Word: dicken
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Christmas belongs to Dicken's Christmas Carol and a mantle plastered with cards blessing the family and signed sincerely by an embossing machine. The Fourth of July belongs to the Star Spangled Banner and corny political speeches delivered at the courthouse corn and weenie roast. Even Commencement belongs to something--we really don't know who or what, but its trademarks are a sheepskin inscribed with extinct languages, special issues of The Crimson, and maybe even Woody Allen to inspire our voyage to "The Real World...
Shaw took for his basic premise the situation of a young man's willingness to be executed in another person's place-very likely suggested by the end of Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities, where Sidney Carton goes to the guillotine in the stead of his friend Charles Marnay. Ironically, death did not, however, remain a matter of stage make-believe. Shaw wrote the play in 1896-97 at the request of the famous actor of melodrama Wiliam ("Breezy Bill") Terriss; but, before Terriss ever essaved the title role, he was murdered by a madman outside London...