An exuberant portrait of the original funnyman-as-celebrity, and a dazzlingly colorful chronicle of his theatrical milieu, from the frequent Drury Lane riots to stage elephants running amok The son of a deranged Italian immigrant, Joseph Grimaldi (1778-1837) was the most celebrated of English clowns. The first to use white-face makeup and wear outrageous colored clothes, he completely transformed the role of the Clown in the pantomime with a look as iconic as Chaplin's tramp. His friends included Lord Byron and the actor Edmund Kean, and his memoirs were edited by the young Charles...
An exuberant portrait of the original funnyman-as-celebrity, and a dazzlingly colorful chronicle of his theatrical milieu, from the frequent Drury ...
In a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and his young wife Mary, gathered for the summer. For three glittering months, this party of young bohemians would share their lives, charged with sexual and artistic tensions. It was a period of extraordinary creativity from which would emerge some of the masterworks of the Romantic period, including Frankenstein.
But there were two other guests at the villa that summer, for whom the season would not be so rosy. With Byron came his young physician, John Polidori, a man with literary...
Villa Diodati. 1816.
In a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and his young wife Mary, gathered for the summer. For...
