Rioting started during the first performance of the comedy The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1907.
The commotion was started by a reference to an undergarment.
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.
Scheherazade is the narrator of the Arabian Nights (c. 1450), who tells stories night after night to keep her husband, the Sultan Schahriah, from strangling her at dawn. Scheherazade tells her stories to her sister Dinarzade in the Sultan’s hearing.
As set forth by scholastic theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), the seven deadly sins are: anger, covetousness, envy, gluttony, lust, pride, and sloth.
In the Old English poem Beowulf (eighth cent.), Beowulf came from The Geats, a Scandinavian people.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Water, Water, everywhere/Nor any drop to drink” in his poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). The lines are often misquoted as “and not a drop to drink.”
A Confederacy of Dunces was published eleven years John Kennedy Toole’s death. Born in 1937, Toole finished his comic novel of New Orleans in 1963, but failed to find a publisher. He committed suicide in 1969. With the help of the novelist Walker Percy, his mother succeeded in getting the book published in 1980. Dunces…