By Karl S. Guthke
This tongue-in-cheek e-book on final phrases is chock filled with fun anecdotes embedded in a scrumptious froth of ironic remark in regards to the grand cultural implications of death-bed utterances. I provide the publication 3 stars just because it's intended to be a moderate, dilettante paintings with the entire airiness (and tastiness) of a souffle. when you are trying to find a few pleasant bed-time studying, this is often the publication for you.
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Continued to commemorate deceased (rather than executed) figures of public life such as George Washington, Queen Caroline of Great Britain (d. 1821), Pope Paul V; politicians like Gaspard de Coligny (Duke of Châtillon), Mirabeau, Jean-Jacques de Barillon; military men such as Marshal Fabert; or, again, Robert W. Logan, a missionary in Micronesia. The catalogues of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the British Library, and the Library of Congress will yield many more such pamphlets. Also, as such and similar catalogues reveal, the related genre of bulletin-like booklets catching the eye by their very titles, which promise accounts of “the last days,” “the last hours,” “the last moments,” or “the last farewell” of well-known persons, flourished in several languages well into the nineteenth century.
123 This scenario, presented here in all its dogmatic severity (which was not significantly softened until late in the seventeenth century), was re-enacted in Shakespeare’s time almost daily in public executions. For the “dying speeches,” read by the “sufferers” at the scene of execution and printed soon thereafter as broadsides or small pamphlets, regularly followed the pattern set by the ars moriendi: the criminal confessed and commended his soul to his Maker, or, more rarely and specifically in the case of sectarian dissenters and Jesuits, he stood by his deeds and convictions.
Last words are usually featured in those pamphlets that have been accessible to me. 22 CHAPTER ONE At the present time, this particular pamphlet genre seems to be extinct. Its place has been taken by more substantial books, anthologies, and death chronicles in the manner of John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud (1949) and Simone de Beauvoir’s Une Mort très douce (1964), or by literary works such as Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil (1945), W. S. Burrough’s The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1969), and BernardHenri Lévy’s Les Derniers Jours de Charles Baudelaire (1988).