MONDAY, 17 APRIL, 2006
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Poem: "A Lamb By Its Ma" by Chase Twichell, from Dog Language. © Copper Canyon Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
A Lamb By Its Ma
Just before it rains, the lilacs
thrash weakly,
storm light heightening
the clusters drooping
at their peak of scent,
wind running
trough them like slow water,
then a splash, mood swing:
leaves spangled with drops
from inside the storm.
Mary made us come inside
if there was lighting,
flapping a white towel
to call us back.
We hung around the kitchen
drinking tea till it cleared.
She brought us tea at bedtime.
A good cup of black tea
and you'll sleep like a lamb by its ma.
She told us that our parents
loved us, that their war
was theirs alone.
She said it in the charged air,
in the scent of their absence
from the house,
their clean absence.
If thunder came at night,
she told about the brave
and faithful dogs of Scotland,
how a shepherd knows
where his lamb has gone
by bits of wool in the wire.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Isak Dinesen, (books by this author) born Karen Dinesen on a rural estate called Rungsted near Copenhagen, Denmark (1885). She came from a wealthy family of landowners and writers. Her grandfather was a friend of Hans Christian Andersen. She started writing at an early age, and one of the first stories she published was about a woman who has a love affair with a ghost.
In college she fell in love with the son of Baron Blixen of Sweden. But when he refused to marry her, she decided to get revenge by marrying his twin brother. She and her husband then moved to Kenya where they started a coffee plantation. She fell in love with Africa, and thought of it as a kind of Eden.
But she and her husband did not get along and they separated in 1925. She was alone and unhappy on the coffee plantation, and said, "I began in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times." The plantation grew less and less profitable and she struggled to stay in business. After a swarm of locusts and a drought, she finally had to sell the farm to a local developer.
But just as she was leaving Africa for good, Dinesen sent some of her stories to a publisher, and they were published as the collection Seven Gothic Tales (1934). Out of Africa came out in 1937.
Isak Dinesen said, "All sorrows can be borne, if you put them into a story."
It's the birthday of novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, (books by this author) born in Madison, Wisconsin (1897). As a boy, he lived near a university theater where they performed Greek dramas, and his mother let him participate as a member of the chorus. He never forgot the experience, and decided then that he would try to write for the theater someday.
Wilder got a job at the University of Chicago and began to write a series of experimental one-act plays that used almost no scenery or props, and often included an all-knowing character called the Stage Manager. Then, in 1938, he produced the play for which he is best known, Our Town, about the New England village of Grover's Corners.
TUESDAY, 18 APRIL, 2006
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Poem: "Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire" by Robert Phillips from Circumstances Beyond Our Control: Poems. © Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
I, Rose Rosenfeld, am one of the workers
who survived. Before the inferno broke out,
factory doors had been locked by the owners,
to keep us at our sewing machines,
to keep us from stealing scraps of cloth.
I said to myself, What are the bosses doing?
I knew they would save themselves.
I left my big-button-attacher machine,
climbed the iron stairs to the tenth floor
where their offices were. From the landing window
I saw girls in shirtwaists flying by,
Catherine wheels projected like Zeppelins
out open windows, then plunging downward,
sighing skirts open parasols on fire.
I found the big shots stuffing themselves
into the freight elevator going to the roof.
I squeezed in. While our girls were falling,
we ascended like ashes. Firemen
yanked us onto the next-door roof.
I sank to the tarpaper, sobbed for
one-hundred forty-six comrades dying
or dead down below. One was Rebecca,
my only close friend, a forewoman kind to workers.
Like the others, she burned like a prism.
Relatives of twenty-three victims later
Brought suits.
Each family was awarded seventy-five dollars.
It was like the Titanic the very next year-
No one cared about the souls in steerage.
Those doors were locked, too, a sweatshop at sea.
They died due to ice, not fire. I live in
Southern California now. But I still see
skirts rippling like parachutes,
girls hit the cobblestones, smell smoke,
burnt flesh, girls cracking like cheap buttons,
disappearing like so many dropped stitches.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of lawyer and writer Clarence (Seward) Darrow, (books by this author) born in Kinsman, Ohio (1857). Darrow became famous for defending some of the most unpopular people of his time. In the 1925 Monkey Trial, he defended high school teacher John Scopes for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in a Tennessee school. In "The Crime of the Century," in 1924, he successfully defended two confessed teenage murderers, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, from receiving the death penalty.
He wrote the novel An Eye for an Eye (1905), and the nonfiction books Crime: Its Cause and Treatment (1922), The Prohibition Mania (1927), and The Story of My Life (1932).
He once said: "I never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure."
On this day in 1906 an earthquake struck San Francisco. It was one of the worst natural disasters in American history. At the time, San Francisco had a population of about 450,000 people and was the busiest port on the Pacific coast of the United States. Business had been booming, and new office buildings, factories, mansions and hotels had been constructed all over the city.
The earthquake began near dawn, at 5:12 AM on a Wednesday morning, and lasted for a little over a minute. Scientists later determined that the San Andreas Fault had moved about twenty-three feet. The quake measured 8.3 on the Richter scale, and it was felt from southern Oregon to south of Los Angeles and as far east as central Nevada. The epicenter was near San Francisco.
A San Francisco journalist named James Hopper said, "The earthquake started ... with a direct violence that left one breathless. ... There was something personal about the attack; it seemed to have a certain vicious intent. My building quivered with a vertical and rotary motion and there was a sound as of a snarl. ... My head on the pillow, I watched my stretched and stiffened body ... springing up and down and from side to side like a pancake in the tossing griddle of an experienced French chef."
A policeman said, "[The streets] began to dance and rear and roll in waves like a rough sea in a squall, [then] sank in places and vomited up car tracks and the tunnels that carried the cable. These lifted themselves out of the pavement, and bent and snapped."
The world-famous tenor Enrico Caruso had performed at San Francisco's Grand Opera House the night before, and he woke up in his bed as the Palace Hotel was falling down around him. He stumbled out into the street, and because he was terrified that that shock might have ruined his voice, he began singing.
There was a loud sound of an explosion as the city gas plant blew up. Wooden structures caught fire from overturned stoves and immediately began to burn. The fire department went out to fight the fires, only to find that the city had lost all of its running water. Firemen attempted to stop the spread of fire by dynamiting whole city blocks, but despite their efforts the fire raged for three days and most of the city burned to the ground.
More than 500 city blocks and more than 28,000 buildings were in ruins. Some 250,000 people were left homeless. Nearly 3,000 people died. Americans mourned the loss of San Francisco, one of the country's greatest cities. The journalist Will Irwin wrote in the New York Sun, "The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest-hearted, most pleasure-loving city of this continent, and in many ways the most interesting and romantic, is a horde of huddled refugees living among ruins. ... San Francisco is the city that was."
But people immediately began rebuilding the city. In three years, about 20,000 new buildings went up.
WEDNESDAY, 19 APRIL, 2006
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Poem: "Who Will Know?" by Joyce Kennedy from Ghost Lamp. © Laurel Poetry Collective. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Who Will Know?
He wanted to stay.
He didn't ask for much.
He wanted to know what was "going on,"
He read the paper every day.
The world is like a sponge.
It absorbs us.
Mother was grieved with the nursing home.
He said, "Kiddo, it's all right."
The world goes on its way.
Now that he's gone, who will know?
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1943 that an uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto began. It was the largest ghetto uprising of World War II.
Hitler's army had invaded Poland in September of 1939. Warsaw was the last city in Poland to submit to the Nazis, but on September 27, after three weeks of resistance, the city finally surrendered. One Warsaw man wrote in his diary, "All about us buildings lie in ruins. ... If there is a Hell, this is it. [The] hospital was set afire. ... The shrieks of those trapped in the flames could be heard for blocks around, even above the crash of shells and bombs."
Conditions only got worse. There were about 300,000 Jews in Warsaw to begin with, but thousands more Jewish refugees streamed in from smaller towns. On October 3, 1940, about a year after the invasion, the Nazis officially announced the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto. They built a wall around a section of the city measuring about twenty blocks by six blocks. Jews were given a month to move into the ghetto, and all non-Jews were ordered to leave. Jews had to leave almost all of their possessions in their homes, and many of the Poles who left the ghetto area moved into their old apartments.
Almost all of the Jews in Warsaw lost their jobs, and many of them went around collecting rags, bones, tin, and paper to sell to the Germans. Some worked in factories and shops set up by the Nazis. Others started trading on the black market.
In the winter, there were often fuel shortages, and not much gas and electricity. Pneumonia, influenza, bronchitis, and other diseases were common. Many people got frostbite, and some elderly people and children froze to death in their beds. The ground was so hard that graves had to be blasted out with dynamite. Fur coats, wood, and coal were smuggled in to keep people warm.
Eventually, small resistance groups began to pop up in the ghetto. One socialist group formed cells of five members each, so that the member only knew of the other four people in their cell. Underground newspapers were published in both Polish and Yiddish. The Nazis had confiscated almost all of the printing presses in the city, but people reconstructed presses from discarded machinery and printed the newspapers on paper they found in the trash. All the official schools were closed down, but secret schools were formed in basements and abandoned buildings. Professional musicians who had managed to keep their instruments began playing beautiful music on the streets. One survivor said they "turned Warsaw into a city of song."
In the summer of 1942, the Nazis began Operation Reinhard—the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the concentration camp in Treblinka. From July to September, over 300,000 Jews were deported, leaving only about 50,000 people in the ghetto. When reports of mass murder leaked back to the ghetto, a group of people, mostly young men, formed a resistance group called the Z.O.B.—which in Polish stood for Jewish Fighting Organization.
Members of the group began ambushing Nazi officials and stealing their weapons, and they got more weapons by smuggling them in from outside the ghetto. The leader of the group, a twenty-three-year-old man named Mordecai Anielewicz, organized several underground factories for making grenades, bombs and mines. He also supervised the creation of a chain of tunnels, trenches and bunkers for people to hide out in.
In January of 1943, ghetto fighters opened fire on German troops as they tried to round up more people for deportation. The Nazis were forced to retreat and the Jewish fighters gained the confidence to go ahead with a bigger revolt. Then, on this day, April 19, 1943, the first day of Passover, hundreds of German soldiers entered the ghetto in rows of tanks, planning to destroy the ghetto in three days. But resistance fighters fought back with the guns and grenades they had been storing. Fighting went on for days; when they ran out of grenades the Jews fought with kitchen knives, chair legs—whatever they could get their hands on. They hid in their trenches and tunnels and in the sewers. They held out for almost a month, but on May 16 the revolt ended. Nazis burned down buildings, shot many of the remaining Jews, and sent the rest of them to concentration camps.
On the forty-fifth anniversary of the uprising, a survivor named Irena Klepfisz said, "What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures. ... Ordinariness is the most precious thing we struggle for, what the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for. Not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth—an ordinary life."
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Poems: "Water-Lilies" by John Clare. Public domain. And an excerpt from "The Flower" by George Herbert. Public domain. (buy now)
Water-Lilies
The water-lilies on the meadow stream
Again spread out their leaves of glossy green;
And some, yet young, of a rich copper gleam,
Scarce open, in the sunny stream are seen,
Throwing a richness upon Leisure's eye,
That thither wanders in a vacant joy;
While on the sloping banks, luxuriantly,
Tending of horse and cow, the chubby boy,
In self-delighted whims, will often throw
Pebbles, to hit and splash their sunny leaves;
Yet quickly dry again, they shine and glow
Like some rich vision that his eye deceives;
Spreading above the water, day by day,
In dangerous deeps, yet out of danger's way.
from The Flower
How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are Thy returns! even as the flowers in Spring,
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring;
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.
Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown,
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O, my only Light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.
Literary and Historical Notes:
In 1841, on this day, the first detective story was published. In his story The Murders in the Rue Morgue," published in Graham's Magazine, Edgar Allen Poe (books by this author) created mystery's first fictional detective, Auguste C. Dupin. The story introduced many of the elements of mysteries that are still popular today: the genius detective, the not-so-smart sidekick, the plodding policeman and the use of the red herring to lead readers off the track.
It's the birthday of musician (Ernest Anthony) Tito Puente, (books by this author) born in New York, New York (1923). He became known as the Mambo King.
Puente always saw his music in terms of dance. He said, "I think as a dancer, not a musician. [I ask], 'How would it look as a dance?'" Even when recording his hundredth album, he insisted that the music be recorded live, with the entire orchestra present, as opposed to one section at a time, the way most recording is now done. When his agent suggested this might waste time, Puente replied, "You don't understand. ... I'm a dancer. I must dance in the studio while the whole thing is playing to see if it really works."
It's the birthday of science fiction writer Ian Watson, (books by this author) born in St. Albans, England (1943). He's known for his Black River/Yaleen trilogy: The Book of the River (1984), The Book of the Stars (1984), and The Book of Being (1985).
It's the birthday of artist Joan Miró, born in Barcelona, Spain (1893). He became known for his colorful, surrealistic paintings that combined abstract shapes with plants, animals and people.
It's the birthday of one of the founders of psychiatry, Philippe Pinel, born in Saint-André, France (1745). He studied mathematics, theology and internal medicine before becoming the chief physician at a Paris insane asylum in 1792. Before Pinel arrived, conditions at the asylum were horrible: patients were chained to the walls like animals and people could pay a fee to come in and watch them.
Pinel put a stop to these practices, as well as misguided treatments like bleeding, purging and blistering. Popular theory at the time held that the insane were possessed by demons, but Pinel argued that they were just under social and psychological stresses. He started treating patients by talking to them about their problems in intense conversations on a regular basis, which paved the way for modern psychiatric practices.
FRIDAY, 21 APRIL, 2006
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Poem: "Bronco Busting, Event #1" by May Swenson from Nature: Poems Old and New. © Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Bronco Busting, Event #1
The stall is so tight he can't raise heels or knees
when the cowboy, coccyx to bareback, touches down
tender as a deerfly, forks him, gripping the rope-
handle over the withers, testing the cinch,
as if hired to lift a cumbersome piece of brown
luggage, while assistants perched on the rails arrange
the kicker, a foam-rubber band around the narrowest,
most ticklish part of the loins, leaning full weight
on neck and rump to keep him throttled, this horse,
"Firecracker," jacked out of the box through the sprung
gate, in the same second raked both sides of the belly
by ratchets on booted heels, bursts into five-way
motion: bucks, pitches, swivels, humps, and twists,
an all-over-body-sneeze that must repeat
until the flapping bony lump attached to his spine is gone.
A horn squawks. Up from the dust gets a buster named Tucson.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of John Clifford Mortimer, (books by this author) born in London (1923). He's best known as the author of the novels featuring the lawyer Rumpole of the Bailey.
He wrote his first novel when he was in law school, and he's continued to practice law his entire life, writing plays, novels and screenplays in his spare time. He once boasted with no particular vanity, of being "the best playwright ever to have defended a murderer at the Central Criminal Court." He became well known in Great Britain, but most Americans hadn't heard of him until the BBC's adaptation of his Rumpole books aired on PBS in the early '80s.
As a lawyer, Mortimer developed a reputation for fighting for civil rights and free speech. Mortimer once said that comedy is "the only thing worth writing in this despairing age, provided the comedy is truly on the side of the lonely, the neglected, and the unsuccessful, and plays its part in the war against established rules."
It's the birthday of writer and naturalist John Muir, (books by this aurhor) born in Dunbar, Scotland (1838). In 1867 he was working at a carriage parts shop in Indianapolis when he almost lost one of his eyes in a freak accident. He later said, "I felt neither pain nor faintness, the thought was so tremendous that my right eye was gone—that I should never look at a flower again." He was so affected by the incident that he decided to quit his job and walk across the country, living as close to nature as possible.
He walked for a thousand miles, from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, and then he sailed to Cuba, Panama, and finally California, which would become his home for the rest of his life. He fell in love with the Sierra Mountains in California, and spent much of his time hiking and camping there. He also visited Alaska, South America, Australia, Africa, China, Europe and Japan, studying plants, animals, rocks and glaciers. He was largely responsible for the creation of Yosemite National Park in 1890, and in 1892, he helped found the Sierra Club. He also published many books, including The Mountains of California (1894).
It's the birthday of Charlotte Brontë, (books by this author) born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England (1816). She's the oldest of the three famous Brontë sisters. Anne wrote Agnes Grey (1847), Emily wrote Wuthering Heights (1847), and Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre (1847), about a smart, passionate governess working for a mysterious man named Mr. Rochester.
Wuthering Heights got mostly good reviews, and Jane Eyre was an even bigger success. But as soon as critics started to suspect that the novels were written by women, they turned against them, calling them "coarse," "unfeminine," and "anti-Christian." Within two years of the publication of Jane Eyre, all of Charlotte's siblings had died. She continued to write novels, including Villette (1853), but she was often sick and usually unhappy. She married her father's curate in 1854 but died soon after from complications with her pregnancy.
It's the birthday of humorist Josh Billings, born Henry Wheeler Shaw in Lanesboro, Massachusetts (1818). Billings said, "Don't take the bull by the horns, take him by the tail; then you can let go when you want to."
SATURDAY, 22 APRIL, 2006
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Poem: "House" by Billy Collins from The Trouble With Poetry: And Other Poems. © Random House. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
House
I lie in a bedroom of a house
that was built in 1862, we were told—
the two windows still facing east
into the bright daily reveille of the sun.
The early birds are chirping,
and I think of those who have slept here before,
the family we bought the house from—
the five Critchlows—
and the engineer they told us about
who lived here alone before them,
the one who built onto the back
of the house a large glassy room with wood beams.
I have an old photograph of the house
in black and white, a few small trees,
and a curved dirt driveway,
but I do not know who lived here then.
So I go back to the Civil War
and to the farmer who built the house
and the rough stone walls
that encompass the house and run up into the woods,
he who mounted his thin wife in this room,
while the war raged to the south,
with the strength of a dairyman
or with the tenderness of a dairyman
or with both, alternating back and forth
so as to give his wife much pleasure
and to call down a son to earth
to take over the cows and the farm
when he no longer had the strength
after all the days and nights of toil and prayer—
the sun breaking over the same horizon
into these same windows,
lighting the same bed-space where I lie
having nothing to farm, and no son,
the dead farmer and his dead wife for company,
feeling better and worse by turns.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Norwegian-American novelist O. E. (Ole Edvart) Rolvaag, (books by this author) born in Helgeland, Norway in 1876. He grew up on Donna Island, a tiny treeless island just south of the Arctic Circle. When he was fifteen, he dropped out of school and began to go on daylong fishing expeditions. Five years later, he quit his life as a fisherman and sailed to the United States.
He landed in New York with almost no money and no prospects, and ended up walking the entire night to find a farm where the family could speak Norwegian. Eventually, he made his way to South Dakota, where he worked on his uncle's farm for three years. He got a degree from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and went on to write novels chronicling the experiences of Norwegian immigrants in the American Midwest, including his most famous book, Giants in the Earth (1927).
It's the birthday of American novelist Ellen Glasgow, (books by this author) born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1873. She penned realistic novels about Virginian society in the nineteenth century. She wrote The Deliverance (1904), about class conflicts in the wake of the Civil War, and she wrote In This Our Life, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1942.
It's the birthday of philosopher Immanuel Kant, (books by this author) born in Königsberg, Germany, in 1724. He wrote hugely influential treatises, including Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Critique of Judgment (1790).
He never traveled more than one hundred miles from his home city and held to a strict daily routine. It has been said that the people of Königsberg set their watches by his daily afternoon walks.
It's the birthday of Henry Fielding, (books by this author) born in Sharpham Park, Somerset, England (1707). He was one of the first great novelists to write in English.
He was a socialite and a womanizer, famous for his inspired bouts of drunkenness. He wrote more than twenty hit plays and became known for making fun of the politicians of his day. The prime minister at the time, Sir Robert Walpole, was fed up with all of the rowdy political satires that had become so popular in London theaters. He thought that Fielding in particular had gone over the line with some of his jokes; and so in 1737 the Theatrical Licensing Act was passed, which said that only plays licensed by the government could be performed.
Fielding knew that none of his plays would ever be approved by the government, so he quit writing plays and went to law school. Seven years later, he published his most famous novel, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, about a boy who is left on the bed of an aristocrat who decides to raise the child himself. As a young man, Tom is expelled from the house and goes on to have a series of adventures.
SUNDAY, 23 APRIL, 2006
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Poem: "Sonnet 104" by William Shakespeare. Public domain. (buy now)
Sonnet 104
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April pérfumes in three hot Junes burned,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah yet doth beauty, like a dial hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived:
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred,
Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, (books by this author) born in St. Petersburg, Russia (1899). He described himself as "a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library." He learned to read and write English before he could do so in Russian, and his family spoke in a mixture of English, French and Russian. But Nabokov's family had to flee Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution.
In 1940, he sailed to America with his family, arriving in New York City poor and almost completely unknown. He struggled to support his family with a series of jobs teaching at New England colleges. Then, in the summer of 1951, he and his wife drove to Colorado in their Oldsmobile station wagon and he began to work on a novel in the car about a middle-aged European man named Humbert Humbert who falls in love with a twelve-year-old American girl named Dolores Haze. And that was Lolita (1955).
He later said that the novel was, in part, about his love affair with the English language. But it was hugely controversial, and the controversy helped the novel become a big best-seller. Nabokov was finally able to quit teaching and move with his wife to a hotel in Switzerland.
Today is believed to be the birthday of William Shakespeare, (books by this author) born in Stratford-on-Avon, England (1564). He was a playwright and poet, and is considered to be the most influential and perhaps the greatest writer in the English language. He gave us many beloved plays, including Romeo and Juliet (1594), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595), Hamlet (1600), Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1605).
Only a few scattered facts are known about his life. He was born and raised in the picturesque market town of Stratford-on-Avon, surrounded by woodlands. His father was a glover and a leather merchant; he and his wife had eight children including William, but three of them died in childbirth. William probably left grammar school when he was thirteen years old, but continued to study on his own.
He went to London around 1588 to pursue his career in drama and by 1592 he was a well-known actor. He joined an acting troupe in 1594 and wrote many plays for the group while continuing to act. Scholars believe that he usually played the part of the first character that came on stage, but that in Hamlet he played the ghost.
Some scholars have suggested that Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays attributed to him because he had no formal education. A group of scientists recently plugged all his plays into a computer and tried to compare his work to other writers of his day, such as Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and the Earl of Oxford. The only writer they found who frequently used words and phrases similar to Shakespeare's was Queen Elizabeth I, and she was eventually ruled out as well.
Shakespeare used one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, almost 30,000 words, and he was the first writer to invent or record many of our most common turns of phrase, including "foul play," "as luck would have it," "your own flesh and blood," "too much of a good thing," "good riddance," "in one fell swoop," "cruel to be kind," "play fast and loose," "vanish into thin air," "the game is up," "truth will out" and "in the twinkling of an eye."
Shakespeare has always been popular in America, and many colonists kept copies of his complete works along with their Bibles. Pioneers performed his work out West. Many of the mines and canyons across the West are named after Shakespeare or one of his characters. Three mines in Colorado are called Ophelia, Cordelia, and Desdemona.
Shakespeare continues to be the most produced playwright in the world.
