ENGL 3413: World Literature

John M. Mercer, Professor of English

Northeastern State University, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma

Study Guide 7: The Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio’s Decameron

Revised 2-12-09

 

Introduction to The Thousand and One Nights

Over many centuries, the stories of The Thousand and One Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights) were progressively translated through the following languages:  

·        Sanskrit  

1.      In ancient times, Sanskrit was the literary language of what country?

2.      What work written in Sanskrit have we previously studied in this class?

·        Middle Persian

3.      What is the modern name for Persia?

4.      Extra credit: What is the modern name for the language spoken in this country?

·        Arabic

5.      Arabic is the language of Arabs in all Arab countries.  What work written in Arabic have we previously studied in this class?

6.      According to our textbook, in what Arab capital were these stories translated from Middle Persian into Arabic?  What is the significance of this Arab capital in today’s world?

7.      Using the map on page 860 in your textbook, identify the areas where these 3 languages were spoken.  (To see the boundaries of modern nations, compare the  map in the textbook with a current map of this part of Asia.)

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8.      Over the years, new stories from various languages were added to the collection.  What children’s stories that are popular today were added to The Thousand and One Nights?

9.      The Thousand and One Nights is a prose narrative, the first of many works of this broad genre that we will study in this class.  What genres of prose narrative are being written today?

 

Questions Relating to All Stories in The Thousand and One Nights

  1. What is the place or status of women in the societies depicted in these stories?  How are women treated?  Give specific examples to support your generalizations.  (The status of women in these stories should NOT be attributed to Islam; the origins of many if not most of these stories predate Islam.)
  2. Because these stories were adapted into Islamic cultures, however, they reflect many aspects of Muslim belief and practice.  Identify specific examples of each of the following aspects of Islam:
  3. Be sure you follow and remember the main events in the plot of each story.  For each story you have trouble following or remembering, make a brief list of the main sequence of events.   
  4. In each story, look for the following elements:
  5. Which stories most clearly follow the above scenario?
  6. Which stories don’t seem to fit this scenario?
  7. What is Shahrazad trying to accomplish by repeating this pattern in her stories? 

 

Prologue: “[The Story of King Shahrayar and Shahrazad, His Vizier’s Daughter],” 926

  1. What causes Shahzaman’s depression?   
  2. What causes Shahrayar’s madness?
  3. What is a cuckold?  Which characters are cuckolds?
  4. What causes Shahzaman to recover from his depression?
  5. Why does their encounter with the black demon’s woman cheer both brothers?
  6. What shocking practice does Shahrayar vow to carry out daily?  Why?
  7. Why does Shahrazad, the vizier’s daughter, offer to marry Shahrayar?
  8. What is a vizier?
  9. Why does the vizier tell the next story to Shahrazad?
  10. What country or language do the names Shahzaman, Shahrayar, and Shahrazad (also spelled Scherazade) come from? (See the textbook’s introduction to The Thousand and One Nights.)  What does “shah” mean?
  11. This section introduces the frame or framework, a story that sets up the telling of other stories. In the Middle Ages, frames were frequently used in collections of stories.  How does the frame of The Thousand and One Nights provide each of the following benefits to the work as a whole?
    1. Unity
    2. Continuity
    3. Interest 
  12. What collection of poetic narratives in Middle English literature is famous for its masterful use of a frame?  Identify the author and title (which appear elsewhere in this study guide).
  13. The stories told within frames usually have a large number of different storytellers.  Beginning with “The First Night” (937), however, all the stories in The Thousand and One Nights are told by a single narrator.  Who is this single narrator?  What are the narrator’s personal traits?  (See especially 932b.)
  14. What are the narrator’s motivations for telling all these stories?  In other words, what is the narrator trying to accomplish?
  15. What technique does the narrator use so that she will be permitted to keep telling stories night after night?
  16. The frame also includes the links that provide transitions among the many stories in the collection.  How are the links identified in your textbook? 
  17. Many of the links in The Thousand and One Nights are formulaic, repeating the same elements over and over.  What are these repeated elements?

 

“The Tale of the Ox and the Donkey,” 933

  1. The editor’s introduction states that the vizier’s stories are “irrelevant” (924) to his purpose.  (See question 9 above.)  Do you agree with this assessment?  Why or why not?
  2. Under what circumstances will the merchant die? 
  3. How is the donkey the victim of his own miscalculation? 

 

“The Tale of the Merchant and His Wife,” 935

(This is a continuation of the previous story.)

  1. What does the merchant’s wife insist that he tell her?  Why is her demand such a serious problem for the merchant?
  2. Has the merchant’s wife previously known about the merchant’s special ability?  How does this part of the story seem to contradict the third sentence of “The Tale of the Ox and the Donkey” (933)?
  3. What action saves the merchant’s life?  How does he get the idea to do this?

At the double-space below the middle of page 936, the tale ends and the frame resumes with a link. 

  1. How successful have the vizier’s stories been in persuading Shahrazad to change her planned course of action?
  2. What role does Shahrazad’s sister Dinarzad play in Shahrazad’s scheme? 

 

“The Story of the Merchant and the Demon,” 937

  1. The merchant in this story is not the same as the merchant in the previous story.  What does the prevalence of merchants tell us about the culture that produced these stories?
  2. Why is the merchant’s life in jeopardy? 
  3. What does the demon’s plan to punish the merchant have in common with Shahrayar’s plan to punish women?    
  4. After the merchant receives a temporary reprieve, what commitment does he make to the demon?
  5. Extra-credit research or prior knowledge: How is the merchant’s commitment to the demon similar to Gawain’s commitment to the Green Knight in the Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (found in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1)?
  6. What role do the following characters (as a group) play in the story?  Why do they all tell their own stories?
  1. These old men are also referred to as sheikhs.  What is a sheikh or sheik?

 

“The First Old Man's Tale,” 941

  1. Why is it apparently acceptable for this man to have a mistress?
  2. What happens to the man’s son and mistress? 
  3. In The Thousand and One Nights, this is the first of many transformations of humans into animals.  What other work studied in this class contains many such transformations?
  4. How does the man discover what has happened to his son and mistress?
  5. How is the man’s son restored to him?
  6. Who is the ill-intentioned woman in this story?  How is she punished?
  7. Who is the well-intentioned woman in this story? 
  8. What judgment does the demon pass on this tale and on each of the other two he hears?

 

“The Second Old Man's Tale,” 944

  1. How is the beginning of this story similar to the Parable of the Prodigal Son in the New Testament?  Which characters in this story are like the Prodigal Son?  Which character is like the Prodigal Son’s brother?
  2. Under what circumstances does the second old man (the narrator of this story) say, “Be kind to those who hurt you” (946m)?  Why does Shahrazad include this line in the story she is telling Shahrayar?
  3. Who are the two dogs with the second old man (the narrator)?  What circumstances led to their becoming dogs?  What is the second old man now trying to do with the dogs?

 

“The Third Old Man's Tale,” 947

  1. Who is the bad woman in this story?  What bad things does she do?
  2. Who is the good woman in this story? What good thing does she do?
  3. How is the bad woman punished?
  4. What happens to the merchant whose life was in jeopardy to the demon?
  5. How is the demon’s allowing the three old men to bargain for the merchant’s life comparable to what Shahrazad is doing in the frame?
  6. What does your textbook say that helps explain why this tale is so short and undeveloped in comparison with the other two old men’s tales?

 

Introduction to Boccaccio’s Decameron

Boccaccio is the last of the writers of the Middle Ages we will study in this class. 

  1. What Italian city was Boccaccio’s home? 
  2. What other Italian writer that we have studied lived in the same city?
  3. What Italian writer did Boccaccio teach about and write a biography about?
  4. Just as Dante’s Divine Comedy is the greatest work of medieval Italian poetry, so Boccaccio's Decameron is the greatest work of medieval Italian prose.  At the beginning of the textbook’s introduction to The Decameron (1142), what other distinctions are given to this work?  What is a “vernacular language”?

The title The Decameron means “10 days.”  The frame of The Decameron tells the story of  10 young adults who visit the Italian countryside for 10 days, each person telling one story each day (10 storytellers x 10 days = 100 stories).  The frame includes all that is in your textbook of “The First Day” and brief links between the tales.  (See the discussion of the frame of The Thousand and One Nights earlier in this study guide.)

  1. The storytellers in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are highly individualized and interesting in themselves.  How individualized and interesting in their own right are the 10 storytellers in The Decameron? 
  2. The storytellers in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are perfectly matched with the stories they tell. In The Decameron, who tells the story about Brother Alberto and the Angel Gabriel? How well suited is the teller to this tale?

The 100 stories in The Decameron have greatly varied plots, characters, and tones.  Boccaccio collected his stories from many different oral and written sources. 

 

“The First Day,” 1144

The frame is set in Florence during the epidemic of the bubonic plague (or Black Death) in 1348, when about three-fifths of the population of the city died.   This disease is called “bubonic” because a major symptom is the eruption of “buboes” or swollen lymph glands.

  1. How large were the buboes?
  2. What other symptoms of the plague does Boccaccio mention?
  3. Does Boccaccio’s account of the plague appear to be factual?
  4. Extra-credit research or prior knowledge: What other literary works give accounts of plagues? 
  5. At the very beginning of “The First Day,” what two theories are offered to explain the cause of the plague?
  6. Extra-credit research: According to modern science, what is the actual cause of the plague?  How was the plague spread in medieval Europe?  What is the treatment for bubonic plague today?  What recent outbreaks of bubonic plague have occurred?  (The disease was found in the Oklahoma Panhandle in the early 1990s.)
  7. At what specific point in the frame does the fiction begin?
  8. How does Pampinea suggest that the 10 friends spend the hottest part of each day?  Why do they accept her suggestion?  (Young adults with a similar need for entertainment today would probably laugh Pampinea off the villa for making such a suggestion.  What has changed?) 

 

“The Second Tale of the Fourth Day,” 1156

“[Brother Alberto and the Angel Gabriel]”

  1. The announced theme for the fourth day is “love stories with unhappy endings.”  Is this story appropriate to this theme? Why or why not?
  2. This story is a fabliau, a popular medieval genre.  The best-known fabliau is “The Miller’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. To what extent does each of the following characteristics of fabliau apply to “Brother Alberto and the Angel Gabriel”?  Support your responses with specific evidence.
    1. It is a short narrative, usually written in poetry.  (Is this story in poetry or prose?)
    2. It is highly comical, with a farcical plot (far-fetched, totally unbelievable). 
    3. It contains bawdy humor; love is reduced to mere sex.  It is “anti-romantic.”
    4. Although its main purpose is popular entertainment, it also satirizes weaknesses of human nature. 

(1)   What human weaknesses are satirized through the character of Lisetta?  How does the story communicate this satire?

(2)   What human weaknesses are satirized through the character of Brother Alberto? How does the story communicate this satire?  At what point should Brother Alberto know not to go any further? 

  1. What moral is stated at the end of the story?  To what extent does the story exemplify the stated moral?  To what extent is the tone of the moral consistent with the tone of the story itself? Is the tone of the story primarily moral, immoral, or amoral?  What is the difference among these labels?    
  2. How are the frame of The Decameron and the story about Brother Alberto typical of the Middle Ages? 

 

“The Ninth Tale of the Fifth Day,” 1162

“[Federigo and the Falcon]”

  1. The theme of the stories on the fifth day is supposed to be “love stories ending happily after misfortune.”  To what extent is this story appropriate to the theme?
  2. This story exemplifies many aspects of the courtly love, a type of relationship that frequently appeared in medieval romances.  To what extent does each of the following characteristics of courtly love apply to the relationship between Federigo and Mona Giovanna?
    1. An unmarried man is in love with a married woman.  (Thus the desired relationship, if consummated, would be adulterous.) 
    2. The woman rejects the man; he responds very emotionally to her rejection of him.
    3. The man practically worships the woman, putting her high on a pedestal.  (C. S. Lewis, an expert in medieval romance, calls the man’s adoration “the religion of love.”)
    4. The woman may continue to reject the man, OR she may eventually accept him and have a physical (but not merely physical) relationship with him.
    5. The one thing courtly lovers must not do is get married. (Romantic love was believed to be incompatible with marriage.)
  3. Class discussion: Compare and contrast courtly love with Platonic love.
  4. What does the story reveal about the character of Federigo?
    1. What does he do to win Mona Giovanna’s love?  What happens to him as a result?
    2. How does he respond when, uninvited, she arrives at his house for lunch?  Read his speech to her on this occasion.  What does this speech reveal about him?
    3. What sincere praise does she give him on this visit?
    4. How does she praise him when her brothers urge her to remarry?
  5. What admirable character traits of Monna Giovanna does the story reveal?
  6. What is the tone of this story?  How does the tone of this story contrast with that of the story about Brother Alberto?
  7. What are several ways in which the events of Monna Giovanna’s visit to Federigo’s house reveal situational irony?  How is the situational irony in this story similar to that in O. Henry’s short story “The Gift of the Magi”?