Trivia – Page 3 – Interesting Literature

Five Fascinating Facts about Vampire Fiction

Fun facts about vampires in literature

1. Vampires began to appear in literature in a big way in the early eighteenth century, as a result of a real-life ‘vampire craze’. In the 1720s and 1730s, vampires became a big part of European culture, and even included the digging up of a couple of suspected vampires, Petar Blagojevich and Arnold Paole, in Serbia. Following this, there was a 1748 poem The Vampire by Heinrich August Ossenfelder, as well as the narrative poem Lenore (1773) by Gottfried August Bürger.

Five Fascinating Facts about Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Fun facts about Shakespeare’s play

1. Shakespeare is thought to have based his play The Tempest on a real-life shipwreck.

William Strachey’s A True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, an account of his experience during the wreck of the ship Sea Venture on the island of Bermuda, was written in 1609, and many scholars believe that the Bard read this account and used it as inspiration for The Tempest.

Five Fascinating Facts about Othello

Fun facts about Shakespeare’s classic tragedy

1. Othello has given us some very famous phrases. Whether we’re describing jealousy as ‘the green-eyed monster’, talking of sexual intercourse as ‘the beast with two backs’, or wearing our heart on our sleeve, we’re quoting Shakespeare’s Othello when we do so.

2. Quite where the name ‘Othello’ came from remains something of a mystery. Probably derived from the name Otho, the name Othello doesn’t appear in Shakespeare’s source for the play, the short story ‘Un Capitano Moro’ (‘A Moorish Captain’, i.e. Othello; indeed, Desdemona is the only named character in the source text; every other character is referred to by his rank). ‘Othello’ was, then – like, it has been suggested, the name Imogen – a Shakespearean coinage.

Five Fascinating Facts about Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

Fun facts about a classic play

1. The first recorded performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was on Candlemas, 1602. Candlemas is 2 February – better-known in the United States as Groundhog Day – and was the date on which Christmas decorations were often traditionally taken down in Shakespeare’s time (unlike these days, when it’s traditional to take them down by – oddly enough – Twelfth Night). Shakespeare’s classic comedy of cross-dressing, separated siblings, love, puritanism, and yellow stockings was possibly first recorded in February 1602, though there may well have been an earlier (unrecorded) performance, perhaps a year earlier.

10 Surprising Words That Drastically Changed Their Meanings Over Time

Words that used to mean something very different

We’ll own up right at the start: the ten words below were suggested to us by the latest book we’ve been reading, Paul Anthony Jones’s The Accidental Dictionary: The Remarkable Twists and Turns of English Words. Jones’s previous books – one of which we included in our pick of the best and most interesting books about the English language – have taken a look at the curious and often surprising histories of English words, and his new book is no different. We were fortunate enough to be the recipients of an advance review copy of the book; it’s out in the UK next week. Below are ten surprising words which quite drastically altered their meanings at some point in the past, and now mean something very different from their original definitions.