Eve's Alexandria

A Sea with Strange Tides

For him the life of the play was set apart from the life outside it, with its own rules of behaviour and speech, to which all were subject, strong and weak, high and low. I did not see the danger of it then, God forgive me my folly.

I don't think I've ever read a novel more epigrammatic than Barry Unsworth's medieval murder mystery, Morality Play (1995). It is narrated by a disgraced priest named Nicholas, whose better angels (the humility and repentance of the header quotation, for example) tend to get drowned out quite a bit by his conviction that he's the cleverest and most important person in any given situation. The prose, as a result, dips back and forth between an unadorned formality - mannered and non-specifically 'archaic' in feel, but nonetheless clear and matter-of-fact, especially when it comes to physical description - and a register sonorous with import, full of little catechisms that have the ring of studied insight. Nicholas is a man trying to make sense of the world, and his past actions, through the lens of his reading.

"There was a guidance in it," he tells us early on, about his encounter with a group of travelling players on the road between York and Durham, "as there had been in my first coming upon them. What is accident to the ignorant the wise see as design." Nicholas, of course, is certain that he falls into the latter category, not least because he is telling this tale in retrospect, as part of an attempt to win an indulgence for his sins (which include gambling and adultery): it is important to him to appear to be as frank as possible about his deeds and his "folly", while at the same time making it clear at every turn that he is not - entirely - responsible. Like the innocent protagonist of a morality play, he has fallen into temptation and strayed from the path of good counsel and righteousness:

To serve the time is the mark of wisdom, as Tobias might have said; and the time had made me a man for songs, not sermons.

The "time" alluded to here is the mid-fourteenth century: this is the England of the Black Death, a world turned upside down, lurid with trauma and crisis and much obsessed with death:

The fields lie untilled, many die of famine, they fall and in haste they are shovelled away in obscure corners. Bands of brigands infest the countryside, peasants in flight from their dues of labour, soldiers returning from these endless wars with France, men who have known nothing but murder from earliest life.

Priests should be upright, pious men; priests should be able to travel unmolested. Neither of these things, in Nicholas' recounting, hold true any longer. Hazard lurks around every corner - a symptom, perhaps, as much of Nicholas' disordered state of mind after his flight from his diocese as of the disrupted society around him. When he first happens across the travelling players, standing around a prone body in a dense woodland far from habitation, he is terrified; partly because he thinks they're robbers and is, he admits, "not brave", but also because of the circumstances. "I was a stranger," he says; "in some manner I could be blamed. There is a passion of violence in the people; where several are gathered the spirit of murder is never far."

He reaches for ecclesiastical analogies to describe what he saw - the "mist of breath" of the people surrounding the body "like incense, a fume of devotion" - but at the same time finds himself re-drawing the scene using imagery from his other life, the one that these people will introduce him to. Twice he remarks upon the unified theatricality of their movements, and imagines them as actors:

I saw them gather round and crouch over him in the bitter cold, then start back to give his soul passage. It was as if they played his death for me and this was a strange thing, as they did not know I watched, and I did not then know what they were. [...]

Then the sound ceased and I saw them shift back to make space for Death, a thing very wise to do, Death being less provoked when at large than when confined. It was like that scene in the Morality Play when the besieged soul flies free at last.

There is marked reluctance and wariness on both sides, although the players, at least, have license to travel through the livery of their patron. But after a well-staged tense episode, Nicholas falls in with them - not without some foreshadowing, of course ("Had I but known the toils of evil this wayside death would lead us into, I would have gone my way with no further syllable and all the haste I could summon") - on their journey to a nearby town to seek burial for their dead friend, Brendan. To earn his keep, he soon is drawn into their "shameful trade", as well; on entering the town, to advertise the performances they will put on to pay for the priest's services in performing the burial, the whole company gets into character, including Nicholas:

[T]hey gave me the horse-hair suit of Antichrist to wear and a devil's horned mask, and armed me with a wooden trident that I was to jab with as we went along, at the same time gibbering and hissing. It was my first role.

Unsworth does a very good job, I think, of giving a sense of how medieval morality plays worked and where they fit into the spectrum of religious observance. Morality plays apparently developed out of the tradition of mystery play cycles (on which see this post from the infancy of Alexandria), although in practice the line between the two genres seems to be blurry, and they certainly overlapped in time. Whereas mystery plays were essentially dramatisations of Biblical stories, morality plays were more like abstract lessons, generally relating to the risky business of being a human in a world filled with temptation and supernatural meddling. Mystery and morality plays alike, staged by privately-funded groups and (increasingly) civic institutions, were more the business of popular religiosity than they were of the Church. As of the early 13th century, a papal edict banned clergy from taking roles in such plays; hence Nicholas' need for some creative self-justification in his narration.

Unsworth emphasises the central role of symbolism in these plays. The characters are archetypes (God, the Devil, Temptation, and so forth), and while there are speeches, it is costume and gesture and spectacle that convey much of the meaning to the audience:

At intervals, when harmony and discord were in full conflict and the issue in doubt, God raised his right hand, palm outward and fingers slightly curled in the gesture of silencing, and with this the din of the demons instantly ceased.

Above all, what we are shown is the players putting forth a moral messages by appealing to the emotions, the fervour and the awe of their audience:

With a horned mask and a wooden trident I was their fear of hell-fire. Two minutes later, still the same timorous creature as before, with a fool's cap and a white mask, I was their hope of laughter.

The audience's laughter, notes Nicholas,

is a welcome thing as saving from silence, but also frightening when there are many laughing together - it is a sea with strange tides. Players swim in the rise and fall of it and if they lose the mastery they drown.

Given this, you might think that it's not the best time to be in a profession that involves stirring up the audience's fears about their salvation, when the world around is offering daily proof of God's displeasure through the very real spectacle of people dropping like flies from the Black Death. You'd be right. But heightening the tension still further, the unnamed town to which the players have come has a secret: a local boy named Thomas Wells has recently been found murdered.

Martin, the leader of the players, sees an opportunity in this, to adapt the abstract message of their performances into something more concrete, something locally meaningful: "We must play the murder", he says. Nicholas objects, strenuously (perhaps more so in the retelling?), and beneath his words we can see Unsworth telescoping the development of medieval drama towards its early modern form:

"God has not given us this story to use, He has not revealed to us the meaning of it. So it has no meaning, it is only a death. Players are like other men, they must use God's meanings, they cannot make meanings of their own, that is heresy, it is the source of all our woes, it is the reason our first parents were cast out."

There follows a wonderful piece of storytelling, as the players go out among the townsfolk to try to gather up the strands of what happened, and then return to recount what they've learned around their campfire: rhythmically, almost ritually, we circle the campfire with the tale, as each character in turn adds layers and nuance to what came before.

The centrepiece of the new play involves Nicholas - in the role of Good Counsel - delivering a sermon on the dangers of temptation, while another member of the cast, Straw, cross-dresses to play the villainess of the piece, the woman accused of Thomas' murder. Nicholas describes Straw (whom he repeatedly blurs with his character, frequently referring to him as "she") "miming [...] a dumb-show of pleasures" as a backdrop to his sermon, such that "the words of spirit and the gestures of flesh should contend together". Again we are encouraged to imagine how such a play might have been staged, and what effect it might have on minds trained to see in dualities and increasingly prone, moreover, to attempt ever greater feats of mortification to punish flesh and purify spirit in such uncertain times:

For the part of the temptress he had devised a strange and frightening way of bending the body stiffly sideways with the head held for a moment in inquiry and hands just above the waist, palms outward and fingers stiffly splayed in a gesture of his own invention. So for a moment, while he made the pause to see the effects of his tempting, he was frozen in wicked inquiry. Then he broke again into sinuous motion, gesturing the delights that awaited Thomas Wells if he would but follow.

But not all the audience are in accord - Thomas Wells' mother objects to the characterisation of her son as the unwary soul led astray by his alluring murderer's blandishments - and even the players find the play changing as they perform it. They spend the next day investigating further, keen to learn the truth, and come to realise that the woman due to die for the crime is not the real culprit.

Looking back, Nicholas sees only danger in this, of a sort that speaks convincingly to a medieval European mindset. "[W]e were moving towards the knowledge of evil", he says; they are abrogating to themselves the responsibility to make meaning and determine truth, when that role belongs to God alone. Through Nicholas' misgivings, Unsworth is able to generate a considerable sense of menace that works on both a murder-mystery and a cultural-history level:

With memory aiding, it is not so difficult to relate events as they follow in sequence. But the dread that comes to natures like mine, that is not so easy to trace, it moves in lurches, forward and back, it catches at new things. That fear I felt in the tavern at the power of human desire, a power for harm or good, I feel it still. The nature of power is always the same, though the masks it wears are various.

I won't spoil the resolution of the mystery; more interesting, in any case, is the process by which it is arrived at, which is both a testament to the power of drama and - from Nicholas' viewpoint - an indictment of the temptation it poses. They became "possessed" by their roles, he claims, "confused between the playing of the thing and the living of it"; "we were drowning in it", he tells us of the subsequent, revised performance of the play, strongly recalling his analogy about the audience's response being like 'a sea with strange tides'. The players are carried forward, and imperilled, by the tide of emotion they evoke with their recreation.

Earlier in the novel, Nicholas foreshadowed this loss of self with his comments on the first time he wore the Antichrist costume, which he experiences as a claustrophobic confinement ("I did not see well through the eyeholes and my sight was altogether closed off at the sides") and a concealment rather than a display; he echoes this later when he confesses that, at the height of his involvement in the play, he came to see his priestly robes as just another costume, as unlikely and false as anything he wore on stage.

Ultimately, though, I choose to read the impassioned defence he offers when he is swept up in the emotion and the possibility of the thing, rather than his retrospective attempt to repent of his involvement, as Nicholas' - and the novel's - verdict on how drama liberates through empathy with the fictional, and tells the truth through lies:

"We learned through the play," I said. "We learned through the parts we were given. It is something not easy to explain. I am new to playing but it has seemed to me like dreaming. The player is himself and another. When he looks at the others in the play he knows he is part of their dreaming just as they are a part of his. From this comes thoughts and words that outside the play he would not readily admit to his mind."

~~Nic

Stories Within Stories

"The mercy of Allah be upon you, for this is no island but a gigantic whale floating on the bosom of the sea, on whose back the sands have settled and trees have grown since the world was young! When you lit the fire it felt the heat and stirred. Make haste, I say; or soon the whale will plunge into the sea and you will all be lost!"

[--'The First Voyage of Sindbad the Sailor']

The perennially popular collection of (often very bawdy) morality tales known as The Thousand and One Nights has a fiendishly complicated textual history, which is largely invisible to the non-specialist reader. It certainly was to me, both when I first read a compilation of the Nights as a child, and later when I came to buy NJ Dawood's translation for Penguin (1954; revised edition 1973). It was only when I had to dig deeper into the text, in the course of academic research on Arabic conquest narratives (published last year, eee), that I began to get an idea of its strange history: the nested stories-within-stories structure of the narrative, it turns out, has nothing on the layers of invention, deception, creativity and appropriation that have gone into making the Nights what it is today.

Only a handful of the tales now associated with the Nights originally belonged to the collection, insofar as anyone can tell what was originally in it - or that 'originally' has any useful meaning when discussing an ever-evolving literary tradition. Much of the most visible and significant reshaping happened at the hands of Orientalist European translators. Some of the tales can be traced to medieval Arabic manuscripts of the Nights; some were filched from elsewhere in Arabic literature ('Sindbad the Sailor', for example); some came from Ottoman Turkish tradition; some (such as 'Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp') seem to have been largely invented, and many others heavily revised, to fit the tastes and assumptions of an 18th-century French reading public with a thirst for the supernatural and the 'exotic' East.

In his introduction to this particular version, Dawood labels the Nights a collection of "folk-tales". He praises them as "the spontaneous products of untutored minds", which can, he says, "be regarded as the expression of the lay and secular imagination of the East in revolt against the austere erudition and religious zeal of Oriental literature generally". Even allowing for the inflated, essentialising rhetoric characteristic of mid-20th-century and earlier Orientalists, there is a level of dramatic irony here: what 'untutored mind', exactly, was writing down such carefully structured stories? And how could anyone who has read even a little medieval Arabic literature really think it was all so humourless and 'austere'?

Where the introduction becomes (unintentionally) funny, however, is with Dawood's assertion that the Nights "have little in common with the refined didacticism of Classical Arabic literature and have therefore never been regarded by the Arabs as a legitimate part of it". Because since Dawood wrote this it has become inescapably clear, thanks to the scholarship of Muhsin Mahdī, amongst others, that in many ways the Nights are indeed not a part of Classical Arabic literature, but not for the reasons he suggests: rather, they're a Persian-Arabic-French co-production, and many of the most famous stories only entered the corpus long after the Classical period.

While the Nights' framing story - of the wily Shahrazad telling tales night after night to the vengefully misogynistic Sasanian shah, pausing on a cliffhanger each dawn in order to win herself another day of life - is set in pre-Islamic Persia, many of the individual tales are set in Baghdad during the reign of the 'Abbāsid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (r. 786-809). (Others are set in Egypt, China, and the high seas.) There is evidence that the collection originated not long after this period, a time that soon came to be viewed as a golden age of learning, stability, and prosperity, and one in which Persian culture was beginning to have a real impact on Islam, as more and more prominent Persian writers and politicians came to embrace the religion and translate Persia's rich literary traditions into Arabic. Back in the 1940s, Nabia Abbott found a papyrus fragment of the Nights that she dated to the 9th century; writers in the 10th century also mention it: al-Mas'ūdī (who died c. 955) summarises a story that he says comes from it, while the bibliographer Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 998) includes the work in his great index of Arabic literature, noting that it consisted of about 200 'nights' (this is important, for reasons I'll come back to in a moment).

The earliest manuscript of the Nights that survives, however - at least to the best knowledge of modern scholars - comes from the 14th century, and it is virtually impossible to tell what, if any, 'authentically' 9th-century material it contains. As is fairly typical in medieval literature in any language - before printing, copyright, etc - the Nights does not seem to have been a fixed book, or the product of a single pen.

But the Nights as we know it - that is, the Nights as represented in Dawood's edition, and more recently (with much more self-awareness) in Penguin's three-volume 2008 edition - is a long way from even this 14th-century core of material. These versions of the Nights, like virtually every version available in English translation, are in fact a mish-mash of three things: a) Classical and medieval Arabic retellings of Persian fables, b) bits and pieces from all over Classical and medieval Arabic fictional, historical and geographical literature, and c) a bunch of 18th-century French fairytales dressed up in 'Oriental' clothing.

The literary tradition of the Nights underwent a radical re-invention in the 18th century at the hands of a French booklover and Arabicist named Antoine Galland (1646-1715), and the various other 'translators' who came after him. Dawood acknowledges this to a limited degree (he calls Galland "by no means a faithful translator"), but his introduction gives no proper sense of the scale of what happened. It's exaggerating only slightly to say that this re-invention stems from Galland misunderstanding the work's title when he happened across it during a book-finding trip to the Middle East. The Arabic title of Alf layla wa-layla (literally 'the thousand nights and a night') is simply a pretty, figurative way of saying 'an awful lot of nights'. Galland, however, took the title literally; as Muhsin Mahdī puts it, charmingly, in his brilliant 1984 study of the Nights' textual history, Galland "fell under the spell of the title". (Incidentally, the first 60 pages or so of Mahdī's book, also called The Thousand and One Nights, is available to read for free on Google books; I highly recommend seeking it out.)

Galland became convinced that the text he had found, the narrative of which was divided into only 280 or so nights, was incomplete. Driven both by curiosity and, increasingly, by his publishers back home - for whom the first few volumes of Galland's translations had proven very popular and profitable - Galland tried in vain to hunt down additional manuscripts. When that failed, he published stories from other sources - including the tales of Sindbad the Sailor and Aladdin, both of which are included in Dawood's translation - under the Nights' title, and offered contradictory reports on where he had found them. Altogether, 12 volumes of his French translation/adaptation/creation were published between 1704 and 1717.

The quest to find the 'missing' nights continued after Galland, and the deceptions only grew more elaborate and brazen. In the 1780s, Jacques Cazotte, noted writer of contes de fées (fairytales), was put in touch by his publisher with one Dom Denis Chavis, a Christian Arab priest who claimed to have access to an additional Nights manuscript. In actual fact, said manuscript was a forgery. Chavis copied the Arabic manuscripts Galland had worked from (both the 14th-century Nights text and another containing the Sindbad stories), introducing minor changes (including some contemporary Syrian colloquialisms) to make it look like an independent work; he also translated some of Galland's French material - including 'Aladdin' - 'back' into Arabic, based solely on the French and not on any Arabic original. Finally, he added a bunch of new stories to the Nights that were actually from completely separate texts. Cazotte and Chavis worked together to translate all this into French.

Meanwhile, Michel Sabbagh, an Iraqi and a much more skilled and learned Arabicist than Chavis, set about creating a decidedly more convincing forgery. He created what he claimed was a transcription of a complete (i.e. 1001 rather than 280) Nights manuscript he'd found in Baghdad, whose colophon dated it to 1703 - thus making it appear to be completely independent of the manuscripts Galland had used, and also putting the putative original well out of the likely geographical range of scholars who might go looking for it (the Orientalist stomping grounds in those days being primarily Aleppo, Istanbul, and Cairo).

Scholars have debated back and forth over the veracity of Sabbagh early-19th-century version, but recently the conclusion has become inescapable: Sabbagh's Nights, like that of Chavis, was largely based on Galland's, spurious additions and all. There is no 'complete' pre-18th-century Thousand and One Nights in Arabic, with all 1001 episodes, because such a thing never existed outside the imagination of the early modern French publishing industry. Nonetheless, these forged manuscripts formed the bases for the two main manuscript traditions, Calcutta and Bulaq (Egypt), that have been used for translation and study ever since, on the presumption of their authenticity. In a considerable step forward for the field, Muhsin Mahdī published an Arabic edition of the 'core' Nights - the 14th-century manuscript - in 1984, as a companion volume to the ground-breaking study I mentioned above; an English translation of this core text, by Husain Haddawy, was published in the US a few years later, although to the best of my knowledge it remains unpublished over here in the UK.

What does this mean for the modern reader? On one level, it enriches the reading experience to see how this body of narrative has evolved over time and in multiple cultural contexts. The example I would offer to demonstrate this is 'The City of Brass', a story that features in Richard Burton's famous late-19th-century translation and in the new (2008) three-volume Penguin collection, but not in Dawood or Haddawy. This is not a core Nights tale, in the sense of being from the 14th-century manuscript, but it wasn't wholly a French invention either; in fact, it comes out of the Arabic historical tradition surrounding the Islamic conquest of Iberia.

The conquest itself happened in the year 711, but its history did not begin to be recorded until the middle of the 9th century. The earliest surviving Arabic chronicle of the conquest was written by the Spanish Muslim jurist Ibn Habīb (d. 852). Ibn Habīb's account is essentially a selection of anecdotes about the myriad strangenesses of Iberia before Islam arrived to civilise the place. In one of these, an expeditionary force wandering in the desert encounters a city, which is entirely surrounded by a wall made of copper. The troops can find no gate, and so their commander, Mūsā, orders the building of a scaffold so that they can scale the wall and see inside. However, when the builders reach a suitable vantage point, and look within, they suddenly begin to laugh - and then throw themselves over the wall, apparently to their deaths. Mūsā offers 100 dinars to the first man to climb up and find out what just happened; the unlucky volunteer, however, does exactly the same thing as his predecessors. Mūsā, chastened, declares the city one of the marvels ('ajā'ib) of Satan, and the army beats a hasty retreat.

Most later medieval accounts of the conquest did not include the story of the City of Copper; instead, it was picked up by writers working in the geographical tradition - that is, by people writing descriptions of the various regions of the Islamic world and its neighbours, a practice that was often supplemented with eye-catching little bits of trivia and anecdotes about their subjects. The tale was, of course, embroidered in the retellings. My favourite of the versions I've found so far is that of al-Gharnātī (d. 1169), who wrote a book all about 'ajā'ib (which might as well have been subtitled Weird Stuff From Around The World). He adds a splendidly gory twist. Here, the chaps scaling the walls to scout out the inside emit horrible shrieks after they plunge over the top. The third and final man is sent up with a rope tied around his waist, but to no avail; although the army down below tries to hold him back, such is the force pulling him inside that the supporting rope succeeds only in cutting him in half before the horrified eyes of his fellows down at the foot of the wall. Despite such cosmetic changes, though, the essential structure and message of the story remains the same: there are some deeply strange, deeply supernatural things in the world that man shouldn't dream of tangling with or trying to understand.

Enter the French Nights adapters. 'Hmm, that's odd; let's get out of here' was considered an unsatisfactory ending for a French audience reading these tales in a very different way, and so the story was extended. In this version, the Muslim army finally made it inside the City - one of their number having been able to climb down inside, and find and open a hidden gate - to discover a dead tableau of prosperous urban life, the city's entire population frozen to the spot in the middle of all manner of everyday actions. Exploring further, they find a palace, and inside it the body of the city's queen and several helpful explanatory stone tablets, which explain that the city got mummified on account of being greedy instead of humble and pious. Mūsā immediately renounces plundering and goes back to the east to live a more ascetic life. As a moral, it's hardly any more sophisticated than the original, but the imagery is just as striking, and it's fascinating to be able to watch the layers of a story develop and change across the centuries like this. With all necessary caveats in mind, then, I'd recommend the three-volume Penguin edition on this basis alone.

On another level, knowing that much of the Nights is early-modern French fabulism means rethinking what we take from the Nights about the medieval Islamic world; Dawood's easy conviction that the Nights show us a folksy, "secular" Arabic culture is rather undercut by the realisation that much of the image this text has created for the western world over the past three centuries is an Orientalist fantasy. Many of the stories Dawood includes are an insight into 18th-century France, not 9th-century Baghdad, and there is a strong appeal to reading a version of the Nights, like Haddawy's translation, that contains only the material that we know is both medieval and Islamic. There is still no manuscript evidence for the existence of either 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves' or 'Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp', two of the most famous Nights stories in the western world, prior to Galland's French 'translation'. Galland claimed to have got them from an otherwise unknown Arab informant - in oral form - called Hanna Diab. Both Chavis' and Sabbagh's purported Arabic 'originals' of 'Aladdin' are in fact translations from Galland's French into Arabic, with the odd colloquial and medieval construction thrown in - attempts to make them sound authentic, but not enough to fool the numerous scholars who have pointed to the underlying French sentence structures and cultural assumptions of these tales. (An additional 'Aladdin' manuscript in Oxford's Bodleian library has likewise turned out to be a dead end, albeit one in better Arabic.)

Even without this background awareness, 'Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp' reads oddly in Dawood's volume. It is set in China and full of terminology (like 'nabob') that belongs more more obviously in an early modern European context, rather than a medieval Arabic one. Its villain is also repeatedly referred to as 'the Moor', although that, at least, could simply be an awkwardly outdated translation - it is certainly not impossible that a medieval Arabic story would cast a Berber as an Othered bad guy, in contrast to more worthy Arabs and Persians. More significantly, though, the main appeal of reading 'Aladdin' lies in recognition - the magic (alas not flying) carpet! the jinnī in a lamp! the beautiful princess and the eeevil vizier! - because as a story it lacks the fun and adventure you might expect, wittering on for 70 or so pages and expecting us to cheer for a, frankly, feckless waste of space of a hero.

Other stories are much more enjoyable. Probably my favourite is 'The Porter and the Three Girls of Baghdad', one of the three core Nights tales from Muhsin Mahdī's edition that is also in Dawood's translation (and, of course, in Haddawy's). I have a hazy memory of reading this story as a child - specifically, of the central female character repeatedly hitting her pet black dogs, and then weeping over them - but I'd forgotten most of it, making it an endlessly inventive delight on re-reading: this is the sort of imaginary ninth-century 'Abbāsid caliphate in which there are random palaces underground, a magnetic mountain in the middle of the sea that destroys ships, and a chap made of brass who spends several days rowing the storyteller in a boat. Marvellous.

Since it appears in both translations, 'The Porter...' also gives me an opportunity for a brief comparison of translation technique. Here is our first description of the girl in Dawood:

Here the young woman unveiled her face and knocked, and the door was opened by a girl of surpassing beauty. Her forehead was white as a lily and her eyes were more lustrous than a gazelle's. Her brows were crescent moons, her cheeks anemones, and her mouth like the crimson ruby on King Solomon's ring. Her teeth were whiter than a string of pearls, and like twin pomegranates were her breasts.

Haddawy's is even more purple, but of particular note is his rendering of the final line: the girl, we're told, has a "bosom like a fountain, breasts like a pair of big pomegranates resembling a rabbit with uplifted ears". I confess myself bemused over the rabbit ears part; my partner suggests it might have something to do with cleavage - any further ideas...?

'The Tale of the Hunchback' - another of the core tales - is a wonderful example of both the style and the tone of the Nights. Set in the cities of Basra and Baghdad in (roughly) the mid-9th century, it offers multiple nested narratives, neat little pen portraits of multicultural urban life, beautiful tricksy women, and drunken lust-addled men getting publicly humiliated. In the first level of the story, a tailor and his wife accidentally(ish) kill a hunchback beggar, after which a series of tragicomic misunderstandings sees the highly symbolic trio of a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew each believing they're to blame for the death, and each in turn being absolved by the other; in the next level, the tailor tells the story of how he met a highly dodgy raconteur who is also a barber (as he so modestly puts it, he is "not only a barber of great repute, but also a master of the arts and sciences: one who is not only versed in alchemy, astrology, mathematics, and architecture, but also (to mention only a few of my accomplishments) well schooled in the arts of logic, rhetoric, and elocution, the theory of grammar, and the commentaries on the Koran"); then we get the barber's tale; this, in turn, involves the barber telling the stories of each of his six brothers.

Taken together, the story is full of people being hoist by their own petard, people getting their just (or unjust) desserts, and men and women finding ways to sneak around social restrictions to meet for assignations. Often all three at once, as in the story of the second of the barber's brothers, who can't believe his luck when he ends up being invited into the apartments of a beautiful young woman (described, as so often in Persian literature especially, as having a face like the moon). Once there, he carries out every request she makes of him - through an older woman acting as a go-between (another typical aspect of Persian fiction) - in the delighted belief he's about to get laid. The fact that these requests include dyeing his eyebrows, shaving off his beard (a major symbol of emasculation in medieval Islamic culture), getting drunk, and stripping naked while she remains fully clothed, doesn't faze him for a moment; the silliness climaxes, so to speak, in the young woman encouraging the man to chase her through her apartments. He does so in "a frenzy of desire", whereupon she leads him through a room with a weakened floor, which gives way beneath him and dumps him unceremoniously out in public:

When the merchants saw al-Haddar drop in their midst – naked, shaven, with eyebrows dyed, his face painted, and his penis erect and rampant, they booed him, and clapped their hands at him, and thrashed his bare body with their hides, until he fell down senseless.

Women are, in general, decorative and/or schemers in the Nights. My favourite is the title character of 'The Young Woman and Her Five Lovers', who manages to trap each of the title's five men in turn in the same, multi-compartment cupboard, before making off with their wealth and her real lover, while the five men bang impotently on the doors. While her goal is dishonest, the real moral failings that the story lampoons are the men's: it is they who have been rendered foolish by their arrogance and lust, each in turn believing both that this woman finds them irresistible, and that at the very moment they are finally alone together in her home, she hears her husband coming and maybe for their safety they'd better hide in this convenient man-sized cupboard compartment...

Men and woman alike display this sort of skill at deception, however; it is the context in which it happens that is gendered, not the technique itself. So women trick the men that trespass (or are enticed) into their homes; men play their mind games in public. In 'The Fisherman and the Jinni' - another of the three core tales in Dawood's translation - an almost identical trick is played on a supernatual creature:

[T]he fisherman asked: "How could this bottle, which is scarcely large enough to hold your hand or foot, ever contain your entire body?"

"Do you dare doubt that?" roared the jinnee indignantly.

"I will never believe it," replied the fisherman, "until I see you enter this bottle with my own eyes!"

Upon this the jinnee trembled from head to foot and dissolved into a column of smoke, which gradually wound itself into the bottle and disappeared inside.

There is one female character whose intelligence is presented as an unambiguous force for good. This is Shahrazad herself, described in Dawood's translation as someone who "possessed many accomplishments and was versed in the wisdom of the poets and the legends of ancient kings". Haddawy's rendering is more detailed, and shows the author(s) of the Nights transposing a typical elite Islamic education onto Sasanian times:

The older daughter, Shahrazad, had read the books of literature, philosophy, and medicine. She knew poetry by heart, had studied historical reports, and was acquainted with the sayings of men and the maxims of sages and kings. She was intelligent, knowledgeable, wise and refined. She had read and learned.

Convinced of women's evil, the shah has been marrying a new girl each night and having her put to death by the morning. Despite her father's attempts to protect her, Shahrazad insists that she be allowed to answer the shah's summons when his eye falls upon her, "so I may either succeed in saving the people or perish and die like the rest". Soon, she is putting her quick wits to good use, keeping the shah occupied each night so as to prevent him from killing any further women.

So there are good reasons to pick up any one of these translations. I'd recommend the Haddawy for the 'real' Nights, for proof that medieval Islamic literature can be enormously entertaining, and for a much better introduction than Dawood's, although the translation lacks flair in places; I'd also suggest the new Penguin version, if you want to see how the Nights was changed by cross-cultural translation and adaptation, and also because the stories you remember will be in there. Get both; call yourselves bibliophiles, otherwise?

~~Nic