[ INTRODUCTION.]
Consanguinity and love which are treated in this novel so romantically and with such tragic catastrophe had already been dealt with in happier mood by Mrs. Behn in The Dutch Lover. Vide Note on the Source of that play, Vol. I, p. 218. [ Cross-Reference: The Dutch Lover, Sources.]
In classic lore the Œdipus Saga enthralled the imagination of antiquity and inspired dramas amongst the world’s masterpieces. Later forms of the tale may be found in Suidas and Cedrenus.
The Legend of St. Gregory, based on a similar theme, the hero of which, however, is innocent throughout, was widely diffused through mediæval Europe. It forms No. 81 of the Gesta Romanorum. There is an old English poem[1] on the subject, and it also received lyric treatment at the hands of the German meistersinger, Hartmann von Aue. An Italian story, Il Figliuolo di germani, the chronicle of St. Albinus, and the Servian romaunt of the Holy Foundling Simeon embody similar circumstances.
Matteo Bandello, Part II, has a famous[2] novel (35) with rubric, ‘un gentiluomo navarrese sposa una, che era sua sorella e figliuola, non lo sapendo,’ which is almost exactly the same as the thirtieth story of the Heptameron. As the good Bishop declares that it was related to him by a lady living in the district, it is probable that some current tradition furnished both him and the Queen of Navarre with these horrible incidents and that neither copied from the other.[3]
Bandello was imitated in Spanish by J. Perez de Montalvan, Sucesos y Prodigios de Amor—La Mayor confusion; in Latin by D. Otho Melander; and he also gave Desfontaines the subject of L’Inceste Innocent; Histoire Véritable (Paris, 1644). A similar tale is touched upon in Amadis de Gaule, and in a later century we find Le Criminel sans le Savoir, Roman Historique et Poëtique (Amsterdam and Paris, 1783). It is also found in Brevio’s Rime e Prose; Volgari, novella iv; and in T. Grapulo (or Grappolino), Il Convito Borghesiano (Londra, 1800). A cognate legend is Le Dit du Buef and Le Dit de la Bourjosee de Rome. (ed. Jubinal, Nouveau Recueil; and Nouveau Recueil du Sénateur de Rome . . . ed. Méon.) Again: the Leggenda di Vergogna, etc. testi del buon secolo in prosa e in verso, edited by A. D’Ancona (Bologna, 1869) repeats the same catastrophe. It is also related in Byshop’s Blossoms.
In Luther’s Colloquia Mensalia, under the article ‘Auricular Confession’, the occurrence is said to have taken place at Erfurt in Germany. Julio de Medrano, a Spanish writer of the sixteenth century, says that a similar story was related to him when he was in the Bourbonnois, where the inhabitants pointed out the house which had been the scene of these morbid passions. France, indeed, seems to have been the home of the tradition, and Le Roux de Lincy in the notes to his excellent edition of the Heptameron quotes from Millin, Antiquités Nationales (t. iii. f. xxviii. p. 6.) who, speaking of the Collegiate Church of Ecouis, says that in the midst of the nave there was a prominent white marbel tablet with this epitaph:—
Cy-gist la fille, cy-gist le père,
Cy-gist la soeur, cy-gist le frère;
Cy-gist la femme, et le mary,