Word: gaol
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...Negro rights, only gave further momentum to the giant sitdown demonstration still scheduled for the weekend. Despite the underlying grimness, the whole affair took on a sort of gaiety. Among the latest eager ban-the-bombers were Angry Young Man John Osborne ("I shall be happy to go to gaol for six months"), Actresses Wendy Hiller and Vanessa Redgrave, Playwright Shelagh Delaney (Taste of Honey), Jazz Singer George Melly, Poet
...winter's day in Philadelphia 56 years ago, 15-year-old Emanuel Julius invested a dime in a paperback edition of Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It was, as it turned out, the wisest investment of his life. As Julius recalls in The World of Haldeman-Julius, an anthology of his writings published last week (Twayne Publishers of New York; 288 pp.; $4). Wilde's poem did something to him. "Never did I so much as notice that my hands were blue, that my wet nose was numb, and that my ears felt hard...
...stood by his friend when Wilde's homosexuality jostled him from society into Reading Gaol. During Oscar's trial, he advised him to escape to France-there was a yacht waiting, he said, with steam up in the Thames. (Shaw suspected the steam yacht was hot air, just as Painter Augustus John thought Harris' Rolls-Royce to be, "like Elijah's chariot, purely mythical.") When Oscar went to prison, Harris defied a savage social blockade to visit the ruined man, offered him ?500. There may have been genuine courage in his conduct, but typically, two days...
...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...