that recorded Coleman's early classic albums (The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century) and that created a sensation in New York City beginning in 1959.
Though Haden left Coleman in late 1960, the two musicians performed together intermittently for several decades thereafter. Haden also worked with other leaders and their ensembles, most often with pianist and saxophonist Keith Jarrett's 1967–75 trio and quartet. In 1969 Haden formed his Liberation Music Orchestra, which included bebop-oriented as well as free jazz players; he re-formed the orchestra in 1982 and 1990. The group played Carla Bley's original adaptations of themes from the Spanish Civil War and Latin American resistance movements, as well as original works (such as Haden's
"Song for Che"
).
In 1976, with three other ex-Coleman sidemen, Haden formed Old and New Dreams to play, for the most part, Coleman songs. Influenced by bop bassist Wilbur Ware, Haden developed a seemingly simple style centred on swinging rhythms and pungent rhythmic variations, a large, perfectly centred tone, a talent for melodic soloing, and an acute harmonic sensitivity. In 1982 he established the jazz program at California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, California, and he remained a member of the faculty there for some three decades. Meanwhile, in the late 1980s he formed his own bebop-oriented Quartet West, a group that he maintained alongside the Liberation Music Orchestra into the 2010s. Among his recordings with Quartet West was Sophisticated Ladies (2010), which featured female vocalists from jazz, classical, and assorted popular music traditions.
Haden received multiple Grammy Awards for his recordings. In 1997 his album Beyond the Missouri Sky, with Pat Metheny, won the award for best jazz instrumental performance. Haden's Nocturne (2000) and Land of the Sun (2004) both won Grammys for best Latin jazz album. In addition, Haden received a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy in 2013.
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Lang, Eddie
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American musician, among the first guitar soloists in jazz and an accompanist of rare sensitivity.
Lang began playing violin in boyhood; his father, who made fretted stringed instruments, taught him to play guitar. In the early 1920s he played with former schoolmate Joe Venuti in Atlantic City, N.J., and then toured with the Mound City Blue Blowers. He settled in New York City in 1924, where he played in dance bands. He quickly became a favourite in studios, making noted recordings with Frank Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke (including “Singin' the Blues,” 1927), among others. Under the pseudonym Blind Willie Dunn, Lang played accompaniments to blues singers and guitar duets with Lonnie Johnson, and he led the band Gin Bottle Four, which included Johnson and King Oliver (“Jet Black Blues,” 1929).
Lang was perhaps most noted for his many recordings with Venuti (including “Stringing the Blues,” 1926) and for his guitar solo recordings. His technique was brilliant, and he was the most important of early jazz stylists to play single-string solos on guitar. His association with the Paul Whiteman band (1929–30) led to work as the guitar accompanist to Bing Crosby early in the singer's solo career. Lang's untimely death resulted from complications following a tonsillectomy.
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Mangelsdorff, Albert
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German trombonist, who began playing bop and in time became an outstanding modal, free jazz, and jazz-rock improviser. He was among the first post-World War II European jazz musicians to create original music.
With his brother Emil (later known as an alto saxophonist), Albert attended secret meetings of the Hot Club of Frankfurt during the period when jazz was banned by the Nazis. He played trombone in a Frankfurt radio band that he led and with German bop groups in the 1950s. Mangelsdorff first played in the United States in 1958. A tour of Asia led to his recording with sitarist Ravi Shankar in 1964 and to his growing involvement with unusual structures, then with free jazz.
As was typical of many free jazz players, Mangelsdorff formed many associations over the years. From 1967 to the 1980s, for example, he was associated with German pianist Alex Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra, a touring ensemble of major European free jazz improvisers. He also worked often with pianist Wolfgang Dauner and the United Jazz & Rock Ensemble. Mangelsdorff was most noted for his expressive virtuosity, especially evident in his unaccompanied solos (as in his 1976 Tromboneliness album), which featured long lines in multiphonics (simultaneously played notes). The Albert Mangelsdorff Prize, an annual award offered by the German Jazz Union, was introduced in 1994.
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Cymbeline
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comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, one of his later plays, written in 1608–10 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from a careful transcript of an authorial manuscript incorporating a theatrical playbook that had included many authorial stage directions. Set in the pre-Christian Roman world, Cymbeline draws its main theme, that of a wager by a husband on his wife's fidelity, from a story in Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron.
In the play Cymbeline, the king of Britain, decides that his daughter, Imogen, must marry his horrid stepson Cloten. When Cymbeline learns that Imogen is secretly married to Posthumus, he banishes Posthumus, who heads for Rome. In a conversation with a villainous Italian, Iachimo, Posthumus finds himself drawn unwisely into betting Iachimo that Imogen's fidelity to her marriage is unassailable. Journeying to England, Iachimo furtively obtains from the sleeping Imogen a token that he uses to convince Posthumus of her infidelity. Posthumus sends a servant to kill Imogen, but the servant instead warns her of the plan. Disguising herself as a young boy (Fidele), she sets out for Rome but loses her way in Wales. There she encounters Belarius and her two brothers, whom she had believed dead (Belarius had kidnapped Cymbeline's sons in retribution for his unjust banishment). Posthumus (who has left Rome), Imogen, and her brothers are caught up in the advance of the Roman army, which has come to collect the tribute that Cymbeline has refused to pay to Rome. The forces clash, and Cymbeline's army is victorious, largely because of the valour of Posthumus, Cymbeline's sons, and Belarius. A lengthy series of revelations and explanations ensue. Posthumus and Imogen are reunited; Cymbeline's now-dead queen is revealed to have been thoroughly wicked; her son Cloten has died at the hands of one of Cymbeline's sons; and Cymbeline is reconciled to all his beleaguered family and to Belarius as well.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Love's Labour's Lost
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early comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written sometime between 1588 and 1597, more likely in the early 1590s, and published in a quarto edition in 1598, with a title page suggesting that an earlier quarto had been lost. The 1598 quarto was printed seemingly from an authorial working draft showing signs of revision. The play's central comic device is that four young men, dedicated to study and the renunciation of women, meet four young women and inevitably abandon their unrealistic ideals.
The play opens as Ferdinand, the king of Navarre, and three of his noblemen—Berowne (Biron), Longaville, and Dumaine (Dumain)—debate their intellectual intentions. Their plans are thrown into disarray, however, when the Princess of France, attended by three ladies (Rosaline, Maria, and Katharine), arrives on a diplomatic mission from the king of France and must therefore be admitted into Navarre's park. The gentlemen soon discover that they are irresistibly attracted to the ladies. Their attempts at concealing their infatuations from one another are quickly exploded. Their next and more considerable problem, however, is to cope with the young ladies' devastating wit, through means of which the gentlemen are thoroughly put down. Adding to this romantic landscape, Shakespeare provides a group of entertaining eccentrics: Nathaniel (the curate), Holofernes (a schoolmaster), Dull (the constable), Costard (the clown), Mote (or Moth, a page), and Jaquenetta (a country girl). Linking both groups is Don Adriano de Armado, a Spanish grandee whose absurd pretensions to poetic eloquence and love melancholy are squandered on the wench Jaquenetta. The play ends with a brilliant coup de théâtre in the arrival of Marcade: his news of the death of the French king introduces into the never-never land of Navarre a note of sombre reality that reminds both the young ladies and the gentlemen that wooing and marriage entail serious responsibilities. Shakespeare's deliberate abstention from the customary “and they all lived happily ever after” conclusion of the genre is remarkable: “Jack hath not Jill.” To be sure, the audience is given a promise that the marriages will ultimately take place, after the gentlemen have had a year to think about themselves and come to maturity. Thus, the play ends with hope—perhaps the best kind of happy ending.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Macbeth, Lady
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wife of Macbeth in Shakespeare's Macbeth. A strong, rational, and calculating woman, Lady Macbeth is determined to see her husband put aside his “milk of human kindness” to fulfill their ambitions to rule.
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Macbeth
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tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written sometime in 1606–07 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from a playbook or a transcript of one. Some portions of the original text are corrupted or missing from the published edition. The play is the shortest of Shakespeare's tragedies, without diversions or subplots. It chronicles Macbeth's seizing of power and subsequent destruction, both his rise and his fall the result of blind ambition.
Macbeth visits the Weird Sisters (Three Witches) on the blasted heath; title page by John Gilbert … Lady Macbeth encourages her husband to stand by his oath to kill Duncan, in Act I, scene 7, of …Macbeth and Banquo, who are generals serving King Duncan of Scotland, meet the Weird Sisters, three witches who prophesy that Macbeth will become thane of Cawdor, then king, and that Banquo will beget kings. Soon thereafter Macbeth discovers that he has indeed been made thane of Cawdor, which leads him to believe the rest of the prophecy. When King Duncan chooses this moment to honour Macbeth by visiting his castle of Dunsinane at Inverness, both Macbeth and his ambitious wife realize that the moment has arrived for them to carry out a plan of regicide that they have long contemplated. Spurred by his wife, Macbeth kills Duncan, and the murder is discovered when Macduff, the thane of Fife, arrives to call on the king. Duncan's sons Malcolm and Donalbain flee the country, fearing for their lives. Their speedy departure seems to implicate them in the crime, and Macbeth becomes king.
Worried by the witches' prophecy that Banquo's heirs instead of Macbeth's own progeny will be kings, Macbeth arranges the death of Banquo, though Banquo's son Fleance escapes. Banquo's ghost haunts Macbeth, and Lady Macbeth is driven to madness by her guilt. The witches assure Macbeth that he will be safe until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane and that no one “of woman born” shall harm him. Learning that Macduff is joining Malcolm's army, Macbeth orders the slaughter of Macduff's wife and children. When the army, using branches from Birnam Wood as camouflage, advances on Dunsinane, Macbeth sees the prophecy being fulfilled: Birnam Wood has indeed come to Dunsinane. Lady Macbeth dies; Macbeth is killed in battle by Macduff, who was “from his mother's womb untimely ripped” by cesarean section and in that quibbling sense was not “of woman born.” Malcolm becomes the rightful king.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Coriolanus
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the last of the so-called political tragedies by William Shakespeare, written about 1608 and published in the First Folio of 1623 seemingly from the playbook, which had preserved some features of the authorial manuscript. The five-act play, based on the life of Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus, a legendary Roman hero of the late 6th and early 5th centuries BCE, is essentially an expansion of the Plutarchan biography in Parallel Lives. Though it is Elizabethan in structure, it is markedly Classical in tone.
The action of the play follows Caius Marcius (afterward Caius Marcius Coriolanus) through several phases of his career. He is shown as an arrogant young nobleman in peacetime, as a bloodstained and valiant warrior against the city of Corioli, as a modest victor, and as a reluctant candidate for consul. When he refuses to flatter the Roman citizens, for whom he feels contempt, or to show them his wounds to win their vote, they turn on him and banish him. Bitterly he joins forces with his enemy Aufidius, a Volscian, against Rome. Leading the enemy to the edge of the city, Coriolanus is ultimately persuaded by his mother, Volumnia—who brings with her Coriolanus's wife, Virgilia, and his son—to make peace with Rome, and in the end he is killed at the instigation of his Volscian ally.
Coriolanus is in many ways unusual for Shakespearean drama: it has a single narrative line, its images are compact and striking, and its most effective moments are characterized by understatement or silence. When the banished Coriolanus returns at the head of the opposing army, he says little to Menenius, the trusted family friend and politician, or to Volumnia, both of whom have come to plead for Rome. His mother's argument is long and sustained, and for more than 50 lines he listens, until his resolution is broken from within. Then, as a stage direction in the original edition testifies, he “holds her by the hand, silent.” In his own words, he has “obey[ed] instinct” and betrayed his dependence; he cannot “stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin.” Thus is his desire for revenge defeated. While his mother is hailed as “patroness, the life of Rome,” Coriolanus stands accused of treachery by Aufidius and is cut down by Aufidius's supporters.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Macbeth
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a general in King Duncan's army who is spurred on by the prophecy of the Weird Sisters and personal ambition to change the course of Scotland's succession in Shakespeare's Macbeth. At the outset of the play, Macbeth is a brave, trusted, and respected soldier. He is undone by his inability to hold his own moral ground and his need (essentially) to prove his manhood to his wife. Despite its horror at Macbeth's acts, the audience is moved to some extent by his self-awareness, uneasiness, and haunted spirit to sympathize with him as events spin out of control. The ultimate hopelessness of his position becomes clear to him at last, and he spells this out in two poignant speeches in Act V, “I have lived long enough” and “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.”
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Hall, Edward
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English historian whose chronicle was one of the chief sources of William Shakespeare's history plays.
Educated at Eton and at King's College, Cambridge, Hall became common sergeant of London in 1533 and undersheriff in 1535. He was also a member of Parliament for Wenlock (1529) and Bridgnorth (1542) in Shropshire. The value of Hall's great work, of which the full title is The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548; 2nd ed., 1550), is very considerable for the contemporary reign of Henry VIII, and its literary quality is higher than that of most chronicles of the time.
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Timon of Athens
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Frank Benson as Timon in Timon of Athens, c. 1890.tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, probably written sometime in 1605–08 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from an authorial manuscript, probably unfinished. Some parts of the play may be by Thomas Middleton. It belongs to Shakespeare's late experimental period, when he explored a new kind of tragic form.
Unlike the plots of his great tragedies, the story of Timon of Athens is simple and lacks development. It demonstrates events in the life of Timon, a man known for his great and universal generosity, who spends his fortune and then is spurned when he requires help. He puts on a feast, invites his fair-weather friends, serves them warm water, and throws it in their faces. Leaving Athens filled with hatred, he goes to live in a cave. There he is visited by his loyal servant Flavius, by the churlish philosopher Apemantus, and by two mistresses of the general Alcibiades, all of whom sympathize to some degree with Timon's plight, but to no avail; Timon has turned his back on ungrateful humankind. While digging for roots to eat, Timon uncovers gold, most of which he gives to Alcibiades' mistresses and to Alcibiades himself for his war against Athens. Word of his fortune reaches Athens, and, as a variety of Athenians importune Timon again, he curses them and dies.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Caliban
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a feral, sullen, misshapen creature in Shakespeare's The Tempest. The son of the sorceress Sycorax, Caliban is the sole inhabitant of his island (excluding the imprisoned Ariel) until Prospero and his infant daughter Miranda are cast ashore. Shakespeare gives Caliban some complexity, with the result that the character has drawn much critical attention, both in contrast to Ariel and Ferdinand and as a symbol, perhaps, of the natural human. Other interpreters consider him a representative of native peoples suffering under imperialist oppression.
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Midsummer Night's Dream, A
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comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about 1595–96 and published in 1600 in a quarto edition from the author's manuscript, in which there are some minor inconsistencies. The version published in the First Folio of 1623 was taken from a second quarto edition, with some reference to a promptbook. One of the “great” or “middle” comedies, A Midsummer Night's Dream, with its multilayered examination of love and its vagaries, has long been one of the most popular of Shakespeare's plays.
Theseus, duke of Athens, has conquered Hippolyta, the Amazon queen, and is about to wed her. Meanwhile, two lovers, Hermia and Lysander, seek refuge in the forest near Athens when Hermia's father demands that she marry Demetrius. Hoping to win Demetrius's favour, Helena tells him their whereabouts and follows him to the forest, where he goes in search of Hermia. The forest is also full of fairies who have come for the duke's wedding. Oberon, the king of the fairies, quarrels with his queen, Titania, and bids his mischievous servant Puck to drop magic juice into her eyes as she sleeps; his intent is to punish her for her disobedience by causing her to fall hopelessly in love with whatever person or creature she happens to see when she awakes. Noting that the human lovers in the forest are also at odds, he orders Puck to drop the love juice into Demetrius's eyes so that Demetrius's one-time affection for Helena will be restored. Because the two young Athenian men look much alike, however, Puck mistakenly administers the love juice to Lysander, who then happens to see Helena when he awakes. He falls hopelessly in love with her. Now both young men are in love with Helena and neither with the poor deserted Hermia. This situation does not make Helena any happier, though. She comes to the conclusion that they are all making fun of her. Hermia and Helena fall out over this contretemps, while the young men have become fierce and even would-be murderous rivals of one another for Helena. All is at sixes and sevens.
In the same woods a group of artisans are rehearsing an entertainment for the duke's wedding. Ever playful, Puck gives one of the “mechanicals,” Nick Bottom, an ass's head; when Titania awakens, she falls in love with Bottom. After much general confusion and comic misunderstanding, Oberon's magic restores Titania and the four lovers to their original states. The duke invites the two couples to join him and Hippolyta in a triple wedding. The wedding celebration features Bottom's troupe in a comically inept performance of their play, The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe, which turns out to be a parody of the perilous encounters the various lovers have experienced in the forest and somehow managed to survive.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Prospero
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the exiled rightful duke of Milan and a master magician in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Prospero has used the experience of shipwreck on an enchanted island to master all sorts of supernatural powers. He uses this knowledge to transform the island and its inhabitants and eventually to reconcile with his usurping brother Antonio. Prospero delivers one of Shakespeare's best-known speeches, declaringWe are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
The character has been said to embody Shakespeare's own philosophy.
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Tempest, The
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drama in five acts by William Shakespeare, first written and performed about 1611 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from an edited transcript, by Ralph Crane (scrivener of the King's Men), of the author's papers after they had been annotated for production.
The play opens with a storm raised by Prospero, who years earlier, as the rightful duke of Milan, had been set adrift in a boat with his three-year-old daughter, Miranda, by his usurping brother, Antonio. Prospero, more interested in his books and his magic than in the pragmatics of ruling Milan, had left himself vulnerable to this overthrow. Arriving at an island, Prospero proceeded to make good use of his magic by freeing the sprite Ariel from the torment of imprisonment to which Ariel had been subjected for refusing to carry out the wicked behests of the sorceress Sycorax. Prospero and Miranda found no living person on the island other than Sycorax's son Caliban. They took Caliban into their little family and lived in harmony until Caliban attempted to rape Miranda. Prospero then confined Caliban to a rock and to the status of slave, requiring him to attend to their needs by performing such tasks as gathering firewood. As the play begins, Prospero raises the tempest in order to cast onto the shores of his island a party of Neapolitans returning to Naples from a wedding in Tunis: King Alonso of Naples, his son Ferdinand, his brother Sebastian, and Prospero's brother, Antonio.
With the arrival of the outsiders, the process of testing and eventual reconciliation begins. The party is brought to shore by Ariel, but Ferdinand is separated from the others and is believed drowned. Ariel helps foil plots against Prospero by Caliban and against Alonso by Antonio. Ariel then appears to Alonso and Antonio as a harpy and reproaches them for their treatment of Prospero. Alonso, believing Ferdinand dead, is certain that his death was punishment for Alonso's crime and has a change of heart. Prospero, convinced that Antonio and company are repentant (or at least chastened), reconciles all and prepares to return to Milan to reclaim his throne.
Young Ferdinand meantime has encountered Miranda, and the two have fallen instantly in love. Their courtship is watched carefully by Prospero, who, though insistent that they proceed carefully and preserve their virginity until they are actually married, welcomes this love relationship as a way of making Miranda happy and at the same time of reconciling Milan and Naples; their marriage will unite the two contending kingdoms.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Braxton, Anthony
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American composer and woodwind improviser, one of the most prolific artists in free jazz.
Braxton, who named John Coltrane, Warne Marsh, and Paul Desmond among his inspirations, began playing alto saxophone in his teens and continued to play in a U.S. Army band. In 1966 he joined the groundbreaking free-jazz cooperative Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and quickly became an original player. A tireless experimenter, he was the first to record an entire album of unaccompanied saxophone solos (For Alto, 1968).
He spent 1969 in France and soon gained an international reputation. He toured and recorded as a soloist on flute, saxophones, and clarinets, as well as with his quartets, which included (in the 1970s) bassist David Holland and trombonist George Lewis, and (in the 1980s) pianist Marilyn Crispell and drummer Gerry Hemingway. He also worked with pianists Dave Brubeck, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Chick Corea; the Globe Unity Orchestra; bop musicians; and Europe-based free jazz improvisers.
Braxton also composed, inspired by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and others; his pieces were written in coloured graphs and usually titled with diagrams. His works included For Two Pianos (1982); Creative Orchestra Music 1976, a major album of big jazz band scores; For Four Orchestras (1978), involving 160 musicians and four conductors; a series of operas titled Trilium; and works for chamber settings, for 100 tubas, and for four amplified shovels and a coal pile. He taught at Mills College in Oakland, California (1985–88), and at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. In the 1990s Braxton also performed as a pianist. He was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1994.
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Konitz, Lee
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American jazz musician, a leading figure in cool jazz and one of the most distinctive alto saxophonists.
Konitz attended Roosevelt University in Chicago and played alto saxophone in the Claude Thornhill band (1947–48), before settling in New York City. Influenced by pianist Lennie Tristano, he developed his mature style and in 1948–50 played in the two seminal cool jazz projects, the Miles Davis “Birth of the Cool” nonet and the Lennie Tristano sextet. After spending a year in the Stan Kenton big band (1952–53), Konitz began a uniquely varied freelance career. He performed often with bop musicians and, in especially rewarding reunions, with Tristano and others of the Tristano circle, such as pianist Sal Mosca and tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh. Apart from appearing in conventional jazz ensembles, he played in duet and solo settings and in his own nonet, which he organized sporadically in the 1970s and 1980s.
Early in his career, Konitz played with an uninflected, vibratoless tone, in contrast to the dominant Charlie Parker alto saxophone style; in time his sound became more expressive without sacrificing its essential clarity. Above all else he was a melodic improviser, who originally played long, often even-noted lines with capricious accents, and who grew steadily to conceive in more varied phrasing. Noted for his frequent harmonic daring, he participated in rare free jazz events, including a free improvisation festival organized by guitarist Derek Bailey in London in 1987. He was an important influence on West Coast alto saxophonists, and he intermittently performed on other woodwinds as well.
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Tristano, Lennie
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American jazz pianist, a major figure of cool jazz and an influential teacher.
Tristano, who became totally blind as a child, began playing piano in taverns at age 12. He grew up in Chicago, where he studied at the American Conservatory of Music (B.Mus, 1943) and was a noted performer and teacher before moving to New York City in 1946.
There his advanced concepts of improvisation and of harmony soon brought him dedicated followers, most notably saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh and guitarist Billy Bauer. They played in Tristano's noted 1949 sextet recordings, which included “Wow” and “Crosscurrent” and was characterized by brilliant ensemble melodic interplay. The recordings also featured two free-form collective improvisations, “Intuition” and “Digression,” which predated the free jazz of Ornette Coleman by nearly a decade. In 1951 Tristano opened a school of jazz, which he ran until 1956, after which he spent most of his time teaching privately. He performed and recorded rarely; his last public appearance in the United States was in 1968.
Tristano aimed for spontaneity, and his music originally was an alternative to the prevailing bop idiom. He concentrated on playing lines with the virtuoso technique and harmonic sophistication of bop but with swing-era rhythmic materials, over an evenly stated, unaccented rhythm section accompaniment. Though his music was considered to be cool jazz as a result of its detachment from conventional emotion, his rhythmic urgency and incisiveness and his linear clarity indicated a passionate quest for pure lyricism. In later recordings such as Lennie Tristano (1955) and The New Tristano (1960–62) his solos became more agitated, with more complex forms, and he experimented with overdubbing and multitrack recording techniques.
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Henry V
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chronicle play in five acts by William Shakespeare, first performed in 1599 and published in 1600 in a corrupt quarto edition; the text in the First Folio of 1623, printed seemingly from an authorial manuscript, is substantially longer and more reliable. Henry V is the last in a sequence of four plays (the others being Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, and Henry IV, Part 2) known collectively as the “second tetralogy,” treating major events in English history of the late 14th and early 15th centuries. The main source of the play was Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, but Shakespeare may also have been influenced by an earlier play about King Henry V called The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth.
In keeping with his father's advice (Henry IV, Part 2) to seek foreign quarrels, Henry V, formerly Prince Hal, resolves to subjugate France and retake the lands in France previously held by England. His political and military advisers conclude that he has a rightful claim to the French crown and encourage him to follow the military exploits of his royal ancestors. The action of the play culminates in Henry's campaign in France with a ragtag army. The depiction of the character of Henry dominates the play throughout, from his nervous watch before the Battle of Agincourt, when he walks disguised among his fearful soldiers and prays for victory, to his courtship of Princess Katharine, which is romantic and tender despite the marriage's having been arranged by the duke of Burgundy.
Although almost all the fighting occurs offstage, the recruits, professional soldiers, dukes, and princes are shown preparing for defeat or victory. Comic figures abound, notably the Welsh captain, Fluellen, and some of Henry's former companions, notably Nym, Bardolph, and Pistol, who is now married to Mistress Quickly. Falstaff, however, dies offstage, perhaps because Shakespeare felt his boisterous presence would detract from the more serious themes of the play.
Shakespeare hedges the patriotic fantasy of English greatness in Henry V with hesitations and qualifications about the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. The king's speech to his troops before battle on St. Crispin's Day is particularly famous for its evocation of a brotherhood in arms, but Shakespeare has placed it in a context full of ironies and challenging contrasts. In the end the chorus reminds the audience that England was to be plunged into civil war during the reign of Henry V's son, Henry VI.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Winter's Tale, The
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play in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about 1609–11 and produced at the Globe Theatre in London. It was published in the First Folio of 1623 from a transcript, by Ralph Crane (scrivener of the King's Men), of an authorial manuscript or possibly the playbook. One of Shakespeare's final plays, The Winter's Tale is a romantic comedy with elements of tragedy.
The plot was based on a work of prose fiction called Pandosto (1588) by Robert Greene. The play opens with Leontes, the king of Sicilia, entertaining his old friend Polixenes, the king of Bohemia. Leontes jealously mistakes the courtesy between his wife, Hermione, and Polixenes as a sign of Hermione's adultery with him. In a fit of jealousy, he attempts to have Polixenes killed, but Polixenes escapes with Camillo, Leontes' faithful counselor, whom Leontes has sent to kill him. The pregnant Hermione is then publicly humiliated and thrown in jail, despite her protests of innocence. When the child, a girl, is born, Leontes rejects the child out of hand and gives her over to Antigonus, the husband of Hermione's attendant Paulina. Antigonus is instructed to abandon the baby in some wild place. Having learned of his mother's mistreatment, Leontes' beloved son Mamillius dies, and Hermione too is carried out and reported dead. Having lost everyone important to him and having realized the error of his ways, Leontes is left to his solitary despair. Meanwhile, the baby girl, named Perdita, is brought up by a shepherd and his wife in Polixenes' kingdom of Bohemia. She appears in Act IV as a young and beautiful shepherdess who has been discovered by Polixenes' son Florizel. Needless to say, her true status is eventually discovered once she and Florizel have arrived at Leontes' court in Sicilia. In a climactic ending, Hermione is discovered to be alive after all. She had been sequestered by Paulina for some 16 years until the time for reunion and reconciliation arrived. Leontes is shown a seeming statue of Hermione, so lifelike that one might imagine it breathes. The “statue” comes to life, and Hermione is seen to have aged during her years of separation and waiting. Leontes, to his intense joy, realizes that he loves his wife more than ever. The recovery of the daughter he attempted to kill is no less precious to him. All is forgiven.
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Tigray
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people of central Eritrea and of the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. The Tigray speak Tigrinya, a Semitic language related to Geʿez and to Tigré, the language of a separate people (the Tigre) inhabiting northwestern Eritrea.
The Tigray are descendants of a Semitic people who intermixed with the Cushitic inhabitants of the region and founded the Christian kingdom of Aksum, which had its capital in the historic region of Tigray. The Tigray are a sedentary agricultural people. Most, along with the neighbouring Amhara people, are adherents of the Ethiopian Orthodox (Coptic) church. Despite the religious and cultural similarities between the Tigray and the Amhara, linguistic differences and political rivalry (often erupting into warfare) have separated the two groups.
In the late 20th century the Tigray accounted for nearly half of the population of Eritrea and less than one-tenth of the population of Ethiopia. Compare Tigre (people).
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Merchant of Venice, The
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comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about 1596–97 and printed in a quarto edition in 1600 from an authorial manuscript or copy of one.
Bassanio, a noble but penniless Venetian, asks his wealthy merchant friend Antonio for a loan so that Bassanio can undertake a journey to woo the heiress Portia. Antonio, whose money is invested in foreign ventures, borrows the sum from Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, on the condition that, if the loan cannot be repaid in time, Antonio will forfeit a pound of flesh. Antonio is reluctant to do business with Shylock, whom he despises for lending money at interest (unlike Antonio himself, who provides the money for Bassanio without any such financial obligation); Antonio considers that lending at interest violates the very spirit of Christianity. Nevertheless, he needs help in order to be able to assist Bassanio. Meanwhile, Bassanio has met the terms of Portia's father's will by selecting from three caskets the one that contains her portrait, and he and Portia marry. (Two previous wooers, the princes of Morocco and Aragon, have failed the casket test by choosing what many men desire or what the chooser thinks he deserves; Bassanio knows that he must paradoxically “give and hazard all he hath” to win the lady.) News arrives that Antonio's ships have been lost at sea. Unable to collect on his loan, Shylock attempts to use justice to enforce a terrible, murderous revenge on Antonio: he demands his pound of flesh. Part of Shylock's desire for vengeance is motivated by the way in which the Christians of the play have banded together to enable his daughter Jessica to elope from his house, taking with her a substantial portion of his wealth, in order to become the bride of the Christian Lorenzo. Shylock's revengeful plan is foiled by Portia, disguised as a lawyer, who turns the tables on Shylock by a legal quibble: he must take flesh only, and Shylock must die if any blood is spilled. Thus, the contract is canceled, and Shylock is ordered to give half of his estate to Antonio, who agrees not to take the money if Shylock converts to Christianity and restores his disinherited daughter to his will. Shylock has little choice but to agree. The play ends with the news that, in fact, some of Antonio's ships have arrived safely.
The character of Shylock has been the subject of modern scholarly debate over whether the playwright displays anti-Semitism or religious tolerance in his characterization, for, despite his stereotypical usurious nature, Shylock is depicted as understandably full of hate, having been both verbally and physically abused by Christians, and he is given one of Shakespeare's most eloquent speeches (“Hath not a Jew eyes?…”).
For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.
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Ramos-Horta, José
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East Timorese political activist who, along with Bishop Carlos F.X. Belo, received the 1996 Nobel Prize for Peace for their efforts to bring peace and independence to East Timor, a former Portuguese possession that was under Indonesian control from 1975 to 1999. Ramos-Horta served as prime minister of East Timor from 2006 to 2007 and as president from 2007 to 2012.
Ramos-Horta's mother was a native Timorese, and his father was a Portuguese national who was deported to East Timor for participating in a revolt against the dictator António Salazar. After studying law in the United States, Ramos-Horta returned to East Timor (then under Portuguese rule) to participate in the independence movement. His activities brought the ire of the Portuguese rulers, and he was forced to flee to Mozambique in 1970. Returning in 1972, Ramos-Horta sided with the pro-independence Fretilin faction in the East Timor civil war. The Fretilin gained control of the government on November 28, 1975, and declared East Timor's independence; Ramos-Horta was named foreign minister. However, nine days later Indonesia invaded East Timor, and Ramos-Horta was again forced into exile.
Eventually settling in Sydney, Australia, Ramos-Horta joined the faculty of the University of New South Wales. From that position he became one of the primary voices for East Timor in the international arena, becoming East Timor's de facto ambassador to the United Nations (UN). He spoke out against human rights violations by the occupying Indonesian military forces and promoted a peace plan to end the violence in his country. After receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1996, he gave the award and prize money to a program called Microcredit for the Poor. He returned home in 1999 after the UN Security Council established the UN Transition Administration in East Timor.
Ramos-Horta continued to urge forgiveness and reconciliation and was appointed East Timor's foreign minister in 2000; he continued in that office after East Timor achieved full sovereignty in 2002. In 2006 fighting erupted in the country after Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri fired hundreds of soldiers who had gone on strike to protest against discrimination. Criticized for his handling of the crisis, Alkatiri resigned and was replaced by Ramos-Horta, who took office in July 2006. In May 2007 Ramos-Horta was elected president, garnering nearly 70 percent of the vote. The following year he was seriously injured after being shot by rebels outside his home in Dili, East Timor. He recovered, and he served out the rest of his term. Ramos-Horta failed in his bid for a second term, however, when, in March 2012, he came in third in the first round of presidential voting. He was succeeded in May by former guerilla leader and later East Timor military commander Taur Matan Ruak (José Maria Vasconcelos).
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Lee, David M.
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American physicist who, with Robert C. Richardson and Douglas D. Osheroff, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1996 for their joint discovery of superfluidity in the isotope helium-3.
Lee received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1952 and a Ph.D. in physics from Yale University in 1959. He joined the faculty of Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.) in 1959, becoming a full professor there in 1968. Lee and Richardson built a special cooling apparatus for their research in the low-temperature laboratory at Cornell. They discovered superfluidity in helium-3 by accident in 1972. They had cooled that compound to within a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero (−273° C) when Osheroff, a graduate student working with them, noticed odd changes in the sample's internal pressure. The team eventually determined that these deviations marked helium-3's phase transition to superfluidity. Because the atoms in superfluid helium-3 move in a coordinated manner, that substance lacks all internal friction and flows without resistance. Helium-3 in this state behaves according to quantum mechanical laws. The discovery of superfluidity in helium-3 enabled scientists to study directly in macroscopic (visible) systems the strange quantum mechanical effects that previously could only be studied indirectly in molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.
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Marsh, Warne
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American tenor saxophonist, a jazz musician noted for his devotion to purely lyrical improvisation.
Marsh played in Hoagy Carmichael's Teenagers (1945) before serving in the U.S. Army. In 1948 he became a student of Lennie Tristano, who was the principal influence upon his art. He played with Tristano from 1949 to 1952 and in rare reunions thereafter. On occasion he played with outstanding former Tristano students such as Lee Konitz and Ted Brown (tenor saxophone). For many years Marsh led his own small groups irregularly and taught; for about five years in the mid-1970s, he played in Supersax, a saxophone-centred ensemble, and orchestrated a number of Charlie Parker solos for the group.
Marsh shared Tristano's ideal of spontaneity. High rhythmic detail, swing, and a complex approach to harmony characterize Marsh's sophisticated solo lines, which he usually preferred to play over unaccented rhythm accompaniments, the better to focus attention on his fluent melodies. His tone was light, without dramatic inflection; as a result he was often considered a cool jazz soloist despite the passion of his quest for lyricism.
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Pepper, Art
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American jazz musician noted for the beauty of his sound and his improvisations on alto saxophone, and a major figure in the 1950s in West Coast jazz (see cool jazz).
Pepper in his teens played in Los Angeles bands led by Lee Young and Benny Carter, then joined the Stan Kenton band briefly before serving in the U.S. Army (1944–46). He returned to Kenton in 1947 and remained until 1952, the year he began leading recording groups. Narcotics addiction and drug-related prison terms interrupted his freelance career in the 1950s; after a remarkably productive period of recording, 1956–60, he spent most of 1961–67 in prison. Physical ailments and a three-year period of rehabilitation in Synanon resulted in only intermittent performing until the late 1970s, when he resumed frequent recording and touring.
Pepper had been influenced by both swing musicians, especially Carter, and bop-era musicians such as Charlie Parker and Lee Konitz. He played alto saxophone with a brilliant, pure tone, stating even small note values with clarity, and he also played clarinet and tenor saxophone on occasion. He constructed his solos with broken phrases and asymmetric accents and formed melodic lines with rare, compelling tension. In contrast to the cool jazz aesthetic that prevailed among other white West Coast jazz musicians, Pepper's improvising was intensely emotional at all tempos, and he was a sensitive interpreter as well, as in Hoagy Carmichael's 1956 recording of “Winter Moon.”
Among his major recordings are his 1956 “Besame Mucho” and the albums Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section (1957), The Way It Was (1960), and Smack Up (1960). Influenced by John Coltrane's music by the 1970s, Pepper recurringly incorporated modal material, cyclic forms, and dissonant, sheets-of-sound elements into his soloing, which continued to be outstanding at the end of his career.
Straight Life (1979) by Art and Laurie Pepper is his autobiography, and Art Pepper: Notes from a Jazz Survivor (1982) is a documentary film about him.
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Shepp, Archie
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African American tenor saxophonist, composer, dramatist, teacher, and pioneer of the free jazz movement, known not only for his creative improvisation and colourful sound but also for his Afrocentric approach to music.
Shepp grew up in Philadelphia and attended Goddard College (B.A., 1959), Plainfield, Vermont. He began his musical career in New York City, where he played tenor saxophone with pianist Cecil Taylor's quartet (1960–62), a pioneer free jazz group. Following collaborations with trumpeter Bill Dixon, in 1963 Shepp formed the New York Contemporary Five (with trumpeter Don Cherry, alto saxophonist John Tchicai, and others), which subsequently toured in eastern and western Europe.
Shepp then led his own groups, which included many of the finest young players of the new music. His major work was done in the 1960s, when he formulated a saxophone style featuring a gruff tone, wide vibrato, hearty swing, and eruptions of harsh screams and multiphonics (simultaneously played notes). The traditions of John Coltrane and Ben Webster were important influences on his soloing. Shepp also composed and arranged songs, setting his pieces with provocative dissonances (as in Fire Music, 1965).
Simultaneously Shepp pursued a literary career, composing essays linking free jazz to black militancy; reading his own poetry on recordings; and writing plays, including Junebug Graduates Tonight (1967). He taught African American studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1968–72). In 1972 he joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he remained until his retirement from teaching in 2002. Throughout his years as a university professor and well afterward, Shepp continued to release new material, including Left Alone Revisited (2002), a tribute with pianist Mal Waldron to jazz singer Billie Holiday, and Wo!man (2011), an album of duets with German pianist Joachim Kühn.
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Threadgill, Henry
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African-American improviser, composer, and bandleader, an important figure in free jazz in the late 20th century.
Threadgill studied at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago and Governors State University, University Park, Ill. In the 1960s he played gospel music on a national tour, rock music in a U.S. Army entertainment troupe, and blues in a Chicago band.
He joined the cooperative Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Threadgill, with Fred Hopkins (bass) and Steve McCall (drums), formed the trio Air in 1971 to play Scott Joplin rags and original works. The group became noted for its close ensemble interplay and for Threadgill's own large-sounding flutes and clarinets and rugged, sometimes violent alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones. He also recorded with Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, and others.
The works Threadgill wrote for his seven-member Sextett (or Sextet) in the 1980s, he frequently presented irony, blues, and abstraction. With this aggressive-sounding group he achieved rich sonorities of woodwinds, brasses, strings, and drums, in compositions with memorable themes and active melodic and rhythmic counterpoint. He expanded upon this interplay in the 1990s with his group Very Very Circus, a septet with unusual instrumentation, which included two tubas and two electric guitars.
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Akzo Nobel NV
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diversified Dutch manufacturer of paints, coatings, and chemicals. The company was formed from the merger of Akzo NV and the Swedish firm Nobel Industries AB in 1994. Its headquarters are in Amsterdam.
Akzo NV had its origins in the German chemical manufacturer Vereinigte Glanzstoff-Fabriken, which was formed in 1899 and made rayon and paints. Vereinigte merged with a Dutch rayon manufacturer, Nederlandsche Kunstzijdefabriek, in 1929, and the new company assumed the name AKU. This firm merged with the major Dutch chemical company Koninklijke Zout-Organon NV (KZO) in 1969 to form Akzo NV, a major Dutch manufacturer of synthetic fibres, industrial chemicals, plastics, paint, adhesives, and pharmaceuticals. Akzo NV ran into financial difficulties in the 1970s owing to competition from East Asian fibre makers and rapidly rising prices for the petroleum-based feedstocks used to make chemicals and fibres. In response, Akzo de-emphasized its fibre business and diversified further into paints and specialty chemicals.
Nobel Industries AB was created in 1984 by the merger of the Swedish chemical firm KemaNobel with the Swedish weapons maker Bofors. This merger reunited the two largest companies that had once been owned by Alfred Nobel, the 19th-century inventor of dynamite and founder of the Nobel Prizes. At the time of its merger with Akzo in 1994, Nobel Industries was a manufacturer of paints, adhesives, and specialty chemicals. The merger of Akzo with Nobel Industries created one of Europe's largest chemical and paint manufacturers. In 2007 Akzo Nobel sold Organon BioSciences NV. The following year it acquired Imperial Chemical Industries PLC.
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Talbot, Mary Anne
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British woman who served in the English army and navy disguised as a man. She was later known as the “British Amazon.”
Talbot's mother died at her birth, and she believed herself to be the illegitimate child of William Talbot, 1st Earl Talbot. She was seduced in 1792 by Captain Essex Bowen and accompanied him to Santo Domingo in the Caribbean, disguised as his footboy and using the name John Taylor. She then went to Flanders as a drummer. She was present at the capture of Valenciennes (July 1793), where Bowen was killed, and then deserted and joined a French lugger. She was captured by the British and then by the French. Talbot spent time in prison and voyaged to the United States before her true sex was discovered in London in 1796. She later became a servant of Robert Kirby, a London publisher, who published her story in The Life and Surprising Adventures of Mary Anne Talbot (1809).
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Ethiopian Plateau
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highlands covering much of Ethiopia and central Eritrea. They consist of the rugged Western Highlands and the more limited Eastern Highlands. The two sections are separated by the vast Eastern Rift Valley, which cuts across Ethiopia from southwest to northeast. The Western Highlands extend from central Eritrea and northern Ethiopia to the basin of Lake Rudolf in the south and include the traditional lands of the Amhara and Tigray peoples. Within this section the Simen Mountains are marked by Mount Ras Dejen (15,157 feet [4,620 m]), the highest peak in Ethiopia. Among the peaks of the Eastern Highlands stands Mount Batu at 14,127 feet (4,307 m). The highlands are the most agriculturally productive and densely populated areas of both Eritrea and Ethiopia.
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Lord Strange's Men
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prominent Elizabethan acting company. A household troupe of Lord Strange, they toured the provinces before appearing at court in 1582. From 1588 to 1594 they were associated with the Admiral's Men. It has been suggested that Lord Strange's Men were the first to employ William Shakespeare, though his role in the company is unclear. The troupe performed at The Theatre and at the Rose Theatre, where they are believed to have staged several Shakespearean plays, including The Comedy of Errors. The troupe's repertory included Robert Greene's Orlando furioso (based on the poem by Ludovico Ariosto) and Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. Upon the death of their patron in 1594, the group left London to perform in the provinces. Some members, however, joined the Chamberlain's Men.
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Amistad mutiny
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Portrait of Joseph Cinqué, leader of the revolt aboard the slave ship …(July 2, 1839), slave rebellion that took place on the slave ship Amistad near the coast of Cuba and had important political and legal repercussions in the American abolition movement. The mutineers were captured and tried in the United States, and a surprising victory for the country's antislavery forces resulted in 1841 when the U.S. Supreme Court freed the rebels. A committee formed to defend the slaves later developed into the American Missionary Association (incorporated 1846).
On July 2, 1839, the Spanish schooner Amistad was sailing from Havana to Puerto Príncipe, Cuba, when the ship's unwilling passengers, 53 slaves recently abducted from Africa, revolted. Led by Joseph Cinqué, they killed the captain and the cook but spared the life of a Spanish navigator, so that he could sail them home to Sierra Leone. The navigator managed instead to sail the Amistad generally northward. Two months later the U.S. Navy seized the ship off Long Island, New York, and towed it into New London, Connecticut. The mutineers were held in a jail in New Haven, Connecticut, a state in which slavery was legal.
The Spanish embassy's demand for the return of the Africans to Cuba led to an 1840 trial in a Hartford, Connecticut, federal court. New England abolitionist Lewis Tappan stirred public sympathy for the African captives, while the U.S. government took the proslavery side. U.S. President Martin Van Buren ordered a Navy ship sent to Connecticut to return the Africans to Cuba immediately after the trial. A candidate for reelection that year, he anticipated a ruling against the defendants and hoped to gain proslavery votes by removing the Africans before abolitionists could appeal to a higher court.
Prosecutors argued that, as slaves, the mutineers were subject to the laws governing conduct between slaves and their masters. But trial testimony determined that while slavery was legal in Cuba, importation of slaves from Africa was not. Therefore, the judge ruled, rather than being merchandise, the Africans were victims of kidnapping and had the right to escape their captors in any way they could. When the U.S. government appealed the case before the U.S. Supreme Court the next year, congressman and former president John Quincy Adams argued eloquently for the Amistad rebels. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court, and private and missionary society donations helped the 35 surviving Africans secure passage home. They arrived in Sierra Leone in January 1842, along with five missionaries and teachers who intended to found a Christian mission.
Spain continued to insist that the United States pay indemnification for the Cuban vessel. The U.S. Congress intermittently debated the Amistad case, without resolution, for more than two decades, until the American Civil War began in 1861.
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boron nitride
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(chemical formula BN), synthetically produced crystalline compound of boron and nitrogen, an industrial ceramic material of limited but important application, principally in electrical insulators and cutting tools. It is made in two crystallographic forms, hexagonal boron nitride (H-BN) and cubic boron nitride (C-BN).
H-BN is prepared by several methods, including the heating of boric oxide (B2O3) with ammonia (NH3). It is a platy powder consisting, at the molecular level, of sheets of hexagonal rings that slide easily past one another. This structure, similar to that of the carbon mineral graphite (see the Figure), makes H-BN a soft, lubricious material; unlike graphite, though, H-BN is noted for its low electric conductivity and high thermal conductivity. H-BN is frequently molded and then hot-pressed into shapes such as electrical insulators and melting crucibles. It also can be applied with a liquid binder as a temperature-resistant coating for metallurgical, ceramic, or polymer processing machinery.
C-BN is most often made in the form of small crystals by subjecting H-BN to extremely high pressure (six to nine gigapascals) and temperature (1,500° to 2,000° C, or 2,730° to 3,630° F). It is second only to diamond in hardness (approaching the maximum of 10 on the Mohs hardness scale) and, like synthetic diamond, is often bonded onto metallic or metallic-ceramic cutting tools for the machining of hard steels. Owing to its high oxidation temperature (above 1,900° C, or 3,450° F), it has a much higher working temperature than diamond (which oxidizes above 800° C, or 1,475° F).
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Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
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(AACM), cooperative organization of musicians, including several major figures of free jazz. The musical innovations of the AACM members became important influences on the idiom's development.
Of the approximately three dozen Chicago musicians who formed the AACM, most had played in an early 1960s rehearsal band led by pianist-teacher Muhal Richard Abrams that had experimented with polytonal and atonal jazz and used then-new free jazz techniques of improvisation and composition. They founded the AACM to produce their own concerts in 1965; however, a shared spirit of musical exploration quickly came to dominate their ventures. AACM members were expected to be adept at composition and improvisation and to present concerts that included only original music. Abrams was the organization's leader in its early years; the Art Ensemble of Chicago, drummer Steve McCall, trumpeter Leo Smith, and saxophonists Fred Anderson, Anthony Braxton, and Henry Threadgill were among its other notable performers and composers.
Also in the 1960s the AACM began a school to provide free musical instruction to inner-city youth. After the Art Ensemble and Braxton's ensemble began appearing in Europe in 1969, the AACM became internationally known. As older members moved away from Chicago, AACM school graduates—including woodwind virtuoso Douglas Ewart and trombonist George Lewis—took their places. The AACM musicians' discoveries in terms of sound colour, fluid rhythms, structure, and free jazz lyricism continued to be influential in the 1990s.
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Vickers hardness
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a measure of the hardness of a material, calculated from the size of an impression produced under load by a pyramid-shaped diamond indenter. Devised in the 1920s by engineers at Vickers, Ltd., in the United Kingdom, the diamond pyramid hardness test, as it also became known, permitted the establishment of a continuous scale of comparable numbers that accurately reflected the wide range of hardnesses found in steels.
The indenter employed in the Vickers test is a square-based pyramid whose opposite sides meet at the apex at an angle of 136°. The diamond is pressed into the surface of the material at loads ranging up to approximately 120 kilograms-force, and the size of the impression (usually no more than 0.5 mm) is measured with the aid of a calibrated microscope. The Vickers number (HV) is calculated using the following formula:
HV = 1.854(F/D2),
with F being the applied load (measured in kilograms-force) and D2 the area of the indentation (measured in square millimetres). The applied load is usually specified when HV is cited.
The Vickers test is reliable for measuring the hardness of metals, and it is also used on ceramic materials. See also Knoop hardness.
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Knoop hardness
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a measure of the hardness of a material, calculated by measuring the indentation produced by a diamond tip that is pressed onto the surface of a sample. The test was devised in 1939 by F. Knoop and colleagues at the National Bureau of Standards in the United States. By using lower indentation pressures than the Vickers hardness test, which had been designed for measuring metals, the Knoop test allowed the hardness testing of brittle materials such as glass and ceramics.
The diamond indenter employed in the Knoop test is in the shape of an elongated four-sided pyramid, with the angle between two of the opposite faces being approximately 170° and the angle between the other two being 130°. Pressed into the material under loads that are often less than one kilogram-force, the indenter leaves a four-sided impression about 0.01 to 0.1 mm in size. The length of the impression is approximately seven times the width, and the depth is 1/30 the length. Given such dimensions, the area of the impression under load can be calculated after measuring only the length of the longest side with the aid of a calibrated microscope. The final Knoop hardness (HK) is derived from the following formula:
HK = 14.229(F/D2),
with F being the applied load (measured in kilograms-force) and D2 the area of the indentation (measured in square millimetres). Knoop hardness numbers are often cited in conjunction with specific load values.
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Borchert, Wolfgang
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playwright and short-story writer who gave voice to the anguish of the German soldier after World War II.
As a young man Borchert wrote several plays and a large number of poems, but he was determined to be an actor. In 1941 he was drafted into the army. The rigours of his army service resulted in jaundice, frostbite, malnutrition, and progressive liver degeneration. He spent much of his military career in jail, accused of self-mutilation (he lost a finger). From his cell he wrote anti-Nazi letters and mocked propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Borchert returned to Hamburg after the war, but ill health forced him to leave an acting troupe he had cofounded. He began writing short stories in January 1946 and, though bedridden, produced most of the body of his work in the remaining two years of his life. He died the day before his most famous work, the play Draussen vor der Tür (1947; “Outside the Door”; Eng. trans. The Man Outside), was first staged. It presents a wounded former prisoner's attempt to discover a reason to keep on living.
Many of Borchert's stories, first collected in Die Hundeblume: Erzählungen aus unseren Tagen (1947; “The Dandelions: Tales of Our Days”), are based on personal experience. They include boyhood memories as well as the war and prison stories for which he is best known. The heroes of his stories, who are victims and are often in physical pain, seek meaning but find death and ruin.
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Bukowski, Charles
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American author noted for his use of violent images and graphic language in poetry and fiction that depict survival in a corrupt, blighted society.
Bukowski lived most of his life in Los Angeles. He briefly attended Los Angeles City College (1939–41) and worked at menial jobs while writing short stories, the first of which were published in the mid-1940s. After a 10-year period during which he abandoned writing and traveled across the U.S. living the life of a destitute alcoholic drifter, he returned to Los Angeles and began publishing poetry in 1955. Beginning with Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail (1959), volumes of his poetry appeared almost annually via small underground publishing houses. By 1963, the year he published It Catches My Heart in Its Hands—a collection of poetry about alcoholics, prostitutes, losing gamblers, and down-and-out people—Bukowski had a loyal following. Notable later poetry collections include Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972), Love Is a Dog from Hell (1977), War All the Time (1984), and You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense (1986). Though he had begun his career as one of the ultimate “cult authors,” his work was so popular and influential that by the time of his death he was one of the best-known American authors and an established part of the 20th-century literary canon. Bukowski was such a prolific writer that his production outstripped his own life span; numerous collections of his previously unpublished poetry appeared posthumously, such as Slouching Toward Nirvana (2005) and The People Look Like Flowers At Last (2007).
Bukowski's short stories and novels are unsparingly realistic and usually comic. They often observe the thoughts and actions of Bukowski's alter ego Henry Chinaski, a hard-drinking unskilled worker, a lover of classical music, and a gambler on the horses. Collections of his stories include Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969), taken from his underground newspaper column of that name, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972), and Hot Water Music (1983). His later novels include Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975), and Ham on Rye (1982). Hollywood (1989), also a novel, took as its subject the filming of the 1987 motion picture Barfly, a semiautobiographical comedy about alcoholic lovers on skid row for which Bukowski wrote the screenplay (published 1984). The novel Pulp was published posthumously in 1994.
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Calisher, Hortense
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American writer of novels, novellas, and short stories, known for the elegant style and insightful rendering of characters in her often semiautobiographical short fiction, much of which was published originally in The New Yorker.
The daughter of an uprooted Southern father and a German immigrant mother, Calisher had a middle-class upbringing in New York City. She graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and later taught there as an adjunct professor of English.
Her short-story collections In the Absence of Angels (1951) and The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (1975), a compilation of previous collections, contain stories featuring Calisher's alter ego, Hester Elkins, a Jewish child living in New York City with her extended family. The recipient of numerous O. Henry short-story awards, Calisher excelled in well-plotted, psychologically perceptive short fiction peopled by well-drawn characters.
Her collected fiction includes Tale for the Mirror: A Novella and Other Stories (1962), Extreme Magic: A Novella and Other Stories (1964), and Saratoga, Hot (1985). Her first novel, False Entry (1961), contains characters who are reintroduced in a radically different setting in The New Yorkers (1969), in which a 12-year-old girl kills her father's unfaithful wife. Calisher's other novels include Queenie (1971), On Keeping Women (1977), and Mysteries of Motion (1983). Age (1987) is the story of an elderly husband and wife in which each decides to keep a diary to be read by the living spouse after the other dies. The novel In the Palace of the Movie King (1993) follows a dissident Russian movie director who finds himself in New York City, while In the Slammer with Carol Smith (1997) describes a world of mental illness and homelessness in Spanish Harlem. Sunday Jews (2003) explores issues of identity in an eclectic family, which includes an art expert, an atheistic rabbi, an anthropologist, and an agnostic Irish Catholic. In 2004 Calisher published the memoir Tattoo for a Slave, the story of her slave-owning grandparents and her parents' experience of moving from the South to New York.
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Campana, Dino
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innovative Italian lyric poet who is almost as well known for his tragic, flamboyant personality as for his controversial writings.
Campana began to show signs of mental instability in his early teens. He studied chemistry intermittently at the University of Bologna but failed to graduate. Thereafter he began a wandering life, traveling throughout Europe and Latin America. He held a variety of jobs, including musician, fireman, policeman, and gypsy fair vendor, and sometimes was jailed briefly or committed to mental institutions for extended periods. His only poetry is contained in the emotionally intense collection Canti orfici (1914; Orphic Songs). A strain of nihilism persists through the conflicting attitudes of his fragmentary poems; they alternate erratically between hallucination and reality, love and fear, Christian and pagan beliefs, at times achieving stunning clarity of expression. His Lettere (1958; “Letters”), written in 1916–18, reveal his decline into insanity and melancholia. In January 1918 he was committed to a mental institution, where he lived for the rest of his life.
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Colegate, Isabel
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British author of novels about life among the upper classes in England during the 20th century.
At the age of 19 Colegate began working as an assistant to literary agent Anthony Blond; when Blond became a publisher, one of the first books he brought out was Colgate's first novel, The Blackmailer (1958). Her next novel, A Man of Power (1960), portrays a newly rich businessman who abandons his wife then is duped by the aristocrat he loves. Among her later novels are the partly autobiographical The Great Occasion (1962), and Statues in a Garden (1964). The Orlando Trilogy (1984), composed of Orlando King (1968), Orlando at the Brazen Threshold (1971), and Agatha (1973), is a modern retelling of the myth of Oedipus and Antigone set during the rise of fascism, World War II, and Britain's 1956 Suez Crisis. The Shooting Party (1980; film, 1985) is about a group of aristocrats who are gathered for a weekend pheasant hunt. Colegate also wrote News from the City of the Sun (1979), A Glimpse of Sion's Glory (1985), Deceits of Time (1988), and The Summer of the Royal Visit (1991).
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Crane, R.S.
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American literary critic who was a leading figure of the Neo-Aristotelian Chicago school. His landmark book, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (1953), formed the theoretical basis of the group. Although Crane was an outspoken opponent of the New Criticism, he argued persuasively for a pluralism that values separate, even contradictory, critical schools.
Crane was educated at the University of Michigan (B.A., 1908) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D., 1911). He taught at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. (1911–1924), and at the University of Chicago (1924–1967). Central to his position as a Chicago critic is the theory that no subjects are barred from investigation by the methods and arts of the humanities; such fields as mathematics, the physical sciences, sociology, and psychology all have histories, languages, literature, and fundamental philosophical precepts that can be discussed and analyzed by means of the general arts of the humanities. These arts are four: analysis of ideas; analysis of symbolic expression, including use of language; explication and interpretation; and historical research.
In addition to publishing many journal articles, Crane edited the influential book Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (1952). Much of his writing was collected in The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays Critical and Historical (1967) and Critical and Historical Principles of Literary History (1971).
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Diego, Gerardo
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Spanish musicologist and prolific, innovative poet.
Diego received a doctorate from the University of Madrid in 1920. During the 1920s he wrote experimental poetry and joined the avant-garde Ultraísmo and Creacionismo movements. He taught for a time in the ancient town of Soria in north-central Spain; the location inspired the poems of Imagen (1922), Soria (1923), and Versos humanos (1925; “Human Verses”). In Vía crucis (1931; “Way of the Cross”) Diego explored religious themes. Angeles de Compostela (1940; rev. ed., 1961), which also contains religious poetry, and Alondra de verdad (1941; “Lark of Truth”), a diary in 42 sonnets, have been called his best work; both collections are relatively traditional and classical in tone.
From 1939 to 1966 Diego was a professor at the Beatriz Galindo Institute in Madrid, where he continued to produce new poems at a rapid rate. Paisaje con figuras (1956; “Landscape with Figures”) won the second of his national literary awards, and in 1979 he shared the Cervantes Prize with Jorge Luis Borges.
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Barthelme, Frederick
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American writer of short stories and novels featuring characters who are shaped by the impersonal suburban environments in which they live.
Brother of writer Donald Barthelme, Frederick attended Tulane University, the University of Houston, and Johns Hopkins University, where he received his M.A. (1977). Rangoon, a collection of his surreal short fiction, drawings, and photographs, was published in 1970. This was soon followed by his novel War & War (1971). With the short stories of Moon Deluxe (1983), written in the present tense and almost all in the first person, he attracted wide notice. The protagonist of his humorous novel Second Marriage (1984) is a man whose second wife kicks him out of their home in order to make room for his first wife. Similarly, his novel Tracer (1985) presents a disheartened male and two women to whom he is attached. His subsequent works include the short-story collection Chroma (1987) and the novels Two Against One (1988), Natural Selection (1990), Painted Desert (1995), Bob the Gambler (1997), and Elroy Nights (2003).
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Bowles, Paul
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American-born composer, translator, and author of novels and short stories in which violent events and psychological collapse are recounted in a detached and elegant style. His protagonists are often Europeans or Americans who are maimed by their contact with powerful traditional cultures.
Bowles began publishing Surrealist poetry in the Parisian magazine transition at the age of 16. After briefly attending the University of Virginia, he traveled to Paris, where his interests turned to music. In 1929 he returned to New York and began studying musical composition under Aaron Copland. Bowles became a sought-after composer, writing music for more than 30 theatrical productions and films. During this time, he also became a member of the loose society of literary expatriates in Europe and North Africa and started writing short stories. In 1947 he and his wife, writer Jane Bowles, settled in Tangier, Morocco, a city that became his most potent source of inspiration. There, he wrote his first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949; film, 1990), a harsh tale of death, rape, and sexual obsession. It became a best-seller and made Bowles a leading figure in the city's expatriate artistic community.
Bowles's later novels include Let It Come Down (1952), The Spider's House (1955), and Up Above the World (1966). His Collected Stories, 1939–1976 (1979) and his subsequent short-story collections, which include Midnight Mass (1981) and Call at Corazón (1988), also depict human depravity amid exotic settings. Bowles recorded Moroccan folk music for the U.S. Library of Congress, wrote travel essays, translated works from several European and Middle Eastern languages into English, and recorded and translated oral tales from Maghribi Arabic into English. Without Stopping (1972) and Two Years Beside the Strait: Tangier Journal 1987–1989 (1990; U.S. title, Days) are autobiographical.
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Cassola, Carlo
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Italian Neorealist novelist who portrayed the landscapes and the ordinary people of rural Tuscany in simple prose. The lack of action and the emphasis on detail in his books caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of the French nouveau roman, or antinovel.
After studying at the University of Rome, Cassola fought with the Resistance during World War II. The period formed the background of some of his best-known works, among them the short-story collection Il taglio del bosco (1955; “Timber Cutting”) and the novel Fausto e Anna (1952; Fausto and Anna), both semiautobiographical. In 1960 Cassola won the Strega Prize for La ragazza di Bube (Bebo's Girl; film, 1964). These austere novels portray with sympathy and restraint individuals—especially women—whose lives are bleak and unfulfilled. Cassola's later concern with the environment and the threat of nuclear war was reflected in essays and in the novel Il paradiso degli animali (1979; “Animals' Paradise”).
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Beattie, Ann
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American writer of short stories and novels whose characters, having come of age in the 1960s, often have difficulties adjusting to the cultural values of later generations.
Beattie graduated from the American University in Washington, D.C., in 1969 and received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Connecticut in 1970. Her short stories were published in The New Yorker and other literary magazines beginning in the early 1970s. She published her first collection of stories, Distortions, in 1976. Her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, also appeared in 1976; it was subsequently adapted as the film Head Over Heels (1979), which was later rereleased as Chilly Scenes of Winter (1982).
Beattie's characters are usually passive, alienated people who cannot extricate themselves from unsatisfying careers and lives. In detached, unemotional prose Beattie chronicles their unfulfilling lives. In her early works, there is little examination of motivation, but the depth of her characters increases in her later works. Historical background is usually absent. Beattie's stripped-down style was variously praised as reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway's minimalism and criticized as detached and shallow.
Other collections of her stories include Secrets and Surprises (1978), The Burning House (1982), Where You'll Find Me and Other Stories (1986), Park City (1998), Perfect Recall (2001), and Follies (2005), all of which tell the stories of disconnected suburbanites. Other novels include Falling in Place (1980) and Picturing Will (1989). Another You (1995) tells the story of a cynical English professor and his adulterous wife, and My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997) is an exploration of the relationship between a young woman in a dead-end marriage and a manipulative aspiring actress. The Doctor's House (2002) portrays the impact of a despicable father and an alcoholic mother on their adult children. In the unconventional novel Mrs. Nixon (2011), Beattie imagined the life of first lady Pat Nixon and also discussed the art of writing. Her other works include the children's book Spectacles (1985), which deals with the supernatural, and Alex Katz (1987), a collection of essays in art criticism.
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Bertolucci, Attilio
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Italian poet, literary critic, and translator. His verse is noted for its lyric accessibility, which was a departure from the Hermetic tradition.
At age 18 Bertolucci published Sirio (1929; “Sirius”), a volume of 27 poems set in his native region of Italy. After attending the University of Parma (1931–35), where he studied law, and the University of Bologna (1935–38), he began teaching art history and contributing to such journals as Circoli, Letteratura, and Corrente. In 1951 Bertolucci moved to Rome and published La capanna indiana (1951; revised and enlarged, 1955, 1973; “The Indian Hut”), which discusses his struggle for peace and privacy in a turbulent world. The work earned Bertolucci the Premio Viareggio, one of Italy's most prestigious literary awards, in 1951. La camera da letto (1984; enlarged, 1988; “The Bedroom”) is a long autobiographical poem about his family history, a subject that inspired much of his work. Bertolucci's other books of poetry include Fuochi in novembre (1934; “Fires in November”), Viaggio d'inverno (1971; “Winter Voyage”), and the bilingual collection Selected Poems (1993). He also translated works by Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Thomas Love Peacock, D.H. Lawrence, and Thomas Hardy. Bertolucci's sons, Bernardo and Giuseppe, are noted filmmakers.
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Booth, Wayne C.
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American critic and teacher associated with the Chicago school of literary criticism.
Booth attended Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, Utah (B.A., 1944), and the University of Chicago (M.A., 1947; Ph.D., 1950), where he became devoted to neo-Aristotelian critical methods while studying with R.S. Crane. He taught at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and Earlham College in Indiana before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1962; he retired as professor emeritus in 1992.
In his influential first book, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961; rev. ed., 1983), Booth presented a detailed examination of narrative technique and introduced such terms as “implied author” and “reliable narrator.” In 1974 he produced Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, a plea for reasoned assent in the educational community that was prompted by events on the Chicago campus. The Company We Keep (1988) offers a discussion of the place of ethics in literary criticism. In addition to writing further works of criticism, Booth cofounded (1974) and coedited from 1974 to 1985 the quarterly Critical Inquiry. His other books include Now Don't Try to Reason with Me: Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age (1970), A Rhetoric of Irony (1974), Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (1979), The Vocation of a Teacher (1988), and The Rhetoric of Rhetoric (2004).
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Bloom, Harold
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American literary critic known for his innovative interpretations of literary history and of the creation of literature.
Bloom's first language was Yiddish, and he also learned Hebrew before English. He attended Cornell (B.A., 1951) and Yale (Ph.D., 1955) universities and began teaching at Yale in 1955; he also taught at New York University from 1988 to 2004. As a young man, he was much influenced by Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry (1947), a study of William Blake, and he later stated that he considered Frye “certainly the largest and most crucial literary critic in the English language” since Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Bloom's own early books, Shelley's Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (1961, rev. and enlarged ed., 1971), and The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (1971), were creative studies of the Romantic poets and their work, then out of fashion. He examined the Romantic tradition from its beginnings in the 18th century to its influence on such late 20th-century poets as A.R. Ammons and Allen Ginsberg, quickly making a name for himself with his individual and challenging views.
With the publication of Yeats (1970), Bloom began to extend his critical theory, and in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975), he systematized one of his most original theories: that poetry results from poets deliberately misreading the works that influence them. Figures of Capable Imagination (1976) and several other works of the next decade develop and illustrate this theme.
One of Bloom's most controversial popular works appeared in his commentary on The Book of J (1990), published with David Rosenberg's translations of selected sections of the Pentateuch. In it, Bloom speculated that the earliest known texts of the Bible were written by a woman who lived during the time of David and Solomon and that the texts are literary rather than religious ones, on which later rewriters imposed beliefs of patriarchal Judaism. This work was one of a number of his books—including Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), The American Religions (1992), Omens of Millennium (1996), Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005), and the novel The Flight to Lucifer (1979)—to deal with religious subjects.
Perhaps Bloom's greatest legacy is his passion for poetry and literature of other types too. This is reflected in his best-known work, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), which rejects the multiculturalism prevalent in late 20th-century academia. He once said of multiculturalism that “it means fifth-rate work by people full of resentment.” In an interview published in 1995, Bloom reflected on the great authors of the Western world, stating,We have to read Shakespeare, and we have to study Shakespeare. We have to study Dante. We have to read Chaucer. We have to read Cervantes. We have to read the Bible, at least the King James Bible. We have to read certain authors.…They provide an intellectual, I dare say, a spiritual value which has nothing to do with organized religion or the history of institutional belief. They remind us in every sense of re-minding us. They not only tell us things that we have forgotten, but they tell us things we couldn't possibly know without them, and they reform our minds. They make our minds stronger. They make us more vital.
Bloom continued to both praise and analyze the literary canon in such books as Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), How to Read and Why (2000), and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003). He returned to the study of influence, the subject that established his critical reputation, in The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011). In addition, he selected the content of, and provided commentary for, the collection The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost (2004).
In the mid-1980s Bloom began to work with Chelsea House Publishers to “chronicle all of Western literature.” By 2005 he had edited more than 600 volumes. Series titles include Bloom's BioCritiques on individual authors, presented in a format that includes an extensive biography and critical analyses; Bloom's Guides, on individual literary masterpieces; Bloom's Literary Places, guides to such cities as London, Dublin, and Paris; Bloom's Major Literary Characters; Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations, on major works; Bloom's Modern Critical Views, on major writers; and Bloom's Period Studies.
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Bidart, Frank
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American poet whose introspective verse, notably dramatic monologues by troubled characters, deal with personal guilt, family life, and madness. His unconventional punctuation and typography give his colloquial and economical style an added emphasis.
Bidart graduated from the University of California, Riverside, and later studied at Harvard University. He joined the faculty at Wellesley College in 1972. His first volume of verse was Golden State (1973). It contains Golden State, an autobiographical account of a father-and-son relationship, and Herbert White, the lurid musings of a psychopathic pedophile; the latter was adapted as a short film by American actor and director James Franco. The Book of the Body (1977) features the dramatic monologues of an amputee and of a suicidal anorexic.
Critical acclaim attended Bidart's publication of The Sacrifice (1983), a collection of five long poems about guilt, among them The War of Vaslav Nijinsky, an ambitious mixture of poetry and prose about the dancer's obsession with the tragedies of World War I, and Confessional, a psychiatric examination of a mother-and-son relationship. He followed the retrospective In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–90 (1990) with Desire (1997) and the chapbook Music Like Dirt (2002), both of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. The poems of Music Like Dirt were later included in Star Dust (2005), which also features new material, including The Third Hour of the Night, a monumental narrative that examines the act of creation through the eyes of Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini. Watching the Spring Festival (2007), a book of lyric poems, included meditations on American actress Marilyn Monroe and Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova. The poems in Metaphysical Dog (2013) were preoccupied with sex and death. Bidart also edited, with David Gewanter, the collected poems of Robert Lowell (2003).
Bidart was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992. He was a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets from 2003 to 2009. In 2007 Bidart received a Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement as a poet.
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Beaver, Bruce
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Australian poet, novelist, and journalist noted for his experimental forms and courageous self-examination, both of which made him one of the major forces in Australian poetry during the 1960s and '70s.
At the age of 17 Beaver underwent the first of several periods of psychiatric treatment for manic depression. He worked at a variety of jobs before becoming a full-time freelance writer in 1964. While contributing reviews to Australian and New Zealand periodicals, he wrote the novels The Hot Spring (1965) and You Can't Come Back (1966).
In 1966, convinced that he would soon be insane, Beaver hastily wrote his first major collection of poems, Letters to Live Poets (1969). It was, he said, an attempt at a “spiritual, intellectual, and emotional autobiography.” His later collections include Lauds and Plaints (1974), Odes and Days (1975), Death's Directives (1978), and As It Was (1979).
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Bowles, Jane
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American author whose small body of highly individualistic work enjoyed an underground reputation even when it was no longer in print.
She was raised in the United States and was educated in Switzerland by French governesses. She married the composer-author Paul Bowles in 1938. They lived in Costa Rica, France, Mexico, and the United States, where she began writing her only published novel, Two Serious Ladies (1943). For a time the couple lived in a boardinghouse with, among others, the writers Richard Wright and Carson McCullers, the composer Benjamin Britten, and the entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee. The couple settled in Tangier, Morocco, in 1952. In December 1953 her play In the Summer House was staged in New York. In addition to the novel and the play, she also published seven short stories.
Bowles deliberately constructed Two Serious Ladies without a plot. Its title characters, one sinful and victimized, the other virtuous and domineering, meet only twice; their lives are presented alternately, in a style praised for its wit. Her short stories and play also contrast domineering and weak women. Her Collected Works was published in 1966; it was expanded after her death and published as My Sister's Hand in Mine (1978).
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Doctorow, E.L.
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American novelist known for his skillful manipulation of traditional genres.
Doctorow graduated from Kenyon College (B.A., 1952) and then studied drama and directing for a year at Columbia University. He worked for a time as a script reader for Columbia Pictures in New York City. In 1959 he joined the editorial staff of the New American Library, leaving that post five years later to become editor in chief at Dial Press. He subsequently taught at several colleges and universities, including Sarah Lawrence College from 1971 to 1978. He was a visiting senior fellow at Princeton University in 1980–81 and the following year became Glucksman Professor of English and American Letters at New York University.
Doctorow was noted for the facility with which he appropriated genre conceits to illuminate the historical periods in which he set his novels. His first novel, Welcome to Hard Times (1960; film 1967), is a philosophical turn on the western genre. In his next book, Big As Life (1966), he used science fiction to explore the human response to crisis. Doctorow's proclivity for harvesting characters from history first became apparent in The Book of Daniel (1971; film 1983), a fictionalized treatment of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage in 1953. In Ragtime (1975; film 1981), historical figures share the spotlight with characters emblematic of the shifting social dynamics of early 20th-century America.
Doctorow then turned to the milieu of the Great Depression and its aftermath in the novels Loon Lake (1980), World's Fair (1985), and Billy Bathgate (1989; film 1991). The Waterworks (1994) concerns life in 19th-century New York. City of God (2000), consisting of what are ostensibly the journal entries of a writer, splinters into several different narratives, including a detective story and a Holocaust narrative. The March (2005) follows a fictionalized version of the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman on his infamously destructive trek through Georgia, aimed at weakening the Confederate economy, during the American Civil War. Doctorow trained his sights on historical figures of less eminence in Homer and Langley (2009), a mythologization of the lives of the Collyer brothers, a pair of reclusive eccentrics whose death in 1947 revealed a nightmarish repository of curiosities and garbage in their Harlem, New York City, brownstone. In Andrew's Brain (2014), a cognitive scientist discusses personal losses and the nature of consciousness with a psychiatrist.
Doctorow's essays were collected in several volumes, including Reporting the Universe (2003) and Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993–2006 (2006), which contrasts the creative process as it manifests in literature and in science. Additionally, Doctorow wrote the play Drinks Before Dinner (1979) and published the short-story collections Lives of the Poets (1984), Sweet Land Stories (2004), and All the Time in the World (2011).
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virtual museum
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a collection of digitally recorded images, sound files, text documents, and other data of historical, scientific, or cultural interest that are accessed through electronic media. A virtual museum does not house actual objects and therefore lacks the permanence and unique qualities of a museum in the institutional definition of the term. In fact, most virtual museums are sponsored by institutional museums and are directly dependent upon their existing collections. Nevertheless, through the hyperlinking and multimedia capabilities of electronic information media—particularly the World Wide Web (a hypermedia system carried on the Internet)—digitized representations can be brought together from multiple sources for enjoyment and study in a manner largely determined by the individual user. Virtual museums of this type can be a powerful tool for comparative study and for research into a particular subject, material, or locality.
Many virtual museums have their roots in “Web sites” or “home pages” maintained on the Internet by museums in order to disseminate information about themselves. Museums' home pages usually contain administrative information such as opening hours, policies, and services. Some include a floor plan of the museum—as does, for instance, the Web site of the British Museum. Virtual museums in this limited sense join the exhibition, the guidebook, the photograph, and the videotape as a medium for promoting and interpreting a museum and its collection.
Extensive sites offering “virtual exhibitions”—that is, online tours of certain key exhibits—are maintained by some institutions, such as the Science Museum in London and the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley. Still other museums or administrative organs provide access to databases on collections—for instance, the Joconde database, maintained by the French Ministry of Culture, from which information can be obtained on important works of art held by more than 60 French museums.
Several institutions collect representations of widely dispersed objects that may or may not be found in museums. One of the pioneers in this field is ArtServe, a collection of thousands of images, particularly of classical art and architecture, made available by the Australian National University for teachers and students of art history. Virtual museums in this sense offer the student many benefits—not least in the selection of material for detailed study—even though final recourse may be necessary to the original material.
Virtual museums in the fullest sense of the term consist of collections that take full advantage of the easy access, loose structure, hyperlinking capacity, interactivity, and multimedia capabilities of the World Wide Web. Indeed, some early electronic collections were used to promote Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, when it was introduced in 1993. One of the first was EXPO, which originated in 1993 with an online guide to artifacts from the Vatican Library that were on display at the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. EXPO has been maintained since then on servers outside of the Library of Congress network and has been expanded into several “pavilions”—including archaeological, architectural, historical, and paleontological exhibits—which have been donated by several organizations. Another pioneer is the WebMuseum, an exhibition of artworks by Western painters from medieval times to the present day that was begun in 1994 by a computer scientist at the École Polytechnique in Paris. The WebMuseum grew to incorporate reproductions of paintings, background text, and musical selections submitted by a large number of contributors.
A directory to virtual museums and museum home pages on the Internet can be found in the World Wide Web Virtual Library: Museums, a service of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) that provides lists of museums by country as well as other categories. Worldwide museum sites can also be found in the Museum Online Resource Review, which provides keyword searching as well as lists of various kinds, and by the Guide to Museums and Cultural Resources.
Many schools use the Internet to form collections of material on a wide variety of subjects. Advice on building school virtual museums is provided by the Bellingham Public Schools in Bellingham, Wash.
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Nostratic hypothesis
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proposed, but still controversial, language family of northern Eurasia. The term Nostratic was proposed in 1903 by the Danish linguist Holger Pedersen to encompass Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, and possibly other language families under one broad category.
Modern research on the Nostratic hypothesis began with the work of the Russian Vladislav M. Illich-Svitych, who made a detailed case in the mid-1960s for the relatedness of the four above-named groups, together with Kartvelian and Dravidian. He also offered a detailed but still incomplete reconstruction of Proto-Nostratic. Important contributions to this theory were also made by the Russian-born Israeli linguist Aron Dolgopolsky. A quite different reconstruction of many of the same languages was proposed by the American Allan Bomhard.
After Illich-Svitych's premature death in 1966, his incomplete work was published with a number of problems still unsolved, and Bomhard's work raised additional unresolved issues. These are among the main reasons why Nostratic has not been well received thus far. More recently, rather than accept or reject the theory in toto, some researchers have focused on ways to correct its doubtful parts and build on the more promising aspects, e.g., revising parts of the proposed Nostratic sound system, adding to the lexical evidence for Nostratic, and resolving conflicts between Nostratic and existing work on the individual language families. This newer work, while also still controversial, is believed by many linguists to lend greater credibility to the Nostratic theory.
Illich-Svitych's work was based on a number of major advances achieved by the 1960s in the understanding of the prehistory of the various language families involved, so that he was comparing the reconstructed proto-forms of each branch of Nostratic rather than the more divergent later attested forms. He proposed systematic phonological correspondences among the various languages, accounting for these and hundreds of other forms; for example, Proto-Indo-European *t, *d, *dh correspond to Proto-Kartvelian *t', *t, *d, respectively. (An asterisk [*] indicates an unattested, reconstructed form.) In addition, Illich-Svitych proceeded by comparing all six protolanguages at once rather than two at a time, since parallels found across all or most of the language families being compared have a greater likelihood of being cognate (and thus representing a common genetic origin) than forms shared by only two or three of the families.
One of the most difficult problems in language comparison is to distinguish systematically between those words likely to be derived from a common protolanguage and the many words that are shared as a result of borrowing (and hence are not evidence of the languages themselves being related). Forms such as those listed above, including personal pronouns, some body parts, and natural phenomena, are known to be particularly resistant to borrowing, so parallels in these areas offer a strong diagnostic indicator of genetic relatedness.
The Nostratic theory remains highly controversial, in part because much of it was published posthumously, with many problems still unresolved. For a number of years after Illich-Svitych's death, there was little further research in Nostratic.
But in recent years, interest in the classification of the world's languages has been reawakened. In the 1990s, new research eliminated or refined many doubtful parts of Illich-Svitych's work and discovered significant new evidence for the validity of the theory. For example, a number of Nostratic words have been found to be more widely attested (especially in Kartvelian and Afro-Asiatic) than was suspected. One interesting new etymology would offer an explanation for the hitherto troublesome connection between the Indo-European prototypes of the English words five, finger, and fist, all of which appear to come from a newly reconstructed Nostratic word, *p'ayngV (with V representing a vowel whose exact features cannot be determined), denoting the hand, or perhaps a way of holding the hand with the fingers bent (as for counting), based on a comparison of Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic forms.
The study of Nostratic is still in its early stages and, even if its basic validity is accepted, many issues of reconstruction remain problematic. In addition, the inclusion in Nostratic of some of the six families, notably Afro-Asiatic and Dravidian, has been questioned, while at the same time some further language families are good candidates for inclusion (especially Yukaghir, Eskimo-Aleut, and Chukchi-Kamchatkan [Luorawetlan]).
The Nostratic theory is among the most promising of the many currently controversial theories of linguistic classification. It remains the best-argued of all the solutions hitherto presented for the affiliations of the languages of northern Eurasia, a problem that goes back to the German Franz Bopp and the Dane Rasmus Rask, two of the founders of Indo-European studies.
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Coustou, Nicolas
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French sculptor whose style was based upon the academic grand manner of the sculptors who decorated the Palace of Versailles, though with some of the freedom of the Rococo manner. He worked in a variety of mediums and produced many works, some in collaboration with his brother, Guillaume.
Coustou was trained by his father, François, and at the age of nineteen was sent to Paris to work in the studio of his uncle Antoine Coysevox. Coustou received a first prize in sculpture in 1682 with his bas-relief Cain Building the Town of Enoch and the next year went to Rome, where his works include Borghese Gladiator and a marble copy of a statue of the emperor Commodus in the guise of Hercules. In 1686 he returned to France and a year later settled in Paris. In 1688 he won a position at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture with an allegorical bas-relief in honour of Louis XIV; he was promoted to adjunct professor (1695), to professor (1702), to rector (1720), and, finally, to chancellor of the academy (1733).
During this period Coustou often received official commissions, which he sometimes carried out with his brother Guillaume. Some of Nicolas' most notable works were a sculpture for the St. Ambrose chapel of the Church of the Invalides, Paris (1692); four groups of Prophets in the St. Jerome chapel, Paris (1692); and a figure entitled France for the cornice of the Chambre du Roi at Versailles (1701). Coustou also contributed a number of sculptured pieces for the park of the Château de Marly not far from Versailles, including Diane and Endymion (1701), Adonis Rests from the Chase (1710), The Nymphes, and Julius Caesar (1696–1713). In 1713 he was commissioned to execute a large statue of St. Denis for the transept of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Paris. Coustou also provided a number of decorations for great houses in Paris and Lyons. Among his last works were a large marble bas-relief of the Passage of the Rhine (1715–18) and a commission completed in 1725 for the Descent from the Cross, in Notre-Dame, which completed a group collectively known as The Vow of Louis XIII. Coustou also executed a number of busts and funeral monuments.
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Cowen, Sir Frederic Hymen
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conductor, pianist, and composer who was widely regarded as one of the most versatile British musicians of his time.
Cowen exhibited his musical talent at an early age, and as a result his parents took him to England at age four to begin a musical apprenticeship. In 1860 he began studying with Julius Benedict and John Goss, and he later studied with leading musicians at the Leipzig Conservatory and in Berlin. On his return to England in 1868 he established himself as a composer, conductor, and accompanist and was active in British music festivals. His compositions include operas, oratorios, cantatas, orchestral suites, songs, and six symphonies. Cowen's Symphony No. 3 (1880; Scandinavian), the most successful of his symphonic works, was performed throughout Europe and the United States.
Cowen was active as a conductor in London, Glasgow, and Manchester and as an adjudicator at music festivals throughout the British Isles. He was knighted by King George V in 1911.
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Crawfurd, John
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Scottish Orientalist and East India Company employee who successfully combined scholarship and diplomatic abilities.
Trained as a doctor in Edinburgh, Crawfurd was first appointed, at age 20, to the North-West Provinces of India. He was transferred in 1808 to Penang (Pinang), off the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, and there he developed the keen interest in Malay language, culture, and history that was to illuminate much of his later scholarly work. When the British took Java from the Dutch in 1811, Crawfurd's familiarity with Indonesian peoples led to his appointment there in a series of civil and political posts (including that of resident at the court of the sultan of Yogyakarta) during the occupation; he continued to pursue his studies of insular Southeast Asia. While in England on leave from 1817, he wrote a monumental History of the Indian Archipelago, 3 vol. (1820).
Returning to India in 1820, Crawfurd was at once appointed by the marquess of Hastings to lead a diplomatic and trade mission to the courts of Thailand and Vietnam; he later published richly descriptive accounts (Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-General of India to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China [1828]). In 1823 Crawfurd succeeded Sir Stamford Raffles as resident of the fledgling settlement of Singapore; during a period of rapid population growth, Crawfurd administered it firmly and with fairness until 1826. He was appointed first British resident at the court of Ava in 1827, at the conclusion of the first Anglo-Burmese War and at a time of great difficulty in relations with Burma (Myanmar). Though he was able to remain there only briefly, he later published an important account of the kingdom, Journal of an Embassy to the Court of Ava (1829).
Retiring to England, Crawfurd stood unsuccessfully for Parliament four times in the 1830s. He devoted the remainder of his long life substantially to continued scholarly work on Southeast Asia, publishing his Grammar and Dictionary of the Malay Language, 2 vol. (1852), and a Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands and Adjacent Countries (1856), which remains a major repository of information on early 19th-century maritime Southeast Asia.
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Crayer, Caspar de
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Flemish painter, who was strongly influenced by his friend Peter Paul Rubens.
De Crayer was a pupil of Raphael Coxcie in Brussels, where he became a master in the painters' guild in 1607 and resided as a much-honoured citizen until 1664. In 1635 he was appointed court painter to the cardinal infant Ferdinand, for whose triumphal entry into Ghent he designed decorations. After Ferdinand's death in 1641, de Crayer received the title of painter to the king. In 1664 he moved to Ghent.
De Crayer was the painter of a large number of altarpieces, which were produced with the help of many assistants and still abound in the churches and museums in Flanders and elsewhere in Europe. His pictures of secular subjects are rare. His artistic development runs parallel in various respects to that of Rubens, but he surpassed most other close followers of Rubens in thoughtfulness and compositional skill. His portraits are much admired.
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Cressy, Hugh Paulin
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English Benedictine monk, historian, apologist, and spiritual writer noted for his editorship of writings by Counter-Reformation mystics.
Educated at Merton College, Oxford, Cressy became chaplain to Sir Thomas Wentworth (later earl of Strafford) and subsequently to Lucius Cary (later Lord Falkland); he was also dean of Leighlin, County Carlow, and canon of Windsor, Berkshire. While in Rome (1646), he converted to Roman Catholicism—owing to the writings of Father Augustine Baker and to Cary's death in the English Civil Wars (1643)—and became a monk of St. Gregory's, Douai (1649). Returning to England after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, he was appointed chaplain to Queen Catherine of Braganza at Somerset House.
His Exomologesis, an account of his conversion, appeared in Paris in 1647; he also wrote Church-History of Brittany or England, from the Beginning of Christianity to the Norman Conquest (1668) and several controversial tracts. His chief significance is as editor of the mystics Walter Hilton (1659), Blessed Julian of Norwich (1670), and Maurice Chauncey.
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Crowder, Enoch Herbert
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U.S. Army officer and administrator of the Selective Service Act in World War I.
Graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. (1881), Crowder fought with the cavalry against Indians in the West (1881–85). After serving as judge advocate to U.S. troops in the Philippines in the Spanish-American War, he was sent to Cuba, where he served (1906–08) as secretary of state and justice. He became judge advocate general of the U.S. Army in 1911 and was appointed provost marshal to administer the Selective Service Act when the law was enacted (May 1917). Crowder was U.S. ambassador to Cuba from 1923 to 1927.
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Cruyff, Johan
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Dutch football (soccer) forward renowned for both his imaginative playmaking and his reliable scoring. He won numerous honours in the game, including European Footballer of the Year (1971, 1973, and 1974).
Cruyff joined the youth development squad of Amsterdam's Ajax soccer club when he was 10 years old; he was 17 when he made his debut with the senior team. After helping Ajax to win six league titles, four national cups, and three European Champions Clubs' Cups, he was transferred to FC Barcelona in 1973. Captained by Cruyff, Barcelona won the Spanish League championship in 1974 and was runner-up in 1976 and 1977.
The temperamental Cruyff, along with Franz Beckenbauer of West Germany, was regarded as the world's finest player in an era when the European game was dominated by “total football,” a style of play developed by Dutch coach Rinus Michels that emphasized all-around skill, versatility, and creativity. Cruyff debuted with the Dutch national team when he was 18, and in the 1974 World Cup tournament the Dutch team, led by Cruyff and including Johan Neeskens and Ruud Krol, put on a memorable display of total football that earned them the nickname “Clockwork Orange” (a name borrowed from the novel but inspired by the team's orange jerseys). Although the Netherlands lost to West Germany in the championship match, Cruyff's individual brilliance won him the tournament's Golden Ball (Most Valuable Player) award.
After 1978 Cruyff played with several American teams, including the Los Angeles Aztecs and the Washington Diplomats, and he was named the North American Soccer League's Most Valuable Player in 1979. He returned to Ajax in 1981, first as a player, then as manager. In 1987 Cruyff coached Ajax to a Cup Winner's Cup, and he won the same cup in 1989 as manager of Barcelona. In 1992 he guided Barcelona to both the European Champion Clubs' Cup (now known as the UEFA [Union of European Football Associations] Champions League) and the UEFA Super Cup, but he was fired by the club in 1996. Cruyff was also involved in philanthropy. He founded both a nonprofit organization to encourage children to participate in sports and the Johan Cruyff Institute for Sport Studies, which provides an education in sports management to former athletes and coaches.
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Cujas, Jacques
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French jurist and classical scholar whose work on Roman law was part of the humanist revival of classical culture.
A teacher at the universities of Valence and Bourges, Cujas attracted outstanding students from all over Europe, among them the Dutch classical scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger. In jurisprudence Cujas specialized in Justinian; his Paratitla, or summaries of Justinian's Digest and Codex, expresses in short, clear axioms the elementary principles of Roman law. He also edited the Codex Theodosianus. A complete edition of Cujas's works, in 10 volumes (1658), was prepared by Charles Annibal Fabrot.
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Cunningham, R. Walter
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American astronaut and civilian participant in the Apollo 7 mission (Oct. 11–22, 1968), in which the first manned flight of Apollo Command and Service modules was made.
Cunningham enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1951 and transferred to the Marine Corps, where he served as a fighter pilot (1953–56). He majored in physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, receiving bachelor's (1960) and master's (1961) degrees but abandoning a doctoral program in favour of the manned space project in 1963. He left the space program in 1971 and became a corporation executive.
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D'Arcy, William Knox
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English businessman who was the principal founder of the Iranian oil industry.
As a youth D'Arcy emigrated with his father to Queensland, Australia, where between 1882 and 1889 he made a fortune in the Mount Morgan goldfield. He returned to London and, with British government assistance, secured (in 1901) a 60-year oil-mining concession in Iran. The area, more than 500,000 square miles (1,300,000 square km), included the entire country exclusive of five provinces bordering on Russia. The first strike of any value was made in May 1908 in southwestern Iran and led to the formation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909. D'Arcy retired from active business immediately thereafter. As the first Westerner to discover the oil-production potential of the Middle East, D'Arcy effectively transformed the region into an area of enduring geopolitical interest.
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Omalius d'Halloy, Jean-Baptiste-Julien d'
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Belgian geologist who was an early proponent of evolution.
D'Omalius was educated first in Liège and afterward in Paris. While a youth he became interested in geology (over the protests of his parents) and, having an independent income, was able to devote his energies to geologic researches. As early as 1808 he communicated to the Journal des mines a paper entitled Essai sur la géologie du Nord de la France (“Essay on the Geology of the North of France”).
At his father's urging, d'Omalius took on political responsibilities and became mayor of Skeuvre in 1807, governor of the province of Namur from 1815 to 1830, and a member of the Belgian senate from 1848. He was an active member of the Belgian Academy of Sciences from 1816 and served three times as president. He was likewise president of the Geological Society of France in 1852.
In Belgium and the Rhine provinces d'Omalius was one of the geologic pioneers in determining the stratigraphy of the Carboniferous and other rocks. He studied also in detail the Paleogene and Neogene deposits of the Paris Basin and ascertained the extent of the Cretaceous and some of the older strata, which he for the first time clearly depicted on a map (1817). He was distinguished as an ethnologist, and at nearly 90 years of age he was chosen president of the Congress of Prehistoric Archaeology (Brussels, 1872).
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Dacier, André
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classical scholar and translator who with his wife, Anne Dacier, was responsible for some of the famous Delphin series of editions of Latin classics.
Dacier studied at Saumur with the Humanist Tanneguy Lefèbvre, whose daughter Anne he married in 1683. He was made keeper of the library of the Louvre and, elected to the French Academy in 1695, became its permanent secretary in 1713. His pedantic, somewhat uninspired works include translations of Horace, Aristotle's Poetics, Plato's Dialogues, Sophocles' Oedipus and Electra, and Plutarch's Lives. For the Delphin series, he translated Festus and Flaccus.
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Dagerman, Stig
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Swedish short-story writer, novelist, and playwright whose works, showing the influence of William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and Dagerman's older compatriot, Eyvind Johnson, have been held to express a sense of Existentialist anguish.
A journalist, Dagerman scored a critical success with his play Den dödsdömde (first performed, 1947; The Man Condemned to Die). He was associated with the literary magazines 40-tal (1947–48) and Prisma (1948–50). A collection of his stories, translated into English as The Games of Night, appeared in 1959, five years after his suicide.
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