Where is Colonus and what was Oedipus doing there?
In Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus at Colonus (c. 406 B.C.), the blinded Oedipus wanders by accident into the sacred grove of the furies at Colonus in Attica, about a mile northwest of Athens.
In Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus at Colonus (c. 406 B.C.), the blinded Oedipus wanders by accident into the sacred grove of the furies at Colonus in Attica, about a mile northwest of Athens.
Philip Pirrip was Pip’s real name in Great Expectations.
Greek tragic actors wore “buskins,” boots that reached halfway up the calf and had thick soles to make the actors seem taller. The Greek word for the boot was cothurnus. “Buskin” first appeared as the English term in the sixteenth century.
Washington Irving is believed to have originated the expression “the Almighty Dollar” in Wolfert’s Roost (1855).
Lewis Carroll’s books are said to have been written for a friend, Alice Liddell. Liddell, with three other children on an 1862 boating trip, inspired the first of the stories, which Carroll initially called Alice’s Adventures Underground. The book, with additional tales as well as illustrations, was published in 1865, followed in 1871 by Through…
Milton’s masque Comus was first performed on Michaelmas Night (September 29), 1634, at Ludlow Castle to celebrate the Earl of Bridgewater’s becoming Lord President of Wales and the Marches. The Earl’s children enacted the roles of the Lady and her two brothers in the play.
Bellow’s friend Delmore Schwartz (1913-66), poet, fiction writer, and critic, was the model for Saul Bellow’s hard-drinking poet Von Humboldt Fleisher in the novel Humboldt’s Gift.