Earl Of Leicester's Men

Also called �Leicester's Men, � earliest organized Elizabethan acting company. Formed in 1559 from members of the Earl of Leicester's household, the troupe performed at court the following year. A favourite of Queen Elizabeth, the company was granted a license by royal patent. In 1576 James Burbage, a member of the troupe, built The Theatre to stage their productions. From 1570 to 1583 the Earl of Leicester's Men enjoyed

Shrove Tuesday

The day immediately preceding Ash Wednesday (the beginning of Lent in the Christian churches in the West). It occurs between February 2 and March 9, depending on the date of Easter. Shrove, derived from �shrive,� refers to the confession of sins usual in the European Middle Ages as a preparation for Lent. Shrove Tuesday eventually acquired the character of a carnival or festival

Shrove Tuesday

Any of three species of large, slow aquatic mammals found along tropical and subtropical Atlantic coasts and associated inland waters. Dull gray, blackish, or brown in colour, all three manatee species have stout, tapered bodies ending in a flat, rounded tail used for forward propulsion. The forelimbs are modified into flippers; there are no hind

Howard, Jean

American actress and celebrity photographer (b. Oct. 13, 1910, Longview, Texas - d. March 20, 2000, Beverly Hills, Calif.), was an actress in films of the 1930s and '40s and later became a prominent socialite and a noted photographer of Hollywood's glamour set. She started in show business as a chorus girl, appearing in Florenz Ziegfeld's Broadway musical Whoopee in 1930 and Ziegfeld's last Follies (1931). A screen

Bruegel, Pieter, The Elder

Byname �Peasant Bruegel, �Dutch �Pieter Bruegel De Oudere, or Boeren Bruegel, Bruegel �also spelled �Brueghel, or Breughel � the greatest Flemish painter of the 16th century, whose landscapes and vigorous, often witty scenes of peasant life are particularly renowned (see photograph). Since Bruegel signed and dated many of his works, his artistic evolution can be traced from the early landscapes,

Y�eh-ch'in

Also called �la ch'in�, Pinyin �yueqin�, or �laqin�, also called �moon guitar� Chinese lute, one of a family of flat, round-bodied lutes found in Central and East Asia. It was invented, according to tradition, during the Chin dynasty (AD 265 - 420). It has two pairs of silk strings, tuned (in relative pitch) to c - g, which run from a fastener on the wooden belly to tuning pegs set in the sides of the pegbox. A metal plate is hung inside the body, vibrating against

Gottschalk Of Orbais

Of noble birth, Gottschalk was an oblate (i.e., a child dedicated to monastic life by its parents) in the Benedictine abbey of Fulda. Over the objection of his abbot and eventual lifelong enemy, Rabanus

Minas

Capital, Lavalleja department, southeastern Uruguay. Founded in 1783, the city was named for the surrounding mines. In the second half of the 20th century Minas has become increasingly attractive to tourists, since it is only 75 mi (120 km) northeast of Montevideo and offers hills and forests, both unusual in Uruguay. Its bottled mineral waters long have been distributed throughout

Havana, The city layout

Several broad

Biblical Literature, The Story of Ahikar

According to the book of Tobit, Ahikar, the cupbearer of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, was Tobit's nephew; he is a secondary personage in the plot, and his own story is mentioned. Ahikar is the hero of a Near Eastern non-Jewish work, The Story of Ahikar. The book exists in medieval translations, the best of them in Syriac. The story was known in the Persian period in the Jewish

Biblical Literature, The Story of Ahikar

Any of 21 species of medium-sized toothed whales with extended snouts, including the bottlenose whales. Little is known about this family of cetaceans; one species was first described in 1995, two others are known only from skeletal remains, and the bodies of undescribed species occasionally drift ashore.

Xia Yan

Xia studied in Japan, and after his return to China in 1927 he joined the Chinese Communist Party. He founded the Art Theatre in 1929, was the first to call for a �drama of the proletariat,� and became one of the leaders of the League of Leftist Writers when it was formed in 1930. In the same

Medicine, Costs of health care

The costs to national economics of providing health care are considerable and have been growing at a rapidly increasing rate, especially in countries such as the United States, Germany, and Sweden; the rise in Britain has been less rapid. This trend has been the cause of major concerns in both developed and developing countries. Some of this concern is based upon the

Bohemond Iii

The son of Constance (daughter of Bohemond II) by her first husband, Raymond of Poitiers, he succeeded to the principality upon attaining his majority and then exiled his mother. In the following year (1164) he suffered defeat and was captured by the Muslims. It was the influence of the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus that secured Bohemond's early

Russell, Pee Wee

Reluctantly trained in violin as a child, Russell also tried piano and drums before settling on the clarinet, on which he became a distinctive stylist. Russell developed a quirky, chance-taking style that employed a generally plaintive tone punctuated by growls, squeaks, and breathy mutterings.

Seligman, C.g.

Although educated as a physician, in 1898 Seligman joined the Cambridge University expedition to the Torres Strait (between New Guinea and Australia). After returning to England, he resumed

Diez, Friedrich Christian

As a student Diez acquired a deep interest in Italian poetry, but a visit to the great German poet J.W. von Goethe in 1818 directed his attention to exploring

Baseball

Cuba defeated

Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord

Monboddo's main work, Of the Origin and Progress of Language (6 vol., 1773 - 92), contains a vast body of curious lore on the manners and customs of primitive peoples, relates

Ploce

The emphatic repetition of a word, with particular reference to its special significance (as in �a wife who was a wife indeed�). In rhetoric the term signifies the repetition of a word in an altered grammatical function, as in the line �Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death?� from William Blake's poem Jerusalem (1804), in which the word sleep is used as both a verb and a noun. The term

Olybrius

Before he became head of state, Olybrius was a wealthy senator; he married Placidia, the daughter of Valentinian III (Western emperor 425 - 455). Gaiseric, king of the Vandals, a Germanic people who maintained a kingdom in North Africa, hoped that Olybrius would be made Western emperor but his support made Olybrius suspect to the

Coru�a, La

Province, in the autonomous community (region) of Galicia, northwestern Spain. It was formed in 1833 from part of the captaincy general and former kingdom of Galicia. Bordered by the Atlantic Ocean (west) and the Cantabrian Sea (north), it has the highest rainfall of any Spanish province. Its interior is crossed by the Galician mountains; the coastline, rocky and with deep indentations,

T�rgu Mures

Also spelled �T�rgu Mures, �Hungarian �Marosv�s�rhely, � city, capital of Mures judet (county), north-central Romania. It lies in the valley of the Mures River, in the southeastern part of the Transylvanian Basin. First mentioned in the 14th century, it was a cattle and crop market town called Neumarkt by the Germans, Agropolis by Greek traders, and Marosv�s�rhely by the Magyars. In the 15th century it had 30 guilds. The 18th - 19th-century mathematician

Bondi, Sir Hermann

Bondi received his M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge. During World War II he worked in the British Admiralty (1942 - 45). He then taught mathematics at Cambridge (1945 - 54) and at King's College, London (1954 - 85; emeritus 1985); he served as master of Churchill

Sato Haruo

Sato came from a family of physicians with scholarly and literary interests. He entered Keio University in Tokyo to study with the novelist Nagai Kafu in 1910, but he had already joined the Myojo group of poets revolving

Hisham Ibn 'abd Al-malik

Before his accession to the throne in 724, Hisham led a quiet life in the Umayyad court, holding no important public offices. He reigned during a time of relative calm. Hisham easily maintained internal security but was forced to mount a number

Arrastra

Crude drag-stone mill for pulverizing ores such as those containing silver or gold or their compounds. See patio process.

Abbey, Edwin Austin

Yale University Art Gallery, Edwin Austin Abbey (1852 - 1911) (1973).

China, Formation of a rival southern government

Meanwhile, in July Sun Yat-sen, supported by part of the Chinese navy and followed by some 100 members of parliament, attempted to organize a rival government in Canton. The initial costs of this undertaking, termed the Movement to Protect the Constitution, probably were supplied by the German consulate in Shanghai. On August 31 the rump parliament in Canton established