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.
The subtitle of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is A Tale of the Seaboard.
Osric, a foppish courtier, is the referee in the duel between Hamlet and Laertes in Act 5 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) says “I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul” in “Invictus.”
In Rabelais’s French satire Gargantua and Pantagruel (1533), Gargantua is Pantagruel’s father. Both are giants who go on humorous adventures.
The alienated artist never discovered food that he enjoyed, so he starves to death in Franz Kafka’s short story “The Hunger Artist.”
From Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of the Books (1704). Matthew Arnold used the phrase “sweetness and light” in Culture and Anarchy (1869) to elaborate his idea of culture as a humanizing and ennobling force.