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CHAPTER I
Shakespeare
was a man of the
Renaissance and he shared with his great contemporaries a delight
and interest in folk-lore, which he used either as flowerlike
adornment or as material for his plays. Referring to a song of yore:
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones,
Do
use
to chant
it: it is
silly sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love,
Like the old age.
So the Duke says in
Twelfth Night
which, like other
Shakespearean plays, abounds in popular snatches. This side of
Shakespeare has to be particularly emphasized when one deals with
him in relation to foreign countries; because at their best
folk-productions make for understanding: partly they are more or
less alike everywhere and partly, rising above transitory fashions
and conventions, they appeal through their sheer humanity to any
one, irrespective of place or age.
I. BREZEANU as Shylock
No doubt, one cannot
easily distinguish between what is popular and what is literary;
they often merge into each other. It may even happen that stories or
mere incidents detach themselves from written books and enter the
folk domain, sometimes undergoing such transformations that one is
really puzzled as to their original source. I will take an example
which leads me on to my subject.
A Roumanian who writes in
French, Princess Bibescu, in her book entitled
Isvor
gives us a tale heard
from a peasant woman in Roumania. It runs as follows:
The only son of an
emperor was seized on his wedding day by a sudden impulse to flee
away from his surroundings. Returning the ring to his bride and
exchanging garments with a beggar, he sought unrecognized a
monastery. Later he became a hermit and, after many years of
solitary life, he started back home. And lo, he met on the road his
own father, before whom he knelt and said: "O Lord Emperor, take me
into thy house for I have heard that thou hast also a son wandering
through the world." The emperor spoke: "Let him be taken into my
house." The attendants lodged him in a swineherd's hovel. And then
one morning the bells began to ring all of their own accord and a
voice called from above: "Bear
the Man of God to
the church, for his soul has left his body." The emperor found the
poor stranger dead, holding in his hand a paper with the story of
his life written therein. At the end of it were these words as
signature: "I am your long-lost son, Alexis."
After relating the story
at length, Princess Bibescu asks herself: "Who is this Alexis? A
solar myth? The spring ? A new personification, or one more ancient,
of Pandora ? Or is he a lover faithful to love, fearing to
substitute for the image of the ideal bride which every man carries
in his heart, the tangible one given him by his parents
?"1
Well, nothing of the
kind. Alexis or Alexius ranks among the saints and his life is
comprised in the
Gesta Romanorum2
as well as in. Jacobus de Voragine's
Legenda Aurea,
translated into English
by William Caxton in
1483.
For a long time
The Lives of the Saints
enjoyed such favour
amongst the people of Roumania that to this day some of them, like
the story of Alexis, are told as regular folk-tales with no relation
whatever to the printed work which first put them into circulation.
But, besides
The Lives of the Saints,
there were once other
books of wide popularity both in England and
Roumania; as, for
instance,
Alexander the Great
and the
Story of Troy.
The latter came into
Roumanian literature through a Byzantine medium and also through the
versified romance of Benoit de Sainte-Maure, which accounted not a
little for Shakespeare's
Troilus and Cressida
and for those exquisite
lines in
The Merchant of Venice:
in such a night
Troilus methinks mounted the Trojan walls,
And sigh'd his soul towards the Grecian tents,
Where Cressid lay that night.
Apart from books,
however, one has to bear in mind that from the time of the Crusaders
England was open to a continuous influx of stories, legends,
adventurous exploits from the East. And how eager Elizabethan
dramatists were to seize upon any small incident or suggestion which
savoured to them of remote glamour, can be seen from the following
examples connected with Roumania. In an old account of travels,
William Lithgow speaks about a Moldavian prince whom he chanced to
meet at Constantinople:
"I cannot but regret the
great loss Sir Thomas Glover, then Lord Ambassador for our late
gracious Sovereign King James, received by the Duke of Moldavia, who
chargeably entertained him two years in his
house, and
furnished him with money, and other necessities fit for his
Eminency."3
This Duke of Moldavia was
identified with one Stephen Bogdan, whose father, Iancu Sasul, after
a troubled rule of three years in Moldavia, fled with his family to
Poland. For many years Stephen Bogdan went about from Constantinople
to Venice and London, where his Oriental appearance in
1607,
with the deceitful air of
grief for a lost throne, must have created somewhat of a sensation;
so much so that shortly we see Ben Jonson alluding to him in
The Silent Woman:
Clerimont.
How maps of persons!
La-Foole.
Yes, sir, of Nomentack when he was here, and of the prince of
Moldavia, and of his mistress, mistress Epicoene.
Also Beaumont and
Fletcher in
The Knight of the Burning
Pestle
mention the hall in the
palace of the same Moldavian prince, whose daughter, Pompiona, thus
greets the knightly guest:
Welcome, Sir Knight, unto my father's
court,
King of Moldavia; unto me, Pompiona,
His
daughter
dear!
Then Shakespeare himself,
I do not know whence he
obtained the name
of Transylvania, which may have sounded rather picturesque, for he
introduced it into the scene of the house of ill-fame in
Pericles.
The poor Transylvanian is dead, that lay with the little
baggage,
though the action of the
play takes place many centuries before Transylvania was known as
such. |
