Relating to or characteristic of the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who believed that theatre should be used to make political or social comment, and who therefore refused to allow the audience to suspend their disbelief by, for example, keeping the lights on in the auditorium.
Brechtian
Fact of the Day
The eighteenth-century evangelical preacher George Whitefield considered it a badge of honour that, along with rotten fruit, he might be pelted by 'pieces of dead cats'.
Quote of the Day
"History is a set of lies agreed upon.
"
~ Napoleon
On This Day
899 Alfred the Great, defender against the Vikings, and innocent of burning cakes, died.
1640 The humiliating - for Charles I - Treaty of Ripon was signed. Following the Second Bishops' War with Scottish Covenanters, it left the Scots in control of Newcastle and agreed that Charles would pay the Scottish army £850 a day to maintain the army in England. In this desperate state, Charles was forced to call what would become the Long Parliament, which ultimately led to civil war.
1863 The Football Association was founded in the Freemasons' Tavern, London.
1881 Perhaps the most famous shootout of the American Wild West, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, took place. A result of a long-simmering feud, four lawmen, including Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday, faced off against five cowboys in the thirty-second fight. Despite the deaths of three cowboys, the feud continued.
1951 Winston Churchill became Britain's prime minister for the second time (he had lost the 1945 election and spent the intervening six years as leader of the opposition).