Portal:Literature/Did you know/Week 33

... that the only known sketch of an Elizabethan playhouse (pictured) was made in 1596 by a Dutch traveller, Johannes de Witt, and that it shows The Swan?

... that George Wylie Henderson's 1935 novel, Ollie Miss, is set in rural Alabama, and that it is almost an all-black story, with only two minor characters &mdash; the doctor and the sheriff &mdash; being white?

... that Clivia is an operetta by Charles Amberg (story, lyrics) and Nico Dostal (music) set in the fictitious South American country of Boliguay, and that it premiered in Berlin in 1933?

... that Venice Preserv'd is a Restoration tragedy by Thomas Otway?

... that "Nemo me impune lacessit" is the royal Scottish motto, and that this phrase also occurs in Poe's short story "The Cask of Amontillado"?

... that the 19th century advocates of l'art pour l'art believed that art should be created and appreciated for its own sake, that it should be an end in itself rather than a means to an end?

... that in Aristophanes's 411 BC comedy, Lysistrata calls for a sex strike to make the Greek warriors stop fighting, and that in reaction to the Iraq disarmament crisis the play was the focus of a peace protest initiative called The Lysistrata Project?