Boucquey Thierry (General Editor). Encyclopedia Of World Writers. 3 volumes
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only major work is a history and travelogue known
simply as The Book of Travels, which he began near
the end of his life but never finished. The four
completed volumes present a partial history of the
Ottoman Empire and its peoples.
Travels begins with a historical sketch of the Ot-
toman Empire, including the area’s pre-Ottoman
history. This is followed by a history of Evliya’s own
family and childhood. The work includes a vision of
the prophet Mohammed that Evliya vividly imag-
ines taking place in the mosque of Akhí-Çelebi.
Evliya intends to ask the prophet for his shifáat
(help) but accidentally utters siyáhat (the gift of
traveling), which becomes his calling. The mosque
in the dream lends Evliya the surname Çelebi, but
he likes to call himself “Siyyah,” or “The Traveler.”
Çelebi moves on to describe his early life as a
soldier and the many battles he participated in
against the Ottoman Empire’s enemies. He also
comments on Ottoman administrative structure
and the people, languages, and customs of the
provinces he visits. He provides lists of notable
persons and economic statistics gathered from tax
rolls and other records, all of which has been in-
valuable to modern historians.
Çelebi’s style depends on the subject at hand.
Writing of sultans, folk customs, or ancient history,
he displays wit and poetic talent; for administrative
and economic details he uses a brief, matter-of-fact
style of reporting; and his descriptions of battles
are in lively but mostly unadorned prose.
Çelebi continued to serve the sultan well into
old age, venturing throughout the Mediterranean,
Western Europe, North Africa, and Central Asia.
Although Çelebi often describes himself as “the
humble writer,” his Book of Travels has few equals
in terms of style and detail.
English Versions of Works by Evliya Çelebi
Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir: The Relevant Section of the
Seyahatname. Translated and edited by Martin
van Bruinessen and Hendrik Boeschoten. Leiden
and New York: E.J. Brill, 1988.
Evliya Çelebi in Albania and Adjacent Regions: Kosovo,
Montenegro, Ohrid. Translated and edited by
Robert Dankoff and Robert Elsie. Boston: Brill,
2000.
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de
(1547–1616) novelist, poet, playwright
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in Alcalá,
Spain, the fourth child of Rodrigo de Cervantes and
Leonor de Cortinas. Little is known for certain
about the early life and adolescence of the author of
Don Quixote, and frequent gaps in his biography
have led many later scholars and admirers to attrib-
ute the adventures of the book’s eponymous hero
to his author and creator. Many parallels exist, not
the least of them being that the book’s hero is a gen-
tleman of La Mancha. Likewise the character Saave-
dra tells a story in Part I of Don Quixote about
being held prisoner in a Turkish bagnio in Algiers,
an experience shared by the author, who later took
the family name Saavedra as his own.
Cervantes’s upbringing was marked by the strug-
gles of his father, a surgeon, to keep the family from
poverty. After a series of removes to elude creditors,
Rodrigo settled his family in Madrid in 1567, and
Miguel attempted to catch up on his education. He
received attention for a collection of occasional
poems he wrote for the family of the Spanish king,
Philip II, but shortly thereafter was forced to leave
Madrid after wounding a young man in a duel, a
deed punishable by 10 years of exile and the loss of
his right hand. Cervantes traveled to Italy and en-
tered the service of Cardinal Acquaviva.
The Catholic Spain of Philip II suffered from
two chief pressures: the Protestant threat of Refor-
mation thought as advocated by
ERASMUS, LUTHER,
and adherents of HUMANISM, and the Islamic threat
of the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. Answering
the second of these, Miguel joined the military in
1570 and was promptly sent into battle. He was
wounded at Lepanto in 1571 and lost the use of his
left hand. He returned to active duty a few months
later and fought in several more battles, distin-
guishing himself for heroism. He then spent the
winter in Naples, Italy, an experience that left a rich
imprint on his later writing.
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 47
In 1575 en route from Naples to Barcelona with
his brother Rodrigo, Miguel’s ship was captured by
Barbary pirates and all the passengers were cap-
tured and taken to Algiers. Highly glowing letters
of recommendation, which Miguel carried with
him in hope of finding a government post upon
his return to Madrid, led his captors to believe him
a member of the high nobility and therefore a very
valuable captive. Rodrigo gained his freedom rela-
tively early, but Miguel languished in prison for
five years, failing at a series of escape attempts. Fi-
nally, in 1580, his family paid the enormous ran-
som, and Cervantes returned to Spain broke, in
debt, and permanently injured.
He hoped to make his fortune in the New
World, but his requests for a colonial position were
not granted. Instead, he was given a job as a tax
collector, which required extensive travel and pro-
vided more trials. He was briefly jailed twice due to
disagreements about his handling of state finances,
and after fathering children with two different
women, he married young Catalina de Palacios,
with whom he had no children. In the next year he
published a PASTORAL romance, Galatea (1685), a
story of shepherds and fair maidens.
For the next 20 years, Cervantes wrote frequently
but produced nothing notable. Two plays, Life in Al-
giers and The Baths of Algiers, use his own experi-
ence to dramatic effect, but Spanish theater was
entirely monopolized by the polished and gifted
LOPE DE VEGA. Cervantes continued to read exten-
sively in all forms and genres; he knew the lyrics of
PETRARCH and the writings of GARCILASO DE LA VEGA,
the EPIC romances of Boiardo, ARIOSTO, and TASSO,
BOCCACCIO’s Decameron, and the Eclogues of Virgil.
He also continued to write poetry, which was con-
sidered the literature of the upper classes, but Cer-
vantes was not a particularly remarkable poet.
During one of his stays in prison he conceived the
idea of writing a novel about a valiant but delu-
sional hidalgo, or gentleman, and the character of
Don Quixote was born.
Part I of The History of the Ingenious Gentleman
Don Quixote of La Mancha appeared in 1605, and
was an instant success. Readers were delighted and
entertained by the fantastic antics of the idealistic
and indiscriminate knight-errant. Yet the work, for
all its popularity, was largely considered a boister-
ous
FARCE; “true” literature was either poetry or
drama, and Don Quixote, with its self-conscious
literary techniques, was of a new type altogether.
Cervantes later experimented with other forms,
publishing a poetic mock-epic Voyage to Parnassus
in 1614 and Eight Comedies and Eight New Inter-
ludes in 1615. His 12 short stories, collected under
the title Exemplary Novels and published in 1613,
are equal to Don Quixote in style and execution, but
less often read. Critics often divide these short sto-
ries into two types, realistic or romantic. In the pro-
logue to the tales, Cervantes represented them as
model tales, wholesomely educational, but the
bawdy nature of certain stories made some readers
and critics doubt the moral value of the fictions.
Don Quixote remained the sole reason for his
fame, and when a spurious and anonymous sequel
came out in 1614, an outraged Cervantes hurried
to publish his own authentic Part II in 1615. He
did not have long to enjoy the acclaim or to finish
his latest and, in his eyes, greatest ROMANCE, The
Trials of Persiles and Segismunda (1617). He died in
1616, the same year as the English poet and play-
wright SHAKESPEARE.
Like Shakespeare, Cervantes stands as a monu-
ment in his country’s literature.According to biog-
rapher Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes is considered
not only “the incarnation and epitome of the
Golden Age of Spain,” but also the inventor of the
modern novel.
Critical Analysis
New readers often approach Don Quixote knowing
only that it is a parody of what Cervantes himself
called “impossible fictions”and what French essay-
ist Michel de MONTAIGNE called “wit-besotting
trash”—the medieval romances with their themes
of chivalry and courtly love. The book’s modest
and humble hero—who bears many similarities to
Cervantes—has a peculiar affliction: He has read
so many of these stories that they have addled his
wits. Cervantes writes:
48 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de
Don Quixote so buried himself in his books
that he read all night from sundown to dawn,
and all day from sunup to dusk, until with vir-
tually no sleep and so much reading he dried
out his brain and lost his sanity....Indeed,his
mind was so tattered and torn that, finally, it
produced the strangest notion any madman
ever conceived . . . he decided to turn himself
into a knight errant, traveling all over the world
with his horse and his weapons.
Calling himself Don Quixote, the gentleman-
turned-knight recruits a neighboring peasant, San-
cho Panza, to be his “squire,” and they set off. To
Don Quixote, rambling over the countryside in
search of fame and glory, every inn he encounters
is a castle and every person he meets becomes part
of his self-imagined romance. In the course of his
hero’s adventures, Cervantes exposes, with crush-
ing irony, how unfit an idealistic and half-mad
dreamer is in the “real” world. Many of his ex-
ploits—such as chopping up a puppet play because
he thinks the puppets are powered by a sorcerer,
or the famous moment where he jousts with wind-
mills, thinking them giants, and is ignobly thrown
from his horse—make Don Quixote look ridicu-
lous, foolish, even dangerous. Yet Cervantes tells
his tale in a mild, confidential voice that endears
his hero to the reader and somehow laments the
passing of the chivalric ideal.
This narrative style, whereby the author overtly
involves the reader in the story and calls upon the
audience to make moral judgments about the
characters and their decisions, is part of the novel’s
innovation. The author is self-consciously aware
that he is crafting a story, and characters in the
story read the works of a certain Miguel de Cer-
vantes, including Don Quixote. Adding to the fun,
the hero becomes angry to hear that his exploits
are misrepresented in the falsely authored Part II of
his book. In addition, songs,
SONNETS, and letters
stretch the limits of genre and form, and embed-
ded tales elaborate the action, digress from the
main story, and often provide sparkling narratives
that could stand alone.
Some of the stories narrated in Don Quixote are
obviously drawn from Cervantes’s own life. In a
substantial episode known as the “Captive’s Tale,”
where a former captive of a Algerian bagnio re-
counts his imprisonment, he refers to a man
named Saavedra whom he knew there, and who
was a favorite of the Algerian ruler. Yet the cate-
gories of parody or loose autobiography barely
begin to describe this lengthy and complex work.
Part of the book’s success is due to its obvious
sympathies for the lives of everyday people and its
wickedly cutting observations on the false and lim-
iting practice of certain Spanish attitudes and cus-
toms. Cervantes questions the very nature of art
and reality and examines the ways in which hu-
mans relate to one another in their projects of
shaping identities and following dreams, falling in
love and enduring failures, always mistaking, cor-
recting, learning, and teaching one another.
Ultimately, Don Quixote is a book about books.
The hero’s bibliomania has led to his unique mad-
ness, and large swaths of the narrative are devoted
to discussions of and literary criticism about other
works of fiction. Throughout the work, the narra-
tor assumes the humble stance of a poorly edu-
cated, confused author overwhelmed by his
material. In his Prologue he pokes sly fun at the
pompous literature of his day, scattered with foot-
notes and obscure allusions. He invents a “friend”
who gives him the prosaic advice to make up his
own references:
And as for those missing marginal references,
the names of all the books and writers where
you went hunting for the wit and wisdom
quoted in your history, all you have to do is
scribble in any bits and pieces of Latin you
happen to remember....And with a pinch of
Latin here, and a pinch of Latin there, they
might even think you’re a scholar, which isn’t a
bad reputation, these days.
The impact of Don Quixote on Western litera-
ture can scarcely be underrated. Not only is it felt
by many to be the first and greatest of novels, but
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 49
also the consciousness of its hero has entered the
language; “quixotic” is used to describe someone
romantic and idealistic to an impractical degree.
Novelist Mark Twain used Don Quixote as his
model when he wrote the American picaresque
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and William
Faulkner read Cervantes more often than he read
the Bible. The 400 years of the novel in Western lit-
erature owe themselves to the moment when
Miguel de Cervantes, idle and in jail, began his
own epic quest to cast down the ideology of chival-
ric fiction and find a new way of looking at life—
essentially, in the words of novelist Milan Kundera,
“to comprehend the world as a question.”
English Versions of Works by Miguel de
Cervantes Saavedra
Don Quixote. Translated by Tobias Smollett. New
York: Modern Library, 2004.
Don Quixote: The Ingenious Hidalgo de la Mancha.
Translated by John Rutherford. New York: Pen-
guin Books, 2003.
Exemplary Stories. Edited by Lesley Lipson. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998.
The Portable Cervantes. Translated by Samuel Put-
nam. New York: Viking Press, 1976.
Works about Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Busoni, Rafaello. The Man Who Was Don Quixote:
The Story of Miguel Cervantes. New York: Prentice
Hall, 1982.
Marlowe, Stephen. The Death and Life of Miguel de
Cervantes. New York: Arcade Books, 1997.
Saffar, Ruth El., ed. Critical Essays on Cervantes.
Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986.
Weiger, John G. The Substance of Cervantes. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca. 1342–1400) poet
Though more is known about the life of Geoffrey
Chaucer than many other English poets of his
time, including William LANGLAND and the author
of the poems Pearl and SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN
KNIGHT, the precise year of his birth remains a
mystery. His parents, John and Agnes, were part of
a well-to-do merchant family who lived in Ipswich,
near London. Though “Chaucer” in the French of
the time meant “shoe-maker,” the family trade was
wine making. In 1359 Chaucer traveled to France
with the army of King Edward III and was cap-
tured but quickly ransomed. In 1366 he married
Philippa, daughter of Sir Gilles of Hainault, and in
1367 he joined the king’s household as an esquire
or general servant, and possibly studied law at the
Inns of the Court.
In his lifetime Chaucer made several trips to
France on business for various kings, and between
the years 1370 and 1372 he traveled to Italy. The
French chronicler
FROISSART reports that Chaucer
returned to France in 1377. After the Peasant’s Re-
volt of 1381, Chaucer gradually removed from Lon-
don to Kent, where he served on the peace
commission and later took a post as warden of the
king’s forest. When Richard was deposed in 1399,
Chaucer passed smoothly from the service of one
king to the other, but did not live long enough to
enjoy the favor of Henry IV. Chaucer died one year
later and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The
monument of his death suggests what his life’s work
achieved: He was the first to occupy what became
the Poet’s Corner, which now serves as the final rest-
ing place for such luminaries as SHAKESPEARE and
John
DONNE, symbolizing Chaucer’s place as the
fountainhead of modern English poetry.
As his work suggests, young Geoffrey received a
thorough education in the classics of Latin literature,
including Virgil, Claudius, Lucan, Statius, and Ovid.
He knew French and could read as well as compose
French poetry, and the French poet Eustace De-
schamps wrote a ballade praising Chaucer for his
English translation of the medieval classic Romance
of the Rose. Chaucer’s trip to Italy had a profound
effect on him; he likely met PETRARCH and BOCCACCIO
and discovered the works of Dante. His English con-
temporaries Thomas Usk and John GOWER spoke
highly of him, and in his own time Chaucer as a poet
was well respected, if not always well paid.
He wrote the first of his major works in 1368 as
an elegy for Blanche, the wife of John of Gaunt.
50 Chaucer, Geoffrey
The Book of the Duchess contains many of the ele-
ments of the courtly love poems made popular by
the French poets Guillaume de Machaut and Jean
de Meun; it includes a lovelorn narrator, a dream
vision that takes place in May, and a dialogue with
a mysterious Black Knight. Chaucer most likely
wrote or began his other major poems, The Parlia-
ment of Fowls, The House of Fame, and Troilus and
Criseyde, as well as his translation of The Consola-
tions of Philosophy by Boethius, while he was serv-
ing as a controller in the customhouse between
1374 and 1386. The Trojan War as told in Homer
was a popular subject for medieval tales, and the
story of the fatal love of Troilus, a prince of Troy,
for the modest widow Criseyde had been the sub-
ject of works by many skilled poets, from Boccac-
cio to Benoît de Saint-Maure. Chaucer’s The
Legend of Good Women, which he never finished,
contains a list of the poet’s works, some of which
have descended to posterity and some of which are
lost. In the centuries after his death many poems
written by contemporaries or imitators were erro-
neously attributed to Chaucer, but peculiarities of
language and style have helped scholars identify
the spurious works. One of Chaucer’s greatest
achievements was that by writing in English, in-
stead of the Latin or French then used in govern-
ment and clerical documents, he helped make the
native, vernacular language more accepted in
higher circles.
Critical Analysis
Although Chaucer was famous in his own time, he
is best known today for his unfinished masterpiece
The Canterbury Tales. For this work, Chaucer drew
upon all his careers as soldier, esquire in the king’s
household, diplomat, customs controller, justice of
the peace, member of Parliament, clerk of the
king’s works, and forest official. He used his expe-
riences and his encounters with people from all
stations to create a work of unparalleled variety.
He probably began writing the Tales piecemeal in
1387; evidence suggests he began some of the sto-
ries before deciding to use the narrative framework
of a pilgrimage to Canterbury. The technique of
using a frame story to pull together very different
narratives had been used before, by the composer
of The Thousand and One Nights and by Gower in
his Confession of Amant. Chaucer added a new
twist by drawing his characters from all walks of
life. The pilgrims include a knight and a squire, a
landowner and a lawyer, a miller and a reeve, a
clerk and a merchant, and several religious figures
including nuns and priests, as well as a parson, par-
doner, summoner, and friar—all of whom tell in-
dividual tales.
In the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, the pil-
grims assemble at an inn kept by Harry Bailly, the
high-spirited host who decides to go with them.
Their destination is the shrine where Thomas à
Becket was murdered in 1170, a popular destina-
tion for those interested in religious sites. Bailly
proposes a storytelling contest: Each of the pil-
grims will tell two stories on the way to the shrine
and two on the way back, and the pilgrim who tells
the best story will win a dinner paid for by all the
others. The descriptions of the pilgrims in the Pro-
logue show Chaucer’s eye for authentic detail and
his ear for dialogue. His portraits are often deeply
ironic, and behind the narrator’s naïve voice the
reader can see sharp critiques of the vices, social
problems, and injustices of Chaucer’s day.
One of the most popular pilgrims with mod-
ern readers is the Wife of Bath, who is described as
gap-toothed and a bit deaf.Vain about her clothing
and a famous scold, she is full of abundant energy;
she has had five husbands, often goes on pilgrim-
ages, and is an early feminist in her defense of
women. The Wife’s deafness is the consequence of
a fistfight with her most recent husband over the
issue of wifely obedience. He liked to read to her
from a book about wicked wives, which made her
so angry she finally tore up the book and threw it
into the fire. The Wife’s tale begins a debate about
the basis of marriage, which other pilgrims take up
and elaborate. She tells a story set in the time of
King Arthur, when the queen gives an erring
knight the task of discovering the one thing that
women most want. The knight meets a hideous old
woman who promises to tell him the answer to the
Chaucer, Geoffrey 51
riddle if he marries her. Chastened and desperate,
the knight agrees, and reports to the queen:
“My liege lady, generally,” said he,
‘Women desire to have sovereignty
As well over their husbands as over their love,
And to be in mastery of him above;
This is your great desire, though you have
me killed;
Do as you wish, I am here at your will.”
The knight’s life is spared because he gives the cor-
rect answer, and his joy increases when, after their
marriage, he discovers that the loathsome old
woman was really a beautiful young maiden under
a spell.
Aside from the tale-telling framework, the Tales
are held together by interwoven themes of love, jus-
tice, religious devotion, and the relations between
men and women. These connected meanings give
the individual tales a sense of coherence, despite the
fact that the manuscript exists in 10 fragments.
Scholars often wonder if Chaucer ever intended
to finish all the stories, for he wrote a conclusion in
the form of a Retraction, in which he apologizes
for the works he had written. Given that this type
of apology was a medieval convention and that
Chaucer was known for his subtle yet effective
humor, some doubt that he really regretted writing
the work. In any case, The Canterbury Tales has be-
come a landmark in the history of English and
world literature. G. K. Chesterton calls Chaucer
“not only the father of all our poets, but the grand-
father of all our novelists.” Even now, translator
Louis Untermeyer says that Chaucer “comes
among us with unbounded vitality, gross, delicate,
lavishly inclusive....No poet has ever done more.”
Works by Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer’s Dream Poetry. Edited by Helen Phillips and
Nick Havely. Longman Annotated Text Series.
Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Education,
1997.
The Canterbury Tales. Translated by Nevill Coghill.
New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Edited by John H. Fisher. Boston: Heinle and
Heinle, 1990.
Works about Geoffrey Chaucer
Bisson, Lillian M. Chaucer and the Late Medieval
World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Bloom, Harold. Geoffrey Chaucer. Bloom’s Modern
Critical Views Series. Langhorne, Pa.: Chelsea
House, 2003.
Halliday, F. E. Chaucer and His World. North York-
shire, U.K.: House of Stratus, 2001.
Ward, Adolphus William. Geoffrey Chaucer. La
Vergne, Tenn.: International Law and Taxation
Publishers, 2003.
Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725)
dramatist
The great Japanese playwright Chikamatsu Mon-
zaemon was born Sugimori Nobumori in Echizen,
on Japan’s main island of Honshu. His father, a
minor samurai, abandoned his feudal holdings
around 1665 to become a ronin, or wandering
samurai. He moved with his family to the imperial
capital of Kyoto, where Chikamatsu found service
with the court aristocracy as a teenager. Scholars do
not know how he first became involved in the the-
ater, but some have speculated that a nobleman he
served was a patron of the BUNRAKU, the popular
and prestigious puppet theater for which Chika-
matsu was to compose most of his major works.
He wrote his first bunraku play, The Soga Heir,
in 1683, which received some acclaim. In the fol-
lowing year, he wrote his first play for
KABUKI, and
in 1686 he achieved his first genuine renown with
Kagekiyo Victorious, which was widely hailed for its
originality and deviation from the stagnant for-
mulas of the puppet play. For a 10-year period be-
ginning in 1693, Chikamatsu wrote primarily for
Kabuki, a form of traditional Japanese theater
known for its exaggerated acting and brightly-col-
ored sets and costumes. By 1703, however, he was
again writing exclusively for the puppet theater,
probably because Bunraku treated the playwright’s
52 Chikamatsu Monzaemon
original text with greater reverence than the more
free-spirited Kabuki. In Naniwa Miyage by
Hozumi Ikan, a friend of Chikamatsu relates the
playwright’s views of how puppet theater differs
from live acting:
Jõruri differs from other forms of fiction in that,
since it is primarily concerned with puppets, the
words must all be living and full of action. Be-
cause jõruri is performed in theaters that oper-
ate in close competition with those of the
kabuki, which is the art of living actors, the au-
thor must impart to lifeless wooden puppets a
variety of emotions, and attempt in this way to
capture the interest of the audience....Even de-
scriptive passages like the michiyuki [the jour-
ney], to say nothing of the narrative phrases and
dialogue, must be charged with feeling or they
will be greeted with scant applause.
In 1705 he moved to Osaka, the Bunraku capi-
tal of Japan, and until his death worked primarily
for the famous bunraku chanter Takemoto Gi-
dayu. Takemoto’s lavish puppet theater Takemo-
toza staged the premieres of most of Chikamatsu’s
later works, which would eventually number
around 150 plays.
Chikamatsu’s works fall into two broad cate-
gories: historical romances and domestic tragedies.
Although the former were tremendously popular
in the 18th century, the latter are more highly es-
teemed for their accurate and vivid portraits of
Japanese society. Peopled by samurai, farmers,
merchants, housewives, thieves, and prostitutes,
they feature believable characters that speak collo-
quial dialogue in realistic (and often rather sordid)
settings such as streets, shops, brothels, and tea-
houses. They are also noteworthy for a remarkably
modern, naturalistic conception of drama in
which the protagonists gain tragic stature when the
pressures of society drive them to extreme acts.
The stories’ realism was centuries ahead of its time.
Most of the domestic tragedies are based on actual
incidents, and Chikamatsu rarely spent more than
a few weeks on any given work so it would be as
topical as possible when presented; for instance, he
finished The Love-Suicides at Sonezaki (1703)
within two weeks of the celebrated double suicide
by an assistant in the Osaka firm of Hirano and a
prostitute named Ohatsu, upon which it was
based. The assistant and Ohatsu committed sui-
cide in the Sonezaki Shrine, from which the play
takes its name. This play and the similarly themed
Double Suicide at Amijima (1720) proved so pop-
ular that they touched off a widespread vogue for
lovers’ suicides both on stage and in real life.
Few of Chikamatsu’s historical ROMANCES sur-
vive, one of which is the spectacular Battles of
Coxinga, a lavish swashbuckling melodrama based
loosely on the life of a 17th-century Chinese pirate
who unsuccessfully attempted to restore the Ming
dynasty to his country’s throne. Written in 1715, it
was the playwright’s most popular work during his
lifetime and for many years after his death.
Critical Analysis
The Love-Suicides at Sonezaki is perhaps Chika-
matsu’s most famous and characteristic play. Writ-
ten in 1703, its plot bears a marked similarity to
that of Alexandre Dumas’s Lady of the Camellias,
written some 150 years later. It is the story of
Tokubei, a bankrupt merchant who rejects a lu-
crative arranged marriage for the love of the in-
dentured prostitute Ohatsu. The lovers are unable
to escape the respective fates that threaten to sepa-
rate them forever and commit suicide together. As
they prepare to die, Tokubei says to Ohatsu: “You
make me feel so confident in our love that I am not
worried even by the thought of death....Let us
become an unparalleled example of a beautiful
way of dying.”
The final act the lovers perform together is pref-
aced by “one of the loveliest passages in Japanese
literature,” according to Donald Keene. It is spoken
by Ohatsu, in the final lines of a 100-line lyric, one
of the only stretches of verse in a predominantly
prose drama:
It’s strange, this is your unlucky year
Of twenty-five, and mine of nineteen.
Chikamatsu Monzaemon 53
It’s surely proof how deep are our ties
That we who love each other are cursed alike.
All the prayers I have made for this world
To the gods and to the Buddha, I here and now
Direct to the future: in the world to come
May we be reborn on the same lotus!
Ohatsu’s final line is a reference to an ancient Bud-
dhist belief that after a double-suicide, the lovers
would spend eternity on the same lotus leaf.
For the quality of his prose, Chikamatsu is often
called “the Japanese Shakespeare.” In the words of
translator Donald Keene,“we can only marvel that
he could produce such astonishing textures of lan-
guage,” especially given the truncated schedule
under which he generally worked. Scholars also
view him as just as quintessential a playwright of
the Japanese Tokugawa period as Shakespeare was
of the English Elizabethan. Unfortunately, the
modern Japanese theater rarely performs Chika-
matsu’s plays, due to a sharp decline in Bunraku’s
popularity since the late 18th century. Most con-
temporary Japanese audiences know him prima-
rily through Kabuki and film adaptations of his
works, many of which diverge significantly from
the source material.
Works by Chikamatsu Monzaemon
Five Late Plays. Translated by C. Andrew Gerstle. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
Major Plays of Chikamatsu. Translated by Donald
Keene. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Works about Chikamatsu Monzaemon
Gerstle, C. Andrew. Circles of Fantasy: Convention in
the Plays of Chikamatsu. Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1986.
Gerstle, C. Andrew. “Heroic Honor: Chikamatsu and
the Samurai Ideal,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies (December 1997): 307–382.
Heine, Stephen. “Tragedy and Salvation in the Float-
ing World: Chikamatsu’s Double Suicide Drama
as Millenarian Discourse,” Journal of Asian Stud-
ies (May 1994): 367–394.
Chilam Balam, The Books of (n.d.–1700s)
Like THE BOOK OF CHILAM BALAM OF CHUMAYEL, The
Book of the Chilam Balam of Tizimin and The Book
of the Chilam Balam of Mani are parts of The Books
of Chilam Balam, a record of Mayan history and
culture based on stories firmly rooted in Mayan oral
literature. The Tizimin book, while it contains
prophecy, is more historical in nature and tone than
the Mani book, which is more prophetic. In terms of
dating the manuscripts, it is important to remember
that Maya literature contains no linear, or chrono-
logical, history. As authors Leon-Portilla and Earl
Shorris point out, “The Maya priests who wrote the
books of the Chilam Balams were expected to pre-
dict the future based on the past, then to record
what happened during the predicted period.”
The Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin covers,
roughly, Maya history from the seventh to the 19th
centuries and focuses on the Itza and Xiu peoples
and their interaction with the ultimate conquering
by the Spanish. It includes, among other stories and
predictions, “The Last Flight of the Quetzal
Prince,” a story about Tecum; “The Death of
Cuauhtemoc,” a description of the Mexican prince’s
death; and “Crónica de Chac-Xulub-Chen,” a story
of the tragic enslavement of the Maya people.
The Book of the Chilam Balam of Mani roughly
covers the same time period as the Tizimin book,
but it is written in the future tense, giving it a
prophetic tone and nature. Its focus is on the Span-
ish conquest of the Maya, and its stories include
“The Prophecy and Advice of the Priest Xupan
Nauat,” “The Prophetic Words of the Great
Prophets, The Principal Goods of the Underworld,
and the Great Priests,” and “The Prophecy of
Oxlahun-Ti-Ku-for Katun 13 Ahau: Recital of the
Priest of Chilam Balam,” among others.
The Books of Chilam Balam represent not only a
desperate attempt to cement dying wisdom, but
also a mourning of the fate of the people it repre-
sents. “Should we not lament,” the book asks defi-
antly, “in our suffering, grieving for the loss of our
maize and the destruction of our teachings con-
cerning the universe of the earth and the universe
54 Chilam Balam, The Books of
of the heavens?” As one of the Great Priests states
in “The Prophetic Words of the Great Prophets,”
I wrote this not to speak of our poverty but to
make known the events that happened in the
life of our ancestors.
In this, the contributors to The Books of Chilam
Balam succeeded, and their efforts represent today
a rare historical, cultural, and literary record of the
Maya people.
English Versions of The Books of
Chilam Balam
The Ancient Future of the Itza: The Book of Chilam
Balam of Tizimin. Translated by Munro S. Ed-
monson. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.
The Book of the Jaguar Priest: A Translation of the Book
of Chilam Balam of Tizimin. Translated by Maud
Worcester Makemson. New York: Henry Schu-
man, 1951.
A Work about The Books of Chilam Balam
Leon-Portilla, Miguel, Earl Shorris, et al. In the Lan-
guage of Kings: An Anthology of Mesoamerican Lit-
erature—Pre-Columbian to the Present. New York:
W.W. Norton, 2001.
Choon Hyang Jun (1700s) novel
Choon Hyang Jun is a novel that was published
anonymously in Korea during the 18th century. It
tells of the love between Choon Hyang, the beloved
only daughter of a kisaeng—a professional enter-
tainer, or courtesan—and Yi Toryong (or, in some
versions, Yi Mongyong), the aristocratic son of a
provincial governor in Namwon, southwestern
Korea. Because of the social disparity between
them, and because Yi Toryong is still dependent on
his parents, they keep their attachment secret. The
lovers are separated when Yi Toryong’s father is
transferred to a position in the capital. Choon
Hyang is defenseless when the new governor be-
gins to pursue her, but she will not consider being
unfaithful to Yi Toryong. Furious at the impudence
of her refusal, the governor has her publicly
whipped and then imprisoned. She is near death
from grief and humiliation when Yi Toryong, who
has passed the examination for public office and
has become a high-ranking official, returns to res-
cue her and to have the lecherous governor fired
for abusing his office.
Although it has a fairy tale-like happy ending,
the story contains elements of realism and biting
social commentary in its depiction of the corrupt
official and the underlings who are too timid to re-
sist his injustices. There are also poignant passages
about the unfair situation of the kisaeng entertain-
ers who are scorned for taking up a profession that
was the only one available in Korea at the time for
women who had to earn their own living.
Choon Hyang is one of the most beloved char-
acters in Korean literature. Her story is the basis for
the most popular of the pansori Korean operas and
for several Korean films, including the very first
sound movie made in Korea, the classic Chun
Hyang of 1935. A 1992 Japanese anime film, The
Legend of Chun Hyang, transforms the heroine into
a warrior princess.
English Versions of Choon Hyang Jun
A Classical Novel: Ch’un-hyang. Translated by Chin
In-sook. Seoul, Korea: Korean International Cen-
tre, 1970.
The Love of Choon Hyang. Retold by Chi Sun Rhee.
Chapel Hill, N.C.: Professional Press, 2000.
Virtuous Women: Three Classic Korean Novels. Trans-
lated by Richard Rutt and Kim Chong-un. Korea:
Kwang Myong, 1974.
classicism (1450–1600)
Classicism broadly refers to a number of move-
ments in art, literature, architecture, and music
that took place at various times. To call something
“classic” typically means the object is the best rep-
resentative of its kind. Classicism as a literary
movement generally refers to a renewed interest in
classicism 55
and imitation of the art of ancient Greece and
Rome, since the period in which these civilizations
flourished is frequently referred to as the Classical
Age in the history of Western Europe. This interest
is usually marked by aesthetic standards reflecting
the classical ideals of balance, clarity, concise ex-
pression, and concern for form.
More precisely, classicism refers to a movement
during the
RENAISSANCE when a rediscovery of the
works of Greek and Roman rhetoricians and
philosophers, such as Plato and Cicero, con-
tributed to a new set of literary ideals. Part of the
broader
HUMANISM movement, these new stan-
dards of harmony, restraint, and idealism can be
seen in the works of Italian writers PETRARCH,
Dante, and BOCCACCIO. Likewise, artists in the cir-
cle of Cosimo de Medici, including MICHELANGELO
Buonarroti, and other European authors followed
the Italian precedents, as can be seen in the writ-
ings of Englishmen Francis BACON and Ben JONSON.
Later on, French classicism, also known as NEO-
CLASSICISM, particularly valued reason, intellect,
simplicity, and symmetry, as shown in the works of
PASCAL, DESCARTES, LA ROUCHEFOUCAULD, RACINE,
and CORNEILLE.
In the 18th century, archaeological discoveries
of the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii further
revived interest in classical art. The classical pe-
riod of German literature, 1750–1820, resulted in
the dramas of SCHILLER and GOETHE and the music
of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. A Victorian
classicism in England in the 19th century made
“classical” synonymous with conservatism and the
valuing of traditional forms over individual ex-
pression. Likewise, the 20th century witnessed its
own revival of the models of classical Greece and
Rome, reflecting the belief that the works of these
periods reached a standard of beauty never rivaled
in Western art.
Works about Classicism
Bennett, Benjamin. Modern Drama and German
Classicism: Renaissance from Lessing to Brecht.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Honour, Hugh. Neo-Classicism. New York: Penguin
Books, 1996.
Lange, Victor. The Classical Age and German Litera-
ture, 1740–1815. New York: Holmes and Meier,
1982.
Tur ne r, Fre der ick. Natural Classicism: Essays on Liter-
ature and Science. New York: Paragon House,
1985.
Zerner, Henri. Renaissance Art in France: The Inven-
tion of Classicim. Paris: Flammarion, 2004.
Cloud of Unknowing, The (1300s?)
The Cloud of Unknowing was written by an anony-
mous 14th-century mystic for individuals dedi-
cated to serving Christ and to knowing God
through practicing a contemplative, mystical life.
Over the past several hundred years, however, the
work’s readership has grown to a much larger au-
dience. The 17 surviving manuscripts of the work
attest to its popularity during the Middle Ages, and
The Cloud is now often studied alongside Eastern
religious works, such as the Upanishads, in addi-
tion to other works by religious writers of the age,
including JULIAN OF NORWICH’s Revelations of Di-
vine Love.
The author of The Cloud of Unknowing also is
believed to have written the following letters, trea-
tises, and short tracts: The Epistle of Prayer, The
Epistle of Discretion in the Stirrings of the Soul, The
Epistle of Privy Counsel, and The Treatise of Dis-
cerning of Spirits. All of these works show a re-
markable similarity in the obvious influence of
Dionysius and Richard of St. Victor, but The Cloud
of Unknowing is superior to the other works in its
clarity of thought, contemplation of the divine,
and lively prose style.
The author, who was probably a monk, chal-
lenges readers to practice rigorous discipline while
contemplating God by abandoning all attachment
to forms and objects. In this sense, then, the mystic
asks his readers to engage in metaphysical medita-
tion, that which is “beyond the physical.” Some
scholars interpret the cloud of the work’s title as a
56 Cloud of Unknowing, The