Fiction
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Fiction’
Literary rumour in the time of Queen Anne said that William Shakespeare owed his extraordinary career to a scurrilous ballad.
The tale of how bad-boy William Shakespeare was chased out of Warwickshire for his scurrilous verses only to find immortality on the London stage is enduringly popular, though modern scholars are sceptical at best. The following account comes from Shakespeare scholar and Poet Laureate Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718).
A street urchin of Lahore takes it on himself to provide a naive Tibetan monk with a hot meal.
Young Kim O’Hara, who knows all the ways and wiles of the dusty streets of Lahore, has promised to help a Tibetan monk beg for his dinner. He has high hopes of a certain grocer’s wife, but she is not disposed to dole out charity to yet another holy man.
The mayor and corporation of Hamelin outsource a rodent problem to a professional rat-catcher.
The tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin in Lower Saxony goes back to the 13th century, and has been retold by the Brothers Grimm, Goethe and our own Robert Browning. Scholars have surmised that its origins lie in the migration of Hamelin’s population to work in lands from modern-day Poland to Romania.
A hen-pecked, ne’er-do-well farmer from New York took off into the Catskill Mountains, and fell in with some very odd company.
The story of Rip van Winkle was written in 1818 by Washington Irving, an American who was visiting England at the time. It tells of an obliging but ne’er-do-well farmer of Dutch descent living in colonial America, who falls asleep in the mountains one evening and consequently misses a rather important event.
The simple folk of Brittany know what it means when a nobleman calls himself godfather to an unknown infant.
Rafael Sabatini’s ‘Scaramouche’ is the tale of Andre-Louis Moreau, a young lawyer of no great convictions who becomes caught up in the French Revolution of 1789 through loyalty to a friend. The novel opens by placing Moreau against his family background — a difficult matter, though Breton gossip thinks it has got it all worked out.
The scheming Iago warns Othello against falling victim to jealousy.
Othello, a General in the Venetian army, has promoted Cassio to Lieutenant instead of Iago; in revenge, Iago has hinted at an intrigue between Cassio and Desdemona, Othello’s wife. Othello is beside himself to hear more, but Iago teasingly clams up, as if worried about Cassio’s reputation.