Word: gibbets
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Give a dog an ill name, says the proverb, and he'll soon be hanged. Hang a man for piracy and he'll be known as a bloody pirate to all posterity. Captain Kidd, who ended his career in a gibbet on Execution Dock, has become the legendary archetype of brutal buccaneer. Says Biographer Wilkins: poor Captain Kidd was a much-maligned man. In a 411-page examination of the contemporary documents in Kidd's case, Sleuth Wilkins sniffs the cold, obscured trail like an eager beagle. His beaglish enthusiasm, indeed, takes Author Wilkins in a wide...
...Cambridge. When he went to the U. S. in 1905 and began to lecture, he found his metier: "Yes, the platform has been everything to me. It has been the bed of my erotic joys. It has been the battlefield of my fiercest struggles. It has been the gibbet of my execution. It has been the post of my scourging. It has been my throne. It has been my close-stool. It has been my grave. It has been my resurrection. On the platform I have expressed by a whisper, by a silence, by a gesture...
Breaks from prison, both righteous and illegitimate, are not lacking to this volume. Jack Sheppard, an 18th century felon of note, laughed at locksmiths and was the beadle's despair of his time. His uncanny dexterity at picking his way out of gaol not only cheated the gibbet many times but made him a popular hero. Latude, whom a whim of Madame la Pompadour kept thirty-five years fast incarcerated in the Bastille, retained his sanity by taming rats and spiders in his cell. Then there is the whimsical tale of Benvenuto Cellini and the mad constable of St. Angelo...
...Medici were ousted from Florence, Savonarola practically bossed the town. But when he ran afoul of the Pope (ill-famed Alexander VI) his star quickly waned. Arrested, tried and convicted (after 14 applications of torture) of false prophecy, he was hanged and burned. Before the death-march to the gibbet from which he was to swing, the Bishop who was pronouncing the formula of degradation got his words mixed. Savonarola corrected...
Capable Playwright Crothers has cross-stitched her problem drama with pure comedy. Brightest moments of the play occur when Mary's rich, flibberty-gibbet friend Bridget (Spring Byington) is permitted to loosen her tactless but well-meaning tongue. "I know how you feel, Mary," she says consolingly. "It used to make me feel so badly when my husband went off and left me. I didn't feel half so sad when he died. I knew where...