Ezra Mannon, a New England general returning from the Civil War represents Agamemnon in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra.
His wife Christine represents Clytemnestra.
George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess is based on Porgy (1925), by Du Bose Heyward. Heyward and his wife, Dorothy, won a Pulitzer prize for their dramatic version of the novel. Porgy is a crippled beggar and gambler who lives on Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina. Bess is his drug-addicted mistress.
“Laugh, and the world laughs with you,/ Weep, and you weep alone” are the opening lines of the poem “Solitude” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1855-1919).
Taken from the Greek word semeion, or “sign,” the term “semiotics” had its origins early in the twentieth century, when French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and American philosopher C. S. Peirce called for a new science of signs. Saussure called the discipline “semiology”; Peirce called it “semiotic.” Since then, semiotics as the study of cultural…
Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) by Oscar Wilde includes the statement “I can resist everything except temptation”.
The Latin translation of the Bible was written mostly by St. Jerome in 382-384 A.D. The term comes from Latin editio vulgata, “spread among the people.”
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).