Playwrights – Page 2 – Interesting Literature

Five Fascinating Facts about Molière

Facts about Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Molière

1. Molière died shortly after collapsing on stage during one of his own plays. Molière’s play Le malade imaginaire, known in English as The Imaginary Invalid or, alternatively, The Hypochondriac, was first staged in February 1673. Molière acted in the production, taking the lead role of Argan (the hypochondriac of the title). Ironically, given the role he was playing in the production, Molière in fact collapsed in a fit of coughing during the performance. He insisted on finishing his performance, before suffering another massive haemorrhage and dying shortly after. He had been suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis for several years.

Five Fascinating Facts about Patrick Hamilton

Interesting facts about a neglected novelist and playwright

1. Patrick Hamilton’s famous fans and champions have included Doris Lessing and Graham Greene. The playwright and author J. B. Priestley was also an admirer of Hamilton’s work, much of which focuses on working-class British life. In 1968, future Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing lamented: ‘Hamilton was a marvellous novelist who’s grossly neglected.’ More recently, Fever Pitch author Nick Hornby has expressed admiration for Hamilton’s novels, declaring Hamilton ‘my new best friend’ when he first encountered his work.

Five Fascinating Facts about Aeschylus

Fun facts about the ancient Greek playwright

1. Of the ninety or so plays Aeschylus is thought to have written, only seven have survived. And one of those we cannot be absolutely sure he wrote: scholars have questioned whether Prometheus Bound, one of the seven surviving plays attributed to him, is actually his work. The six plays that we can confidently attribute to Aeschylus are: The Persians (one of the few Greek tragedies to be based on recent real-life events), Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliants, and the Oresteia trilogy, comprising Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides.

Five Fascinating Facts about J. M. Barrie

Interesting facts about a much-loved writer

1. He was the first writer to kill off Sherlock Holmes. Before Conan Doyle ‘killed off’ Sherlock Holmes in ‘The Final Problem’ (1893), his friend (and fellow Scotsman) J. M. Barrie published a spoof tale in which the famous detective meets his demise. So, the author of Peter Pan was the first writer to kill off Sherlock Holmes.

Always try to be a little kinder than is necessary. – J. M. Barrie

Five Fascinating Facts about Arthur Miller

Interesting Arthur Miller trivia

1. Arthur Miller’s father lost virtually everything in the 1929 Wall Street crash. Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949) was informed by personal experience: in 1929, when Miller was still a boy, his father Isidore lost much of his fortune in the famous stock-market crash of 1929. His father had owned a women’s clothing business, a chauffeur, and a staff of some 400 people; they lost virtually everything.