Word: gaol
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...this period, Oscar Wilde wrote his Ballad of Reading Gaol. A great fan of the dandy Irishman, Gertrude could hardly bear that the author of such ethereal tales as "The Nightingale and the Rose" was in prison. Her writings show that she reacted wholeheartedly to literature; while Pembroke, by Mary Williams, made her feel soul-sick, Marius the Epicurean left her dissatisfied...
...Around the imminent hanging of such a man, who himself never appears on stage, Irish Playwright Brendan Behan, sometime I.R.A. man and jailbird (see SHOW BUSINESS), has set down a clearly on-the-spot account. As in that memoir of another Irish Prisoner-Playwright, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Quare Fellow records the atmosphere, the emotions, the tensions of convicts and gaolers as execution nears. But, in Behan's play, as atmospheric pressure mounts, the need for outlets intensifies. Voices are raised, and fists; a half-brutal, half-compulsive humor dominates; the hangman gets drunk; officials get edgy...
...They nearly made a national festival of it when, 100 years ago, Dr. William Palmer of Rugeley died a sportsman and a poisoner to his fingertips. On June 14, 1856, a crowd of 30,000 jostled and bargained for a good view of the scaffold outside Stafford Gaol, miners caroused in the taverns, and when Palmer died without a struggle, they cried, "Cheat! Twister!", for they had come to see him kick at the end of the rope. Britain's Robert Graves, poet, novelist, fabulist and all-round man of letters, has now issued a lively post-post-mortem...
...first gaol of the game was scored by William Collins on an assist from Richard Reilly. Later in the first period Reilly himself scored on a pass from George Higginbottom. The single goal of the third period was again the result of the Reilly-Collins combination with Collins scoring...
...gods who had endowed Wilde so richly with comic gifts refused to allow him the bonus of tragedy. Apart from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde produced nothing in the three years between his release from prison and his death (in 1900, of cerebral meningitis). Humor was his nature, sorrow only his perversity-as he himself may have realized, for it is said that when confronted with a huge bill for a surgical operation toward the end of his life, he sank back into the arms of the Comic Muse, saying: "Ah, well, then, I suppose that I shall have...