Percy Shelley’s first wife Harriet Westbrook Shelley committed suicide by drowning in 1816, two years after Shelley left her for Mary Wollstonecraft.
Shelley had eloped with the sixteen-year-old Harriet in 1811.
Shelley himself died by drowning in a boating accident aboard his schooner, Ariel, in 1822.
Anne Tyler’s first novel was If Morning Ever Comes (1965), written in her early twenties. Born in 1941, Tyler was respected by critics but did not become widely known until Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1982.
Joel Chandler Harris adapted the Uncle Remus folktales, which were first published in the Atlanta Constitution and were later collected in Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1880).
In the 1964 play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window by Lorraine Hans-berry, it was located in Greenwich Village, New York City.
Chaucer’s pilgrims are going to Canterbury Cathedral to visit the shrine of Thomas a Becket, former archbishop of Canterbury. Becket had been assassinated in the cathedral in 1170, following a political disagreement with King Henry II. Pilgrimage to the shrine was a popular journey at the time the Tales were written (c. 1387-1400).
Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (c. 1851) ends with: “And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night”.
Edward Alleyn played Doctor Faustus in the original production of Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy, circa 1589. Alleyn also played the lead in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1587).