Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) music hall. In England, the Licensing Act of 1737 confined the production of legitimate plays to the two royal theaters—Drury Lane and Covent Garden; the demands for entertainment of the rising lowe...

(Encyclopedia) Peacock, Thomas Love, 1785–1866, English novelist and poet. He was employed by the East India Company from 1819 to 1856, serving as its chief examiner the final 20 years. Peacock's novels, comic and...

(Encyclopedia) Laurel and Hardy, American film comedy team. The duo consisted of Stan Laurel, 1890–1965, b. Ulverson, England, whose real name was Arthur Stanley Jefferson; and Oliver Hardy, 1892–1957, b. Atlant...

(Encyclopedia) trickster, a mythic figure common among Native North Americans, South Americans, and Africans. Usually male but occasionally female or disguised in female form, he is notorious for exaggerated biologi...

(Encyclopedia) round, in music, a perpetual canon on a tune that returns to its beginning in which all the voices enter at the unison or the octave. An example is Sumer Is Icumen In. Rounds were popular in 17th-cent...

(Encyclopedia) Green, Henry, pseud. of Henry Vincent Yorke, 1905–73, English novelist. Born to an aristocratic family, he was the longtime managing director of his family's industrial engineering business in Londo...

(Encyclopedia) tourniquet to͝orˈnĭkĕt, –kā, tûrˈ– [key], compression device used to cut off the flow of blood to a part of the body, most often an arm or leg. It may be a special surgical instrument, a ru...

(Encyclopedia) tallit tälētˈ [key], in Judaism, four-cornered, fringed shawl worn by males during the morning prayers. It is donned before putting on the phylacteries, except on Yom Kippur when it is worn all thr...

(Encyclopedia) actinometer ăkˌtənŏmˈətər [key], instrument used to measure the heating power of radiation. Actinometers are used chiefly in meteorology to measure solar radiation as transmitted directly by th...

(Encyclopedia) Raphia: see Rafa.