#OTD in 1878.
Henry Irving's production of Hamlet, with himself in the title rôle playing opposite Ellen Terry as Ophelia, opens at the Lyceum Theatre, London (of which they have taken over the management). The tendency of actor-managers to emphasise the importance of their own central character did not always meet with the critics' approval.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet
Hamlet at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1524
What Influenced Mary Shelley to Write Frankenstein?
Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is today lauded as the first science fiction novel as well as a seminal work of Gothic horror.
By Lauren Jones
https://www.thecollector.com/mary-shelley-wrote-frankenstein-novel/
#OTD in 1845.
The American actress Charlotte Cushman plays Romeo to her sister Susan's Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet at the Haymarket Theatre in London.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Cushman
Romeo and Juliet at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1513
#OTD in 1785.
The Marquis de Sade finishes writing The 120 Days of Sodom (Les 120 Journées de Sodome) while imprisoned in the Bastille; it will not be published until 1904.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_120_Days_of_Sodom
#OTD in 1877.
Anna Sewell's animal welfare novel Black Beauty is published. It was written from a horse as main character's perspective. Sewell wrote it in the last years of her life, during which she was bedridden and seriously ill.
"Knowledge, like matter, he would affirm, was divisible in infinitum; — that the grains and scruples were as much a part of it as the gravitation of the whole world."
Tristram Shandy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Sterne
English novelist, poet and musicologist Sylvia Townsend Warner was born #OTD in 1893.
Warner initially trained as a musicologist and contributed to the Oxford University Press's Dictionary of National Biography before transitioning to a literary career. Lolly Willowes (1926) it is her debut novel and one of her most celebrated works, it is a feminist tale about a spinster who finds liberation through witchcraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Townsend_Warner
#OTD in 1891.
Maurice Maeterlinck's play The Blind (written in 1890) is premièred. Les Aveugles is, along with L'Intruse, one of Maurice Maeterlinck's first two plays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_(play)
Les Aveugles is available at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48368
"Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel."
Jack London died #OTD in 1916.
A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.
When you were people
We could have loved you,
Found out your names
And brought you presents…
—“Poem for Innocent Victims of War” by AC Jacobs (1937–1994) – born #OTD, 30 May
Published in NAMELESS COUNTRY: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2018)
A 🎂 🧵
1/6
https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781784106751/nameless-country/
#Scottish #literature #poetry #Jewish #diaspora #20thcentury #warpoetry
#OTD in 1816.
Percy Bysshe Shelley marries his mistress Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in London, after the suicides on October 9 of her half-sister, Fanny Imlay (by laudanum in Swansea), and on December 10 of his pregnant estranged first wife, Harriet (by drowning in The Serpentine).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley
Books by Percy Bysshe Shelley at G:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1529
Books by Mary Wollstonecraft at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/84
#OTD in 1899.
William Gillette's play Sherlock Holmes, based (with authorisation) on the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, opens in New York City with himself in the title rôle.
Danish author Marie Bregendahl was born #OTD in 1867.
Her first novel Hendrik i Bakken was published in 1904. She went on to gain fame with En Dødsnat in 1912, based on the death of her mother when she was only 12.
#OTD in 1856.
The first of George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life and her first work of fiction, "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton", is submitted to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine by G. H. Lewes for anonymous publication.
25,000 Images of Medieval Geoffrey Chaucer Manuscripts Are Now Online
By Regina Sienra
https://mymodernmet.com/geoffrey-chaucer-manuscripts-british-library/
Geoffrey Chaucer at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/144
#OTD in 1871.
First performance of The Bells starring Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre, London. The Bells is a translation by Leopold Lewis of the 1867 play Le Juif polonais by Erckmann-Chatrian.
#OTD in 1836.
The funeral of Czech romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha takes place on what should have been the day of his wedding to Eleonora Šomková, about a month after the birth of their child.
French writer Laure Junot, duchess d’Abrantès was born #OTD in 1784.
It was Honoré de Balzac who urged her to write her Memoirs, which he corrected tirelessly and which, once successful, she shamelessly denied he'd had a hand in.
#OTD in 1859
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, an early example of mystery fiction, begins serialisation in All the Year Round.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_in_White_(novel)#
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Year_Round
#OTD in 1952.
Agatha Christie's murder-mystery play The Mousetrap opens at the Ambassadors Theatre in London's West End after a premiere in Nottingham, UK. It will become the longest continuously running play in history.
In the Mouth of a Whale
Herman Melville and the watery beast.
By Herman Melville
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/animals/mouth-whale/?campaign=FE11LQA4
Books by Herman Melville at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/9
Why Did Shakespeare Write Macbeth?Shakespeare’s influences while writing this tragedy may have come from a variety of sources and events.
https://www.thecollector.com/why-did-shakespeare-write-macbeth/
#OTD in 1919.
The Großes Schauspielhaus opens as a theater in Berlin, with an interior designed by Hans Poelzig. It begins with the director Max Reinhardt's production of the Oresteia.
The House of Atreus at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8604
#OTD in 1899.
Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, a reworking of his The Wood Demon (1889), receives its Russian metropolitan première at the Moscow Art Theatre.
Is beauty natural?
Charles Darwin was as fascinated by extravagant ornament in nature as Jane Austen was in culture. Did their explanations agree?
By Abigail Tulenko via @aeonmag
https://aeon.co/essays/how-austen-and-darwin-converged-on-the-question-of-beauty
