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Colombe's Birthday
''Colombe's Birthday'' is a play written by Robert Browning. In 1843, he was approached by William Macready's rival Charles Kean to write a play for him. Browning took up the offer and finished the play in 1844. In March of that year, he read the finished play to Kean and his wife, Ellen Tree, and it was accepted for production. However, they could not promise its performance until 1845 and forced Browning not to publish it until then. Despite this request, the play was published five weeks later as the next number of his ''Bells and Pomegranates'' series. The play was finally produced in 1853 through the influence of Helen Faucit, who starred in the first production as the title character. Characters * Colombe of Ravenstein – Duchess of Juliers and Cleves * Sabyne – Colombe's attendant * Adolf – Colombe's attendant * Guibert – a courtier * Gaucelme - a courtier * Maufroy – a courtier * Clugnet – a courtier * Valence – advocate of Cleves * Prince Berthold – clai ...
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Robert Browning
Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings and challenging vocabulary and syntax. His early long poems ''Pauline'' (1833) and ''Paracelsus'' (1835) were acclaimed, but his reputation dwindled for a time – his 1840 poem ''Sordello'' was seen as wilfully obscure – and took over a decade to recover, by which time he had moved from Shelleyan forms to a more personal style. In 1846 he married fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett and moved to Italy. By her death in 1861 he had published the collection ''Men and Women'' (1855). His ''Dramatis Personae'' (1864) and book-length epic poem ''The Ring and the Book'' (1868–1869) made him a leading poet. By his death in 1889 he was seen as a sage and philosopher-poet who had fed into Victorian social and political discourse. Societies for ...
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William Macready
William Charles Macready (3 March 179327 April 1873) was an English actor. Life He was born in London the son of William Macready the elder, and actress Christina Ann Birch. Educated at Rugby School where he became headboy, and where now the theatre is named after him, it was his initial intention to go to University of Oxford, but in 1809 financial problems experienced by his father, the lessee of several provincial theatres, called him to share the responsibilities of theatrical management. On 7 June 1810, he made a successful first appearance as Romeo at Birmingham. Other Shakespearian parts followed, but a serious rupture between father and son resulted in the young man's departure for Bath in 1814. Here he remained for two years, with occasional professional visits to other provincial towns. On 16 September 1816, Macready made his first London appearance at Covent Garden as Orestes in ''The Distressed Mother'', a translation of Racine's ''Andromaque'' by Ambrose Philips. ...
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Charles Kean
Charles John Kean (18 January 181122 January 1868), was an English actor and theatre manager, best known for his revivals of Shakespearean plays. Life Kean was born at Waterford, Ireland, a son of actor Edmund Kean and actress Mary Kean (''nee'' Chambers). After preparatory education at Worplesdon and at Greenford, near Harrow, he was sent to Eton College, where he remained three years. In 1827, he was offered a cadetship in the East India Company's service, which he was prepared to accept if his father would settle an income of £400 on his mother. The elder Kean refused to do this, and his son determined to become an actor. He made his first appearance at Drury Lane on 1 October 1827 as Norval in Home's ''Douglas'', but his continued failure to achieve popularity led him to leave London in the spring of 1828 for the provinces. In Glasgow, on 1 October in that year, father and son acted together in Arnold Payne's ''Brutus'', the elder Kean in the title-part and his son as Tit ...
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Ellen Tree
Ellen Kean (12 December 1805 – 20 August 1880) was an English actress. She was known as Ellen Tree until her marriage in 1842, after which she was known both privately and professionally as Mrs Charles Kean and always appeared in productions together with her husband. Biography Early years Ellen Kean was born Eleanora Tree, the third of four daughters of Cornelius Tree, an official of the East India Company in London. Her three sisters became actresses, but, unlike Ellen, retired from the stage when they married. Her professional stage debut was in a musical version of ''Twelfth Night'' in London in 1822 as Olivia alongside her sister Maria as Viola.Wilson, M. Glen"Kean, Eleanora (1805–1880)" ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition, January 2008, accessed 25 May 2009. She gained experience touring in the provinces, and from 1826 was a regular member of the companies at the Drury Lane and Haymarket Theatres, ...
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Helen Faucit
Helena Saville Faucit, Lady Martin (11 October 1817 – 31 October 1898) was an English actress. Early life Born in London, she was the daughter of actors John Saville Faucit and Harriet Elizabeth Savill. Her parents separated when she was a girl, and her mother went to live with William Farren in 1825.Carol J. Carlisle, 'Saville , John Faucit (1783?–1853)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 200accessed 2 Nov 2015/ref> With her elder sister Harriet, she was trained for the stage by her step-uncle, Percy Farren. She debuted as Juliet at a small theatre in Richmond in 1833. Her performance was praised by critics of '' The Athenaeum'', but Farren delayed her professional debut to give her further training. Early career Faucit's first professional appearance was made on 5 January 1836 at Covent Garden as Julia in James Sheridan Knowles's ''The Hunchback''. Her debut, a spectacular success, placed her at once among the leading ...
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Cleves
Kleve (; traditional en, Cleves ; nl, Kleef; french: Clèves; es, Cléveris; la, Clivia; Low Rhenish: ''Kleff'') is a town in the Lower Rhine region of northwestern Germany near the Dutch border and the River Rhine. From the 11th century onwards, Cleves was capital of a county and later a duchy. Today, Cleves is the capital of the district of Cleves in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The city is home to one of the campuses of the Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences. Territory of the municipality In addition to the inner city, the territory of Kleve comprises fourteen villages and populated places: Bimmen, Brienen, Donsbrüggen, Düffelward, Griethausen, Keeken, Kellen, Materborn, Reichswalde, Rindern, Salmorth, Schenkenschanz, Warbeyen and Wardhausen. History The name ''Kleff'' probably derives from Middle Dutch ''clef'', ''clif'' 'cliff, bluff', referring to the promontory on which the Schwanenburg castle was constructed. Since the city's coat of ...
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Isobel Armstrong
Isobel Armstrong, (born 1937) is a British academic. She is professor emerita of English at Birkbeck, University of London and a senior research fellow of the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. She is a fellow of the British Academy. She has been a visiting scholar at many institutions, including at Princeton University in 2016-2017. She is also a published poet. Armstrong is the younger sister of writer Diana Wynne Jones. Career Armstrong is a critic of nineteenth-century poetry, literature and women's writing. Her publications include ''Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction'' (2017), ''The Radical Aesthetic'' (2000), ''Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre'' (1999) and ''Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Politics and Poetics'' (1993). Her book ''Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination'' (2008) won the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize. In ''Victorian Poetry ...
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Corn Law
The Corn Laws were tariffs and other trade restrictions on imported food and corn enforced in the United Kingdom between 1815 and 1846. The word ''corn'' in British English denotes all cereal grains, including wheat, oats and barley. They were designed to keep corn prices high to favour domestic producers, and represented British mercantilism. The Corn Laws blocked the import of cheap corn, initially by simply forbidding importation below a set price, and later by imposing steep import duties, making it too expensive to import it from abroad, even when food supplies were short. The House of Commons passed the corn law bill on March 10, 1815, the House of Lords on March 20 and the bill received Royal assent on March 23, 1815. The Corn Laws enhanced the profits and political power associated with land ownership. The laws raised food prices and the costs of living for the British public, and hampered the growth of other British economic sectors, such as manufacturing, by reducing ...
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Arthur Symons
Arthur William Symons (28 February 186522 January 1945) was a British poet, critic and magazine editor. Life Born in Milford Haven, Wales, to Cornish parents, Symons was educated privately, spending much of his time in France and Italy. In 1884–1886, he edited four of Bernard Quaritch's ''Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles'', and in 1888–1889 seven plays of the ''"Henry Irving" Shakespeare''. He became a member of the staff of the ''Athenaeum'' in 1891, and of the '' Saturday Review'' in 1894, but his major editorial feat was his work with the short-lived '' Savoy''. His first volume of verse, ''Days and Nights'' (1889), consisted of dramatic monologues. His later verse is influenced by a close study of modern French writers, of Charles Baudelaire, and especially of Paul Verlaine. He reflects French tendencies both in the subject-matter and style of his poems, in their eroticism and their vividness of description. Symons contributed poems and essays to ''The Yellow Book'', includ ...
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Rose Eytinge
Rose Eytinge (November 21, 1835 – December 20, 1911) was a Jewish American actress and author. She is thought to be the first American actor to earn a three figure salary. Biography Eytinge was born November 21, 1835 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She began on the amateur stage at 17 and soon was invited to join a professional touring company. Her professional debut was on stage at the Olympic Theatre. She performed with Edwin Booth in "The Fool's Revenge". With Booth and others, she toured Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.. President Abraham Lincoln attended her performances and she was invited to the White House. In 1855, she married the newspaperman and author David M. Barnes (1820-1900), but was divorced in 1862. They had one daughter, Rose Courtney, an actress who married actor John T. Raymond. Her niece, Pearl Eytinge, was also an actress. In 1869, she married Colonel George H. Butler, U. S. Consul General to Egypt. They lived abroad for ...
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Julia Marlowe
Julia Marlowe (born Sarah Frances Frost; August 17, 1865 – November 12, 1950) was an English-born American actress, known for her interpretations of William Shakespeare's plays. Life and career Marlowe was born as Sarah Frances Frost at Caldbeck, Cumberland, England, to clogger and shoemaker John Frost and Sarah (Strong) Hodgson. When she was four her family emigrated to the United States. Her father, who was an avid fan of local sports, "fled to America in 1870 under the erroneous impression that he had destroyed a neighbour's eye by flicking a whip at him during a race." He changed his name to Brough and after first settling in Kansas he moved his family east to Portsmouth, Ohio and then Cincinnati. Early career Marlowe obtained the nickname of "Fanny" and in her early teens began her career in the chorus of a juvenile opera company. While touring with the company for nearly a year performing Gilbert and Sullivan's ''H.M.S. Pinafore'' (1879), under the direction of Colonel ...
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