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Events, deaths, births, of 06 NOV
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On a November 06:
2001 The US Federal Reserve Board reduces the target for the federal funds rate from 2.5% to 2%, the lowest since September 1961, and the discount rate, from 2$ to 1.5%. Bank reduce their prime lending rate from 5.5% to 5%, the lowest level since 25 June 1972.

2001 David Trimble, a Protestant moderate who leads the Ulster Unionist Party, is re-elected as leader of Northern Ireland's unity government, with the added support of three lawmakers from a neutral party, Alliance, which represents both Irish Catholics and British Protestants giving him a 31-29 victory in the enlarged Protestant bloc, while he once again receives unanimous support from the Catholic side of the house. To be elected "first minister" of the four-party coalition required majority support from both sides' lawmakers.
2001 Brazil to have public Internet booths.
      Brazil is pledging to install Internet booths in 4000 post offices in 2002, giving free Web access to some 150 million persons in a massive effort to bridge the country's gaping digital divide, President Fernando Henrique Carodoso announces in his regular weekly radio address. The kiosks will be placed first in cities with 10'000 residents or more, which is expected to be done by the first quarter of 2002. The Internet is of great use to all people," says Cardoso. "Citizens who have business with organs of the federal government — like pension requests, taxes, judicial questions or even a project in Congress, need the Internet. Poor students need the Net for their research." That's why the government will give residents free access for 10-minute long sessions, Cardoso says. He does not specify whether there would be any total limit on the free access time. According to the plan, each citizen will be able to register for a free e-mail account. Although Brazil is home to some of the world's most sophisticated Web sites and Internet designers, only a tiny portion of the country's 170 million citizens have full access to the World Wide Web. The country counts some 12 million residential users, the highest number of Internet users in Latin America.
2000 La Unión Europea demanda, ante los tribunales estadounidenses, a las grandes tabacaleras por contrabando.
1999 Chechnya asks for talks as Russian bombs fall (CNN)
1999 Los australianos deciden en referéndum seguir siendo una monarquía y mantener a la reina Elizabeth II de Inglaterra como jefa del Estado.
1998 El escritor español Antonio Muñoz Molina es galardonado con el Premio Femina a la mejor novela extranjera por su libro Plenilunio.
1998 El escultor español Eduardo Chillida es galardonado en Palermo con el Premio Internacional Novecento, Rosa de Oro .
1997 Detenidos en Francia los presuntos miembros de ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) , José Ramón Naveiro Gómez e Idoia Martínez García.
1997 El Comité de Ministros del Consejo de Europa firma en Estrasburgo un protocolo para prohibir la clonación humana.
1996 Bill Clinton wins a second term in the White House, Republican challenger Bob Dole, while the GOP maintained its hold on Congress. The results clearly pleased Wall Street, as traders sent the Dow-Jones Industrial Average surging to a 100-point gain, bumping the index past the record 6100 mark.
1996 the Republican and Democratic Party chairmen met at the National Press Club in Washington DC, to "bury the hatchet." [Better yet would have been if, by “the hatchet”, they had meant Newt Gingrich]
1995 Many world leaders gather in Jerusalem for the funeral of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
1995 El escritor gallego Xavier Docampo obtiene el Premio Nacional español de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil 95.
1995 Los investigadores Mariano Barbacid Montalbán, Francisco González de Posada y Amable Liñan Martínez reciben el premio español Fomento de la Invención.
1993 The ruling New Zealand National Party wins a one-seat majority in general elections.
1993 Federico Mayor Zaragoza reelegido para un nuevo mandato como director de la UNESCO.
1991 Ukraine signs the Soviet economic-union treaty.
1991 In Kuwait, the last oil fires ignited by Iraq during the Persian Gulf War are put out.
1990 Hungría entra en el Consejo de Europa.
1990 A gunman shoots and misses at Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev presiding over the Revolution Day parade.
1990 In the US general election, the Democrats gain governorships from Republicans in Texas and Florida, but lose California's.
1988 Soviet scientist and well-known human rights activist Andrei Sakharov begins a two-week visit to the United States. Had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. Sakharov was born on 21 May 1921 and died on 14 December 1989. — MORE
1987 Noboru Takeshita es nombrado primer ministro de Japón por una amplia mayoría de la Dieta (Parlamento), tras dimitir Yasuhiro Nakasone.
1986 Reagan signs the first US immigration law establishing penalties for employers who hire undocumented aliens.
1986 Alfa Romeo accepts takeover by Fiat
      The destitute Alfa Romeo company approves its acquisition by fellow Italian automobile manufacturer Fiat, shortly after rejecting a takeover bid by the Ford Motor Company. Alfa Romeo was founded by Nicola Romeo in 1908, and during the 1920s and 1930s produced elegant luxury racing cars like the RL, the 6C 1500, and the 8C 2900 B. Alfa Romeo saw its peak business years during the 1950s and 1960s, when Alfa Romeo chairman Giuseppe Luraghi oversaw a company shift toward more functional and affordable cars. The Giuletta, the Spider, and the Giulia series received enthusiastic responses from consumers, and Alfa Romeo flourished. However, during the 1970s, the company fell out of touch with a changing market, and, like many other automobile companies, failed to meet the demands of recession-era consumers who preferred fuel efficiency and reliability to luxury and design. By the mid-1980s, Alfa Romeo was bankrupt, and Fiat took over the company, assigning it to a new unit called Alfa Lancia SpA, which opened for business in 1997.
1986 The Iran arms-for-hostages deal is revealed, damaging the Reagan administration. — La Prensa estadounidense denuncia que el presidente Ronald Reagan autorizó el suministro de armas a Irán, es el denominado Irangate.
1985 General Jaruzelski elected Poland's head of state
1984 President Reagan (R) landslide (won 49 states) re-election over Mondale (D)
1984 El Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional gana las elecciones presidenciales en Nicaragua.
1984 El dictador chileno Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte restablece el estado de sitio, tras las repetidas manifestaciones contra su régimen.
1982 El líder histórico del comunismo español, Santiago Carrillo, dimite como secretario general del PCE (Partido Comunista de España).
1978 Shah of Iran places Iran under military rule. — Tras dos nuevas jornadas de revueltas en Irán, el jefe de estado mayor, el general Azahri, es nombrado primer ministro.
1976 Benjamin L. Hooks was chosen to be the new executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, succeeding Roy Wilkins.
1975 Unarmed Moroccans invade Western Sahara
      King Hassan II of Morocco starts the Green March, a mass migration in which over 300'000 unarmed Moroccans march into the newly sovereign nation of Western Sahara, waving Moroccan flags and brandishing copies of the Koran. The Moroccans rapidly settle the phosphate-rich area in support of their government's contention that the northern part of the territory is historically a part of Morocco.
      The origins of King Hassan's claim lie in the fact that that the Sahrawis tribes of the region once paid an allegiance to Moroccan monarchs. Following the Moroccan takeover, Mauritania occupies the southern portion of Western Sahara, despite opposition by the Polisario Spanish Sahara liberation movement. Spain, the former colonial power in the territory, threatens to resist the actions of Morocco and Mauritania, but within a few days withdraws its opposition, abandoning its commitment to self-determination for its former protectorate. In 1979, as part of a peace treaty, Mauritania cedes the southern half of Western Sahara to Morocco.
— Unos 350'000 marroquíes inician la marcha verde hacia el Sáhara para forzar la retirada de las tropas españolas. Tras poner varios obstáculos a la celebración del referéndum de autodeterminación propuesto por la ONU, Hassan II había decidido organizar esta marcha, a a que se añadieron 25'000 soldados marroquíes. El 14 Noviembre 1975, se firmaron en Madrid los Acuerdos Tripartitos por los cuales los españoles entregaban el Sáhara Occidental a Marruecos y Mauritania a cambio de compensaciones económicas y políticas,.
1970 South Vietnamese attack into Cambodia
      South Vietnamese forces launch a new offensive into Cambodia, advancing across a 100-mile-wide front in southeastern Cambodia. The new offensive was aimed at cleaning out border sanctuaries and blocking North Vietnamese forces from moving through Cambodia into South Vietnam. The 6,000-man South Vietnamese task force pulled out on November 11 after failing to find new Communist troop sanctuaries. Forty-one enemy soldiers were reportedly killed in the operation.
1969 En Egipto el presidente Gamal Abdel Nasser pide a los países árabes que se preparen para la guerra contra Israel.
1968 Richard Nixon is elected 37th president of the United States, defeating Democrat Hubert Humphrey.
1964 La guardia presidencial de Colombia entra, por vez primera, en la universidad Nacional, para liberar a Carlos Lleras Restrepo, retenido por los estudiantes.
1963 South Vietnam coup gives power to General Minh
      In the aftermath of the November 1 coup that resulted in the murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem, Gen. Duong Van Minh, leading the Revolutionary Military Committee of the dissident generals who had conducted the coup, takes over leadership of South Vietnam. US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge cabled President Kennedy, "We could neither manage nor stop [the coup] once it got started...It is equally certain that the ground in which the coup seed grew into a robust plant was prepared by us, and that the coup would not have happened [as] it did without our permission." Lodge's words were more than a little disingenuous since he had long been a proponent of removing Diem from power. Following Diem's death, a Buddhist named Nguyen Ngoc Tho became premier, but the real power was held by the Revolutionary Military Committee headed by General Minh. The new government earned US approval in part by pledging not to become a dictatorship and announcing, "The best weapon to fight communism is democracy and liberty." However, Minh was unable to form a viable government and he himself was overthrown in a bloodless coup led by Gen. Nguyen Khanh in January 1964.
1962 UN condemns South African Apartheid
      The General Assembly of the United Nations adopts a resolution condemning South Africa's racist apartheid policies, and calls on all member states to terminate economic and military relations with South Africa. Since the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, there had been unanimous condemnation of apartheid at the UN, a movement that was bolstered by the recent increase in African membership. However, in 1962 none of the major Western powers, nor any of South Africa's other main trading powers, supported a full economic or military embargo against the country. In 1963, a year of massive repression in South Africa, most countries adopt a resolution calling for the cessation of arms sales to South Africa, but a mandatory United Nations arms embargo is not imposed against the country until 1977. In 1973 a UN resolution declared apartheid a "crime against humanity." In 1974, South Africa was suspended from the General Assembly. Apartheid was finally abolished in South Africa in 1993.
1959 La comisión de la ONU para Laos afirma que Vietnam del Norte no ha cometido agresión directa; se ha limitado a pertrechar y adiestrar a los guerrilleros laosianos.
1957 Felix Gaillard becomes premier of France
1956 President Eisenhower (D) re-elected defeating Adlai E. Stevenson (R)
1955 Muhammad V ibn Yusuf vuelve al trono de Marruecos tras su exilio por los franceses.
1952 the United States exploded the world's first hydrogen bomb at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific.
1950 Se promulga una nueva Constitución en Nicaragua.
1947 Viacheslav Mijailovich Scriabin “Molotov” declara que Estados Unidos ya no es el único en fabricar la bomba atómica.
1944 Francisco Franco Bahamonde declara a la United Press Association la mentira descarada: “España no es una imitación de los regímenes fascistas o nazis, o de cualquier otro sistema político extranjero, sino que en realidad es ya una democracia”.
1943 The advancing Red Army enters Kiev, Ukraine.
1941 Stalin claims victory is near
      On this twenty-fourth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, Josef Stalin (real name: Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) addresses the Soviet people for only the second time in his three-decade reign of terror. The first time he spoke, on July 2 of the same year, many Soviets were startled to hear his thick Georgian accent. Stalin reluctantly admitted that 350'000 Soviet soldiers had been killed in German attacks. However, he reassured his constituents, the Germans had lost over four and a half million men in the same battles. Beyond that, Stalin claimed that the Soviet Union had the moral upper hand, calling the Germans "men with the morals of beasts." He claimed that a Soviet victory was near, boasting that "if they want a war of extermination, they shall have one." The speech was almost entirely propaganda. In fact, the German losses were nowhere near four million men. Furthermore, Leningrad was surrounded, Moscow was highly vulnerable, and 40% of the Soviet Union was under German control. Stalin hoped his speech would pacify the inhabitants of the conquered territories, who he privately suspected would take up the German cause and rise up against him.
1941 Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov es nombrado embajador soviético en Estados Unidos.
1937 Italia se adhiere al Pacto Antikomintern, firmado por Alemania y Japón en 1936.
1936 Durante la Guerra Civil española el Gobierno de la Segunda República fija su sede en Valencia.
1934 El partido demócrata, encabezado por Franklin Delano Roosevelt, gana las elecciones al Congreso de Estados Unidos.
1928 Herbert Hoover (R) beats Alfred E Smith (D) for President
1928 Dimite el Gobierno francés de Raymond Poincaré.
1924 Stanley Baldwin becomes PM of England
1923 USSR adopts experimental calendar, with 5-day "weeks"
1923 As inflation soars, one loaf of bread in Berlin is reported to be worth about 140 billion German marks.
1921 En Hungría se promulga una ley de destitución de los Habsburgo, como respuesta a la tentativa de golpe de Estado por Carlos I.
1921 Lima sufre fuertes temblores de tierra.
1918 Republic of Poland is proclaimed.
1917 October Revolution in Russia
      Led by Bolshevik Party leader Vladimir Lenin, leftist revolutionaries launch a nearly bloodless coup d'état against Russia's ineffectual Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks and their allies occupied government buildings and other strategic locations in the Russian capital of Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and within two days had formed a new government with Lenin as its head. Bolshevik Russia, later renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was the world's first Marxist state.
      Born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov in 1870, Lenin was drawn to the revolutionary cause after his brother was executed in 1887 for plotting to assassinate Czar Alexander III. He studied law and took up practice in Petrograd, where he associated with revolutionary Marxist circles. In 1895, he helped organize Marxist groups in the capital into the "Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class," which attempted to enlist workers to the Marxist cause. In December 1895, Lenin and the other leaders of the Union were arrested. Lenin was jailed for a year and then exiled to Siberia for a term of three years.
      After the end of his exile, in 1900, Lenin went to Western Europe, where he continued his revolutionary activity. It was during this time that he adopted the pseudonym Lenin. In 1902, he published a pamphlet titled What Is to Be Done? which argued that only a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries could bring socialism to Russia. In 1903, he met with other Russian Marxists in London and established the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (RSDWP). However, from the start there was a split between Lenin's Bolsheviks (Majoritarians), who advocated militarism, and the Mensheviks (Minoritarians), who advocated a democratic movement toward socialism. These two groups increasingly opposed each other within the framework of the RSDWP, and Lenin made the split official at a 1912 conference of the Bolshevik Party.
      After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Lenin returned to Russia. The revolution, which consisted mainly of strikes throughout the Russian empire, came to an end when Nicholas II promised reforms, including the adoption of a Russian constitution and the establishment of an elected legislature. However, once order was restored, the czar nullified most of these reforms, and in 1907 Lenin was again forced into exile.
      Lenin opposed World War I, which began in 1914, as an imperialistic conflict and called on proletariat soldiers to turn their guns on the capitalist leaders who sent them down into the murderous trenches. For Russia, World War I was an unprecedented disaster: Russian casualties were greater than those sustained by any nation in any previous war. Meanwhile, the Russian economy was hopelessly disrupted by the costly war effort, and in March 1917 riots and strikes broke out in Petrograd over the scarcity of food. Demoralized army troops joined the strikers, and on March 15, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, ending centuries of czarist rule. In the aftermath of the February Revolution (known as such because of Russia's use of the Julian calendar), power was shared between the weak Provisional Government and the soviets, or "councils," of soldiers' and workers' committees.
      After the outbreak of the February Revolution, German authorities allowed Lenin and his lieutenants to cross Germany en route from Switzerland to Sweden in a sealed railway car. Berlin hoped (correctly) that the return of the anti-war Socialists to Russia would undermine the Russian war effort, which was continuing under the Provisional Government. Lenin called for the overthrow of the Provisional Government by the soviets, and he was condemned as a "German agent" by the government's leaders. In July, he was forced to flee to Finland, but his call for "peace, land, and bread" met with increasing popular support, and the Bolsheviks won a majority in the Petrograd soviet. In October, Lenin secretly returned to Petrograd, and on November 6-8 the Bolshevik-led Red Guards deposed the Provisional Government and proclaimed soviet rule.
      Lenin became the dictator of the first Marxist state in the world. His government made peace with Germany, nationalized industry, and distributed land, but beginning in 1918 had to fight a devastating civil war against czarist forces. In 1920, the czarists were defeated, and in 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established. Upon Lenin's death, in early 1924, his body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum near the Moscow Kremlin. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor. After a struggle for succession, fellow revolutionary Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union.
      Dans la nuit du 06 au 07 novembre 1917, Lénine et sa petite troupe de révolutionnaires professionnels s’emparent des principaux centres de décision de la capitale russe, Petrograd (anciennement Saint-Pétersbourg). Les habitants de la capitale ne se rendent compte de rien. Sur la perspective Nevski, la grande avenue de Petrograd, les promeneurs et les noctambules vaquent comme à l'accoutumée. Les partisans de Lénine pénètrent arme au poing dans le Palais d'Hiver où résident les ministres du gouvernement. Le Palais est seulement gardé par une unité féminine incapable de s'opposer à l'intrusion. Pour donner à son coup d'Etat l'allure d'une révolution, Lénine fait tirer le croiseur Aurore, amarré à quelques centaines de mètres de là, sur un bras de la Néva.
      Dans la terminologie bolchévique (on dira plus tard communiste), ce coup d'Etat sans véritable soutien populaire sera baptisé "Révolution d’Octobre" car il s'est déroulé du 25 au 26 octobre selon le calendrier julien (en vigueur dans l’ancienne Russie jusqu’au 14 Feb 1918). Cette Révolution d'Octobre est menée par le parti bolchévique de Lénine. Elle met fin au gouvernement issu de la [[!!bad link!!>>] Révolution de Février. Celle-ci avait mis fin au régime tsariste et instauré en Russie une démocratie très étendue... mais trop faible pour résister aux menées d’un agitateur aussi éprouvé que Lénine. Malgré son caractère ultra-violent et sa dénégation de toute forme d'expression libre, le régime que mettra en place Lénine suscitera une immense espérance dans le monde entier. Il s'écoulera 70 ans avant que la ruine de la Russie ne consacre l'échec de cette illusion.
1915 En París se produce el encuentro entre Lord Herbert Kitchener y Aristide Briand.
1913 Mohandas K Gandhi arrested for leading Indian miners march in South Africa
1911 Francisco I. Madeiro inaugurated President of Mexico
1911 Maine becomes a "dry" state.
1906 Republican Charles Evans Hughes was elected governor of New York, defeating newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst.
1903 Los Estados Unidos reconocen la república de Panamá.
1900 US President William McKinley (Republican) re-elected, beating Democrat William Jennings Bryan
1888 Benjamin Harrison (R-Sen-Indiana) beats President Grover Cleveland (D), 233 electoral votes to 168, Cleveland received slightly more popular votes
1884 British protectorate proclaimed over southeast New Guinea
1880 El médico francés Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran descubre el agente causante del paludismo.
1865 CSS Shenandoah strikes its flag at Liverpool, England; the final act of the Confederate States of America
1863 A Union force surrounds and scatters defending Confederates at the Battle of Droop Mountain, in West Virginia.
1861 Davis is elected President of CFA.
      Jefferson Davis is elected president of the Confederate States of America for a 6-year term. He ran without opposition, and the election simply confirmed the decision that had been made by the Confederate Congress earlier in the year.
      Like his Union counterpart, Abraham Lincoln, Davis was a native of Kentucky, born in 1808. He attended West Point and graduated in 1828. After serving in the Black Hawk War of 1832, Davis married Sarah Knox Taylor, the daughter of General (and future President) Zachary Taylor, and the couple settled on the Brierfield plantation in Mississippi. Tragically, Sarah contracted malaria and died within two months of their marriage. Davis then married Varina Howells in 1845, but he maintained close ties to his former father-in-law. Davis was a close advisor to Taylor during the Mexican War, during which he was seriously wounded. After the war, he was appointed to fill a vacant US senate seat from Mississippi, and he served as Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce. When the Southern states began seceding after the election of Abraham Lincoln in the winter of 1860 and 1861, Davis suspected that he might be the choice of his fellow Southerners to be their interim president. When the newly seceded states met in Montgomery, Alabama, on 04 February 1861, they decided just that. He expressed great fear about what lay ahead. "Upon my weary heart was showered smiles, plaudits, and flowers, but beyond them I saw troubles and thorns innumerable." On 06 November Davis is elected to a six-year term as established by the Confederate constitution. However the Confederate States of America would not exist for more than another four years.
1860 Abraham Lincoln elected President of US
      Abraham Lincoln is elected the sixteenth president of the United States over a heavily divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40% of the popular vote, but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, a senator for Illinois.
      Lincoln, a Kentucky-born lawyer and former Whig representative to Congress, first gained national stature during his campaign against Stephen Douglas of Illinois for a US Senate seat in 1858. The senatorial campaign featured a remarkable series of public encounters on the slavery issue, known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which Lincoln argued against the spread of slavery, while Douglas maintained that each territory should have the right to decide whether it would become free or slave. Lincoln lost the Senate race, but his campaign brought national attention to the young Republican Party. In 1860, Lincoln won the party's presidential nomination.
      In the November 1860 election, Lincoln again faces Douglas, who represents the Northern faction of a heavily divided Democratic Party, as well as Breckinridge and Bell. The announcement of Lincoln's victory signaled the secession of the Southern states, which since the beginning of the year had been publicly threatening secession if the Republicans gained the White House. By the time of Lincoln's inauguration on 04 March 1861, seven states had seceded, and the Confederate States of America had been formally established, with Jefferson Davis as its elected president. One month later, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces under General P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina.
      In 1863, as the tide turned against the Confederacy, Lincoln emancipated the slaves and in 1864 won reelection. In April 1865, he was assassinated by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five days after the American Civil War effectively ended with the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. For preserving the Union and bringing an end to slavery, and for his unique character and powerful oratory, Lincoln is hailed as one of the greatest US presidents.
1844 Spain grants Dominican Rep independence
1813 Chilpancingo congress declares Mexico independent of Spain — Se sanciona la independencia de México: En el congreso de Chilpancingo de los Bravos, el jefe del movimiento revolucionario, José María Morelos y Pavón declara la independencia mexicana.
1812 The first winter snow falls on the French Army as Napoleon Bonaparte retreats form Moscow.
1792 Bataille de Jemmappes
      Les volontaires de l'armée française battent les soldats autrichiens à Jemmappes (ou Jemapes), près de Mons, en Belgique. Commandés par Dumouriez, ils bénéficient de l'avantage du nombre et sont portés par la ferveur révolutionnaire. La Révolution française atteint à ce moment des sommets de popularité partout en Europe et jusqu'en Angleterre. Plus sûrement que [[!!bad link!!>>] Valmy, six semaines plus tôt, la victoire de Jemmappes éloigne la crainte de l'invasion. Mais elle excite aussi l'appétit de conquête. Elle conduit à l'occupation de la Belgique et de la rive gauche du Rhin. Les députés girondins de la Convention proposent d'annexer les régions occupées. Danton réclame pour la France le droit de s'installer sur ses frontières "naturelles". Cette politique provoque la formation contre la France d'une première coalition européenne. Elle se soldera 23 ans plus tard par la défaite de Waterloo et l'affaiblissement irrémédiable du pays.
1789 Following the American Revolution, Father John Carroll, 54, was appointed the first Roman Catholic bishop in the newly organized and independent United States of America.
1780 El anatomista y fisiólogo italiano Luigi Galvani realiza, con ancas de rana, la primera observación de los espasmos por influencia de la electricidad.
1572 Supernova is observed in the constellation known as Cassiopeia
1520 La expedición marítima de Fernando de Magallanes entra con sus naves en el estrecho que lleva su nombre.
1482 Francisco Febo, hijo de Gastón IV, conde de Foix, y de Magdalena de Francia, es coronado rey de Navarra en Pamplona.
1528 Texas discovered by Cow's Head
     The Spanish conquistador Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca [hey! they translate Amerindian names, so why not Spanish too?] is shipwrecked on a low sandy island off the coast of Texas. Starving, dehydrated, and desperate, he is the first European to set foot on the soil of the future Lone Star state.
      Cabeza de Vaca's unintentional journey to Texas was a disaster from the start. A series of dire accidents and Indian attacks plagued his expedition's 300 men as they explored north Florida. The survivors then cobbled together five flimsy boats and headed to sea, where they endured vicious storms, severe shortages of food and water, and attacks from Indians wherever they put to shore. With his exploration party reduced to only 80 or 90 men, Cabeza de Vaca's motley flotilla finally wrecked on what was probably Galveston Island just off the coast of Texas.
      Unfortunately, landing on shore did not end Cabeza de Vaca's trials. During the next four years, the party barely managed to eke out a tenuous existence by trading with the Indians located in modern-day east Texas. The crew steadily died off from illness, accidents, and attacks until only Cabeza de Vaca and three others remained. In 1532, the four survivors set out on an arduous journey across the present-day states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Captured by the Karankawa Indians, they lived in virtual slavery for nearly two years. Only after Cabeza de Vaca had won the respect of the Karankawa by becoming a skilled medicine man and diplomat did the small band win their freedom.
      In 1536, the men encountered a party of Spanish slave hunters in what is now the Mexican state of Sinaloa. They followed them back to Mexico City, where the tale of their amazing odyssey became famous throughout the colony and in Europe. Despite the many hardships experienced by Cabeza de Vaca and his men during their northern travels, their stories inspired others to intensify exploration of the region that would one day become Texas.
1429 Henry VI is crowned King of England.
TO THE TOP
Deaths which occurred on a November 06:
2002 Twenty of the 22 on board a twin-engine Fokker 50 which crashes when about to land at Luxembourg's international airport in thick fog.
2002 Michael J. Noll, born on 06 November 1980, is never seen alive after been told to leave the house of a neighbor into which he stumbled drunk, after celebrating his birthday at the Nasty Habit Saloon, a bar popular with students on weekends, in Eau Claire (near I-94), where he was a student at the University of Wisconsin. He may have drowned in the nearby Chippewa River.
2001 An Israeli soldier and three of the Palestinian gunmen who ambushed an Israeli jeep near Tell, south of Nablus, West Bank. Palestinians say that two of the Palestinians were merely wounded in the clash, and later shot in the head in cold blood, after a Red Crescent ambulance had been denied access to the wounded. This brings the al-Aqsa intifada body count to 744 Palestinians and 195 Israelis.
2001 Ikrima Stateh and Majdi al-Tayeb, in the explosion of a car which they had received the car from an Israeli Arab man in the northern Israeli town of Umm el-Fahm a fow hours earlier, and that Palestinians assume was booby-trapped by Israel. This happens in a Jenin refugee camp where Stateh and al-Tayeb were local leaders of the Al Aqsa Brigade. Palestinian militants often buy stolen cars from Israeli Arabs. The car in question, a new Toyota, had been stolen before it was acquired.
2000 Lyron Sprague de Camp, escritor estadounidense.
2000 Mary, 3-month-old conjoined twin, dies as expected upon being surgically separated from Jodie, the other twin, upon whose blood supply she depended, in London, where the Maltese parents had come before their 8 August birch, seeking the best medical help, yet opposed killing one to save the other. They were overuled by British courts.
     Jodie and Mary, conjoined twins, joined at the lower abdomen and sharing a heart and lungs, were born on 8 August at St Mary's Hospital in Manchester, England. Their parents are Catholics, from Gozo, Malta. They came to have the birth in England hoping to get suitable medical help. The doctors soon decided that the twins would die within months if they are not separated, but that separating them would result in Mary's death. The parents refused to authorize the separation, as opposed to their religious beliefs. The doctors took the matter to court and got a High Court ruling, confirmed by London's Court of Appeal on 000922, authorizing the operation.
     [I do not understand why the principle of double effect would not apply here. The intent of the operation is to save Jodie, not to kill Mary, though it is certain that Mary will die as a result. The intended effect is moral, so the operation is moral, unless it requires the direct killing of Mary, which does not seem to me to be the case. It is more like the disconnecting of a life support system.]
     British courts overuling the parents, the operation to separate the twins is performed in London over 20 hours ending at 05:00 on 7 November. As expected, Mary dies. Jodie, expected to recover, will need extensive reconstructive surgery, over a long time, in order to have a somewhat normal life.
     On 7 November, St. Mary's Hospital in Manchester said that the stronger twin, known only as Jodie, was in critical but stable conditiony. "Unfortunately despite all of the efforts of the medical team Mary sadly died. As with all major surgery, the first few days following an operation are the most critical and our thoughts remain with Jodie and her parents." The hospital provided no details of the complicated procedure, which followed months of legal dispute over whether the parents could refuse surgery and let nature take its course.
      Jodie and Mary were born at St. Mary's Hospital on Aug. 8, joined at the lower abdomen and doctors said if they were not separated, both would die within months. Doctors said surgery could allow Jodie to have a normal life, but Mary's heart and lungs were nonfunctional and she would not survive once she was separated from Jodie's aorta.
      The twins' parents — identified only as Roman Catholics from the Maltese island of Gozo in the Mediterranean — opposed the operation for religious reasons but decided not to contest a Sept. 22 decision by the Court of Appeal that the girls can be separated. The court had struggled with the issue of whether the surgery would amount to intentionally killing Mary. Two medical specialists appointed by the court endorsed surgery. "The sad fact is that Mary lives on borrowed time, all of it borrowed from her sister," Lord Justice Alan Ward said in the Court of Appeal ruling. "She is incapable of independent existence. She is designated for death." The official solicitor's office, which represents children's interests in court, had provided legal representation for both children.
      On Friday 02 November 2000, judges rejected a last-minute appeal by the Pro-Life Alliance, an anti-abortion group that wanted the case to be decided in the House of Lords. According to testimony at the Court of Appeal, surgeons expected to begin the operation by exploring the twins' anatomy. The separation process was expected to start with the pelvic bones and then go to the spines, where the twins were joined. "Finally and eventually we have a major blood vessel, which is the continuation of Jodie's aorta, which is bringing blood across to Mary, and similarly the vena cava, which is returning blood from Mary to Jodie. Those would need separating, dividing. It is at that point that we would expect that Mary would then die," the court's judgment said, quoting a surgeon who was not identified.
      Doctors say Jodie will probably need further surgery to reconstruct some organs damaged in the surgery, including her rectum, sexual organs and lower abdomen. She is also expected to need skin grafts. Prof. Lewis Spitz, consultant pediatric surgeon at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital, who has separated conjoined twins, said the next 48 hours will be crucial for Jodie. "These babies are extremely critical after surgery and they have to be carefully monitored in intensive care," he said. "They are very unstable, requiring meticulous attention to fluid replacement and other monitoring."
1998 Dos muertos cuando el movimiento integrista radical palestino hace estallar un coche bomba en el centro de Jerusalén.Hay veintisiete heridos. El atentado pone en peligro la paz entre israelíes y palestinos.
1996 Charles Blais, who has autism, is drowned by his mother, Danielle, in their Montreal home.
1996 Some 1000 by a cyclone in southeastern India.
1977: 39 persons as an earthen dam bursts sending a wall of water through Toccoa Falls Bible College in Georgia.
1970 Agustín Lara Aguirre, compositor mexicano.
1968 Charles Butler McVay III, 70, Rear Admiral USN, was captain of USS Indianapolis, sunk by Japanese sub
     On 30 July 1945, at 00:14 the USS Indianapolis is torpedoed by three torpedoes of a salvo of six from Japanese Sub I-58 with Commander Machitsura Hashimoto in command. The explosions were against her starboard side and the battle cruiser sinks in 12 minutes. Her location at this time as 12 degrees 02 minutes N., 134 degrees 48 minutes E. in the Philippine Sea.. Of 1196 men on board, approximately 300 go down with the ship. The remainder, about 900 men were left floating in shark infested waters with no lifeboats and most with no food or water. The ship was never missed, and by the time the survivors were spotted by accident four days later only 316 men went on to survive.
      The ship's captain, the late Charles Butler McVay III, 47, is wounded but survives and would be court-martialed and convicted of "hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag" despite overwhelming evidence that the Navy itself had placed the ship in harm's way,despite testimony from the Japanese submarine commander that zigzagging would have made no difference, and despite that fact that, although 700 navy ships were lost in combat in WWII, McVay was the only captain to be court-martialed. Recently declassified material adds to the evidence that McVay was a scapegoat for the mistakes of others. Though he was restored to duty and retired as a Rear Admiral in 1949, he was hounded by some of the families of the dead sailors and commited suicide on 6 November 1968. He would be rehabilitated posthumously by the US Congress in October 2000.
1964 Gaston Chaissac, French painter, draftsman, sculptor, and writer, born on 13 Aug 1904 (or in 1910?). — more
1944 Hannah Senesh Jewish poetess, executed by Nazis in Budapest
1920 Arturo Soria y Mata, ingeniero y matemático español.
1917 The last of many thousands killed in Third Battle of Ypres, as it ends, after three months of horrific fighting, when Canadian forces take the village of Passchendaele in Belgium. In one of the bloodiest battles of World War I, a combination of over-ambitious aims, terrible weather conditions, and misguided persistence by British Field Marshal Douglas Haig led to nearly 250'000 total casualties suffered by both sides. At the time Canadian and Australian forces were scheduled to begin the long-planned offensive, Allied artillery and unusually heavy rains had turned the battlefield into a sea of mud. Soldiers fought in the mud, slept in the mud, and a fair number drowned in the mud. When the offensive is finally called off after the Canadian victory at Passchendaele, the total Allied advance amounted to only five miles.
1913 William Henry Preece, telephone pioneer.
      Welsh electrical engineer William Preece helped introduce the wireless telegraph and telephone in Great Britain. As an engineer for the Post Office, he developed numerous inventions, including a railroad signal and his own wireless telephone. Preece also introduced Alexander Graham Bell's telephone to Great Britain and helped radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi win assistance from the Post Office for his work on the wireless telegraph, later known as radio.
1910 Jean Henri Dunant, filántropo suizo, fundador de la Cruz Roja.
1893 (25 Oct Julian) Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 53, in St. Petersburg, Russia, composer, probably by suicide by poison (but the first cover story was that he drank unboiled water during a cholera epidemic) to avoid exposure of his affair with a male member of the imperial family (the second cover story was that his suicide was motivated by the failure of his last symphony, the Pathétique). Tchaikowsky, born on 07 May (25 Apr Julian) 1840, was the leading Russian composer of the late 19th century, great for melodic inspiration and orchestration. (Marche Slave, 1812 Overture, Swan Lake, Nutcracker Suite, Romeo and Juliet)
1891 Comanche, the only 7th Cavalry horse to survive George Armstrong Custer's "Last Stand" at the Little Bighorn, dies at Fort Riley, Kansas
1884: William Wells Brown, author. WILLIAM BROWN ONLINE: The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863) — Clotel, or The President's Daughter (1835) — Clotelle, or The Colored Heroine — Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave (1849) — The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and his Fidelity
1842 William Hone, author. HONE ONLINE: The Political House that Jack Built
1839 Rabbi Hayim Rapoport of Ostrowiec author (Maxim Chayyim)
1837 Luis Candelas, famoso bandolero,es ajusticiado públicamente en Madrid.
1802 José Longinos Martínez, naturalista español.
1793 Dominic Serres, British painter born in 1722. — MORE ON SERRES AT ART “4” NOVEMBER with links to images.
1671 (or 1686 date unknown?} Jan de Bisschop (Johannes Episcopius), Dutch artist born in 1628.
1632 King Gustavus Aldophus of Sweden, in battle.
1510 (on or before 06 November) Giorgio Zorzo da Castelfranco “Giorgione”, Italian painter born in 1477 or 1478. — MORE ON “GIORGIONE” AT ART “4” NOVEMBER with links to images.
1406 Inocencio VII, Papa.
Births which occurred on a November 06:
1952 1st hydrogen bomb exploded (by US at Eniwetok Atoll)
1943 Michael Schwerner civil rights worker, murdered in 1964
1943 Matías Severo Moto Nsa, periodista y presidente del Partido del Progreso de Guinea Ecuatorial.
1939 AVIANCA, compañía aérea, se crea en Colombia, por la fusión de Scadta y Saco.
1930 Los andrajos de la púrpura, drama en cinco actos de Jacinto Benavente y Martínez, se estrena en el teatro Muñoz Seca.
1921 James Jones Robinson IL, novelist (From Here to Eternity)
1899 The first Packard car.
      James Ward Packard, an electrical-wire manufacturer from Warren, Ohio, first demonstrated his interest in automobiles when he hired Edward P. Cowles and Henry A. Schryver to work on plans for a possible Packard automobile in 1896. Although a functional engine was completed in 1897, it would take another two years, and James Packard's purchase of a Winton horseless carriage, before his company fully flung itself into the burgeoning automobile industry. In 1898, James Packard purchased an automobile constructed by fellow Ohio manufacturer Alexander Winston, and Packard, a first-time car owner, experienced problems with his purchase from the start. Finally in June of 1899, after nearly a year of repairing and improving the Winston automobile on his own, Packard decided to launch the Packard Motor Company. On this day, only three months after work on his first automobile began, the first Packard was completed and test-driven through the streets of Warren, Ohio. The Model A featured a one-cylinder engine capable of producing twelve horsepower. Built around the engine was a single-seat buggy with wire wheels, a steering tiller, an automatic spark advance, and a chain drive. Within only two months, the Packard Company sold its fifth Model A prototype to Warren resident George Kirkham for $1,250. By the 1920s, Packard was a major producer of luxury automobiles, and this prosperity would continue well into the late 1950s.
1876 Everett Shinn, US Ashcan School painter who died in 1953. — MORE ON SHINN AT ART “4” NOVEMBER with links to images.
1861 James A. Naismith, Canadian physical education instructor who, in 1891, invented the game of basketball.
1860 Ignace Jan Paderewski Kurylowka Poland, composer: musician: piano: Minuet in G; Polish patriot: 1st Premier of Poland [1919]; brought white Zinfandel wine grapes to US for the first time.
1854 John Phillip Sousa Wash DC, march king (Stars & Stripes Forever, Semper Fidelis) Author. SOUSA ONLINE: The Fifth String, The Fifth String
1851 Charles Henry Dow, in Connecticut, journalist and economist who helped wed media to the stock markets. Dow moved to New York in 1880 to work as a stringer for a financial news wire. In 1882, he joined forces with Edward D. Jones to produce news reports for Wall Street brokerage firms. The newly formed Dow Jones & Company would churn out these bulletins, then known as "flimsies," or "slips," and send them over to Wall Street via messenger. Dow and his team would cap the day with a summary report of the market action that, by 1889, had evolved into the Wall Street Journal. Dow was the first editor of the Journal, using the paper as a vehicle to postulate his economic beliefs, including the aptly named "Dow theory." Along the way, Dow developed a statistical method for measuring the markets that has since become the Dow-Jones averages.
1849 or 1850 Jozef Chelmonski, Polish artist who died on 10 April 1914.
1848 Richard Jefferies, author. JEFFERIES ONLINE: After London, The Pageant of Summer, The Story of My Heart
1839 Mary Ellen Freer Edwards (Mrs John C. Staples), British artist who died in 1908, 1909, or 1910.
1836 Francis Ellingwood Abbot Boston, theologian (Scientific Theism)
1835 Cesare Lombroso, antropólogo y criminalista italiano.
1828 Hiram Corson, author. CORSON ONLINE: An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry
1814 Antoine-Joseph Sax, Dinant, Belgium, instrument maker and inventor of the saxophone. He died on 7 February 1894 in Paris.
1796 George Back, author.BLACK ONLINE: Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition to the Mouth of the Great Fish River, and Along the Shores of the Arctic Ocean, in the Years 1833, 1834, and 1835 (1836)
1781 Lucy Aikin, author. AIKIN ONLINE: Epistles on Women
1771 Alois Senefelder inventor (lithography)
1678 Coenraet Roepel, Dutch artist who died on 04 January 1748.
1671 Colley Cibber England, dramatist, poet laureate, author of Love's Last Shift. CIBBER ONLINE: — An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber volume 1, volume 2 — co-author with Shakespeare of Richard III, Richard III
1661 Carlos II, last Habsburg king of Spain (1665-1700)
1558 Thomas Kyd (baptized), in London, playwright.       ^top^
      Kyd created the "revenge tragedy," a popular dramatic form that gave rise to tragedies like William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Little is known about Kyd's childhood, but scholars believe he was educated at the Merchant Taylor's School in London and raised to be a scrivener, a professional trained to draw up contracts and other business documents. In 1592, The Spanish Tragedie, sometimes called Hieronomo, was entered in the Stationer's Register (licensing the publication of the work). The play, about a father who seeks revenge for his son's murder, became the most popular play in England during its day. In May 1593, Kyd was arrested on suspicion of treason because heretical documents had allegedly been found in his room. Under torture, Kyd claimed the letters belonged to his former roommate, fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe, who was subsequently arrested. Marlowe bailed out of jail but died 10 days later in a bar brawl. Kyd died penniless the following year.
     The dramatic career of Thomas Kyd covers a shorter period than Marlowe’s; and, despite the great popularity and influence of The Spanish Tragedie, it lacks both the range and sustained interest of the work of his junior and associate. He was the son of one Francis Kyd, a city scrivener, and was educated at Merchant Taylors’ school, in which, from 26 October 1565, he was a fellow pupil with Edmund Spenser. This date and an earlier fixing his baptism on 6 November, 1558, are the sole biographical evidence available, with the exception of sundry references, at the close of his short life, in papers connected with the judicial enquiry into Marlowe’s religious opinions.
      For the rest, we must rely on the interpretation of the well known passage in Nashe’s preface to Greene’s Menaphon (1589) and of certain cryptic entries in Henslowe’s diary. The former, by the elaboration of its satirical anger, acquires the value of a biographical document. Even if we had not the punning reference to the “Kidde in Aesop” (a reminiscence of the “May” eclogue of The Shepheards Calender) we should recognise, with due allowance for the extravagance of the attack, that the series of allusions constitutes strong circumstantial evidence as to the victim’s career down to 1589. From this passage, therefore, we assume that Kyd had early forsaken his apprenticeship to his father’s “trade of Noverint”; that, being weak in Latinity (and so charged unjustly), he had turned to play making and had “bled” Seneca through its “English” veins; that, in this barber surgeon enterprise, he had interested himself in the story of Hamlet; and that, later, he had fallen to the task of translating from Italian and French. The reference to the botching up of blank verse “with ifs and ands” seems to be explained by a line in The Spanish Tragedie;   and the ridiculed phrase “bloud is a beggar” may prove to have a textual interest when fortune gives us the pre-Shakespearean Hamlet.
     The earliest known dated work ascribed to Kyd is The Householders Philosophie, a version of Tasso’s Padre di Famiglia. This volume, by “T. K.,” printed in 1588, probably represents the “twopenny pamphlet” work from the Italian to which Nashe refers towards the close of his depreciation. The French enterprise, also amiably described by the same hand, may remain to us in Pompey the Great, his faire Corneliaes Tragedie, which appeared under Kyd’s name in 1595   as a translation of Garnier’s Cornélie, and in the record of his intention to follow with a rendering of that author’s Porcie. This intimation of Kyd’s interest in the French Senecan brings him into immediate touch with lady Pembroke and her coterie, and gives point to Nashe’s double-sensed gibe that the translators “for recreation after their candle-stuffe, having starched their beardes most curiously” made “a peripateticall path into the inner parts of the Citie” and spent “two or three howers in turning over French Doudie.”
      The translation of Cornélie, a pamphlet on The Murthering of John Brewen, Goldsmith, and perhaps another on The Poisoninge of Thomas Elliot, Tailor (both printed by his brother John Kyd in 1592), appear to be the latest efforts of Kyd’s short career, which came to an end about December, 1594. In the short interval anterior to this hackwork, between 1585 and the publication of Nashe’s attack in 1589, the public were probably in possession of the works on which his reputation rests, his Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedie, and The Tragedie of Solimon and Perseda. These, and the discredited First Part of Jeronimo, still supply some of the thorniest problems to Elizabethan scholarship. Only a partial statement can be attempted.
The Spanish Tragedie
     We know that in 1592 The Spanish Tragedie was enjoying the fullest popular favour. None of the earliest quartos—Allde’s undated print, Jeffes’s in 1594, White’s in 1599–gives a clue to the authorship. The entry of the licence for The Spanishe tragedie of Don Horatio and Bellmipeia (Bellimperia) on 6 October, 1592, is silent; so, too, the later editions, and the notes in Henslowe of Ben Jonson’s additions in 1601 and 1602. It is not till we come to the casual reference by Thomas Heywood to “M. Kid” as the author that what might have proved another bibliographical crux is fully determined. We may assume, from the hints in the inductions to Cynthia’s Revels and Bartholomew Fayre, that the play was written between 1585 and 1587. Not only are there no direct references to the great events of 1588, such as could hardly be absent from a “Spanish” tragedy—but the deliberate allusion to older conflicts with England
Kyd and the early Hamlet.
     The theme of The Spanish Tragedie is the revenge of “old Hieronimo” for the undoing of his son Don Horatio and the “pittiful death” of the former in accomplishing his purpose. Though contemporary satire fixed upon the play, and made it out-Seneca Seneca in passion for blood, the essence of the drama lies in the slow carrying-out of the revenge. In this, rather than in the mere inversion of the roles of father and son, is there analogy with the Shakespearean Hamlet; as there is, also, in certain details of construction, such as the device of the play within the play, the presence of the ghost (with all allowance for Senecan and early Elizabethan habit), and, generally, the co-ordination of three stories in one plot. Consideration of this analogy helps us to define Kyd’s position in regard to both the English Senecan tragedy and the Shakespearean: the more immediate matter is that Kyd’s interest in this “variant” of the Hamlet story supports, rather than condemns, the conjecture that he had already been engaged on the tragedy of the son’s revenge. Such recasting by one hand of a single and simple dramatic motif is credible; and, in Kyd’s case, likely, when we recall the alleged relationship of Solimon and Perseda with The Spanish Tragedie. There are few authors of Kyd’s repute whose work suggests more clearly a development from within, a re-elaboration of its own limited material. For this reason, it is hard to disbelieve that he wrote a “first part” to his Spanish Tragedie, even if we be persuaded that the extant text of the First Part of Jeronimo is not from his pen.
     Kyd’s authorship of a Hamlet which served as the basis for the Shakespearean Hamlet is more than a plausible inference. As the arguments in support of this are too lengthy for discussion in this place, only a general statement may be made. In regard to the date, we conclude, from the passage in Nashe, that the Saxo-Belleforest story had been dramatised before 1589. As there is no evidence that it had attracted attention in England before the tour of English actors on the continent, and, as they returned from Elsinore towards the close of 1587, we may very reasonably fix the date of production in 1587 or 1588. The assumption that Kyd is the author rests on these main bases: that the first quarto of the Shakespearean Hamlet (1603) carries over some sections of an original play, and that there are many parallelisms between the Shakespearean play and The Spanish Tragedie, in construction, in phrase and even in metre, and between it and Kyd’s other works, in respect of sentiment. The likenesses in construction already hinted at make up, with the textual data, a body of circumstantial evidence which the most cautious criticism, fully conscious of the risks of interpreting the re-echoed expressions of the spirit of the age as deliberate plagiarism, is not willing to throw aside. Indeed, the cumulative force of the evidence would appear to convert the assumption into a certainty. If, as no one will doubt, Shakespeare worked over, and reworked over, some Hamlet which had already secured popular favour, why should we, with Nashe and the comparative testimony before us, seek for another than Kyd as the author of the lost, perhaps unprinted, play? We are left with the regret that, having Shakespeare’s revisions, we are denied the details of the master’s transformation of the original copy. The lesson of this sequence would have told us more of Shakespeare’s “mind and art” than we could learn from the unravelling of all his collaborated plays.
Doubtful authorship of The First Part of Jeronimo and of Solimon and Perseda.
      That Kyd, following his “serial” habit of production, wrote a “first part” for his “tragedy” is, as we have said, possible, but not a tittle of evidence is forthcoming: that he wrote The First Part of Jeronimo. With the Warres of Portugall, and the life and death of Don Andrœa, which we have in the quarto edition of 1605, is, despite the authority lent in support of the ascription to him, wholly untenable. The problem of Kyd’s association with a first part may be resolved into two main questions. In the first place, did he write, or could he have written, the extant text of 1605? In the second place, is this piece to be identified with the play entitled “Done oracio” alias “The Comedy of Jeronymo,” alias “Spanes Comodye donne oracoe,” which appears seven times in Henslowe’s list of the performances, in 1592, of The Spanish Tragedie?
      A rapid reading of the First Part will show that, far from there being “adequate internal evidence” for assigning the play to Kyd, there is proof that it must be by another hand. To maintain the ascription of Kyd, we should have to adduce very solid testimony, external as well as internal, that Kyd was capable of burlesque, was a veritable “sporting Kyd,” and was Puck enough to make havoc of his art and popular triumph. For, from beginning to end, the piece is nothing but a tissue of rhetorical mockery, a satire of “tragical speeches” and of intermeddling ghosts; often, on closer inspection, a direct quizzing of The Spanish Tragedie itself. By no access of literary devilry could the author of old Jeronimo transform that hero to the speaker of such intentional fustian as
       
Now I remember too (O sweet rememberance)
This day my years strike fiftie, and in Rome
They call the fifty year the year of Jubily,
The merry yeare, the peacefull yeare, the jocond yeare,
A yeare of joy, of pleasure, and delight.
This shall be my yeare of Jubily, for ’t is my fifty.
Age ushers honor; ’t is no shame; confesse,
Beard, thou art fifty full, not a haire lesse.
And it would be hard to believe that Kyd had joined in the raillery of Nashe and the pamphleteers,
       
O, for honor,
Your countries reputation, your lives freedome,
Indeed your all that may be termed reveng,
Now let your blouds be liberall as the sea;
or could write the ludicrous dialogue between the ghost of Andrea and Revenge at the close. The inevitable conclusion is that this First Part cannot have been written by the author of The Spanish Tragedie; and further (and almost as certainly), that this burlesque by another hand is not the piece which was interpolated by lord Strange’s men in their repertory of 1592. The opportunity for the burlesque came more naturally in the early years of the new century, when The Spanish Tragedie had been refurbished by Ben Jonson, and attention had been called to it by his characteristic criticism of the old play. Internal evidence, notably the allusions to the Roman jubilee of 1600 and the acting of the play by the children of the chapel, supports the general conclusion against Kyd’s authorship. It should, however, be noted that the argument that the First Part does not answer Henslowe’s label of “comodey” is irrelevant, if we make allowance for the vague nomenclature of the time and consider that the play makes no pretence to more than the “seriousness” of burlesque. Further, the shortness of the text may be responsible for the view that the play was a “forepiece,” presumably to The Spanish Tragedie. The Henslowe play (never acted on the same night as the serious Jeronimo) might as well be called an afterpiece; but it is hard, in any circumstances, to conjure up an audience of the early nineties, or even of 1605, taking kindly to the two Jeronimos at one sitting.
     Though no solid reason has been advanced against the ascription of Solimon and Perseda to Kyd, it is only on the slenderest grounds that it has been claimed for him. The story on which it is based appears in Henry Wotton’s Courtlie Controversie of Cupids Cautels (1578), which also supplies the original of the pseudo-Shakespearean Faire Em; the play is entered in the Stationers’ register on 22 November, 1592, and is extant in an undated quarto and two quartos of 1599. Its association with Kyd has been assumed from the fact that he uses the same plot in the interpolated play which Jeronimo and Bellimperia present in The Spanish Tragedie. If we assume that one author is responsible for both renderings, the question remains as to which play was the earlier. Decision on this point is more difficult because of the long popularity of Wotton’s translation, and of Jacques Yver’s original, Le Printemps d’Iver—as shown in the successive references, from Greene’s Mamillia (1583), to Shakespeare’s King John and Henry IV. Shakespeare’s pointed allusions to Basilisco—the captain Bobadil of Solimon and Perseda—imply an immediate and current popularity of the play; and for this reason we incline to dispute Sarrazin’s conclusion that it was an early effort, and antecedent to The Spanish Tragedie. It appears, on the whole, reasonable to fix the date of composition between the appearance of The Spanish Tragedie and the entry in the Stationers’ register in 1592, and to consider it, if it be given to Kyd, as a fuller handling of the sketch for Jeronimo and Bellimperia. Certain similarities in motif, construction and phrase are tempting aids to the finding of a single author for both plays. On the other hand, the closer we find the likeness, the harder is it to reckon with the difficulty of believing that an author would thus repeat himself. If, as Kyd’s most recent editor maintains, Solimon lacks the show of genius of The Spanish Tragedie, and if, as is also admitted, there is a close family likeness (on which, indeed, the argument of one parentage is based), we are in danger of being forced, contrary to this critic’s view and our own (as already stated), to the conclusion that the inferior play must be the earlier. The problem is further complicated by the presence of a strange element of comedy in Solimon. This, and, especially, the transcript of the miles gloriosus type in the braggart Basilisco, introduces us, if not to a new author, to a new phase of Kyd’s art. And so we float, rudderless and anchorless, on the sea of speculation.
     The difficulty of determining the authentic work of Kyd makes any general estimate of his quality and historical place more or less tentative; yet the least uncertain of these uncertainties and the acknowledged work in translation give us some critical foothold. Kyd, in the words of his Hieronimo, proclaims his artistic fellowship with the author of Tamburlaine:
       
Give me a stately written tragedie;
Tragedia cothurnata fitting Kings,
Containing matter, and not common things.
     Even if we allow, on the most liberal interpretation of the claims set up by his editors, that he shows a subtler sense of humour than is to be found in Marlowe, we are never distracted from the sombre purpose of his art. A closer student of Seneca than was his brother dramatist, he transfers, with direct touch, the “tragical” rhetoric, the ghostly personages, the revel in stage massacre; yet never in the intimate fashion of the Tenne Tragedies or of his own version of Garnier. We have probably exaggerated his love of “blood.” Despite the sensationalism of Horatio’s death, Kyd never reaches to the depths of horror satirised in the induction of A warning for Faire Women, or disclosed in Titus Andronicus (and for this reason we discredit his association with this experiment of youth); and though, like Webster, whose career as a dramatist began after Kyd’s had ended, he deals rawly with the story of revenge, we observe that his zest for the terrible is losing force. Popular opinion neglects these hints of approximation to the gentler mood of Shakespearean tragedy, as it chooses, also, to forget the contributory usefulness of his and Marlowe’s extravagance in the making of that tragedy.
Criticism of Kyd’s work and comparison with Marlowe; Kyd’s place in English Drama.
     The interest of Kyd’s work is almost exclusively historical. Like Marlowe’s, it takes its place in the development of English tragedy by revealing new possibilities and offering a model in technique; unlike Marlowe’s, it does not make a second claim upon us as great literature. The historical interest lies in the advance which Kyd’s plays show in construction, in the manipulation of plot, and in effective situation. Kyd is the first to discover the bearing of episode and of the “movement” of the story on characterisation, and the first to give the audience and reader the hint of the development of character which follows from this interaction. In other words, he is the first English dramatist who writes dramatically. In this respect he was well served by his instinct for realism. The dialogue of his “stately written tragedy” is more human and probable than anything which had gone before, or was being done by Marlowe. In the working out of his plot, he escapes from the dangers of rhetoric by ingenious turns in the situation. In such a scene as that where Pedringano bandies words with the hangman when the boy brings in the empty box, or in Bellimperia’s dropping of her glove, we are parting company with the older tragedy, with the English Senecans, with Tamburlaine and Faustus and even Edward II, and we are nearer Shakespeare. When we add to this talent for dramatic surprise the talent for displaying character, as it were, rooted in the plot, and growing in it—not strewn on the path of a hero who is little more than the embodiment of a simple idea—we describe Kyd’s gift to English tragedy, and, more particularly, to Shakespeare himself. Direct references in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, though they be many, count for little beyond proving the popularity of The Spanish Tragedie. The indebtedness must be sought in the persistent reminiscence of Kyd’s stagecraft throughout the Shakespearean plays, of devices which could not come from any earlier source, and, because of their frequency, could not come by chance. We reflect on the fact that he, who may have been the young author making trial of Kyd’s manner in Titus Andronicus, found more than a theatre hack’s task in working and re-working upon the early Hamlet. From the straggling data, we surmise, not only that Shakespeare knew and was associated with Kyd’s work, but that the association was more to him than a chance meeting in the day’s round. Jonson with his “additions”—even with the Painter’s Part placed to his credit—supplies an instructive contrast; he intrudes as a censor, and will not be on terms. Yet the fact is worth record in the story of Kyd’s influence, that his work is found in direct touch with that of Shakespeare and Jonson. We want to know more of this association, above all of the early Hamlet which Shakespeare used; and, wishing thus, we are driven to vain speculation, till the Jonsonian Hieronimo stays us (as he may well do elsewhere in the “quest of enquirie” into Elizabethan authorship):
       
’T is neither as you think, nor as you thinke,
Nor as you thinke; you’r wide all;
These slippers are not mine; they were my sonne Horatio’s.

I can find no Kyd works online, but there are several by Marlowe]
(Not Kyd, the snitch, but) MARLOWE ONLINE:
  • Complete Works
  • The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
  • The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
  • The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
  • Tamburlaine the Great—part I  —  part II
  • Tamburlaine the Great—part 1 — part 2
  • The Jew of Malta
  • The Jew of Malta
  • The Jew of Malta
  • The Jew of Malta
  • The Massacre at Paris
  • The Massacre at Paris
  • Dido, Queen of Carthage
  • Edward II
  • Hero and Leander
  • Doctor Faustus
    translator of:
  • Ovid's Elegies
    • 1479 Juana I, Reina de Castilla, hija de los Reyes Católicos.
    Holidays / Mauritius : Ganga Asnam
    Religious Observances Anglican : St Illtyd & Leonard's Day (abbot) / Ang, RC : St Leonard, hermit / Moslem : Night of the Ascent (Rajab 27, 1420 AH) / Santos Leonardo, Atico, Winoco y Severo; santa Felita de Milán. / RC: Sainte Bertille est une religieuse devenue abbesse du monastère de Chelles, près de Meaux. Elle est morte en 710.
    Thoughts for the day: "Even the smallest candle burns brighter in the dark."
    "Even the smallest candle burns brighter if lit."
    "Even the smallest candle is difficult to light in the dark."
    "Even the smallest candle can start a forest fire."
    "Even the biggest searchlight stays dark without electricity."
    "Even the biggest candle in the wind can blow out.”
    “Don't burn the midnight candle at both ends.”
    “Don't burn the midnight candle before its time.”
    “You can kill a thousand; you can bring an end to life; you cannot kill an idea.” —     Acting Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres on the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin [However Ariel Sharon would later make a pretty good try at both killing thousands and thereby killing the idea of peace for which Rabin died.]
    “It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.” —     Deng Xiaoping
    “It doesn't matter if the cat catches rats or not, as long as it keeps them away by its smell.”     [While living in rat-infested Mayan Indian country, I kept a cat, a black one, on the theory that it would be more difficult for rats to see it at night. However I found out that the cat never caught any rat, perhaps because I fed ith well. As there was no cat food available, I fed the cat dog food, but I never told the cat. Anyhow the cat's smell was enough to keep the rats away.]
    “It does matter if the mouse is gray or white: if it's white it's a pet — if it's gray, it's a pest.”
    “If you want the cat to catch mice, don't raise the kitten together with a pet mouse.”
    “If you want the cat and the dog to be friends, raise the kitten and the puppy together.”
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